Today, the PulpFest organizing committee would like to wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving. After the holiday, we hope your ice box doesn’t contain any surprises for you like this young maid has encountered. It looks like one instance when the butler really did do it!
Over the last few months, we’ve been featuring various covers from DIME DETECTIVE, the pulp that helped Popular Publications become one of the leaders of its industry. The company was launched in 1930 by Henry Steeger and Harold S. Goldsmith. It was the dark days of the Depression and many pulps were having hard times. With most of their titles losing money, Steeger and Goldsmith decided to begin a line of magazines that sold for ten cents.
Using some of the writers from the leading detective pulp of the day — BLACK MASK — the new Popular magazine became a terrific seller. Publishing stories by Raymond Chandler, Carroll John Daly, Frederick Davis, Erle Stanley Gardner, John Lawrence, Frederick Nebel, Cornell Woolrich, and other hardboiled writers, DIME DETECTIVE moved to the top of its field. It ran for 274 issues, its last one dated August 1953.
We’ll be offering a profile of DIME DETECTIVE MAGAZINE at PulpFest 2017. It’s all part of our salute to “Hardboiled Dicks, Dangerous Dames, and a Few Psychos.” We’ll also have live theater, author readings, and presentations on the villains of THE SHADOW MAGAZINE, “The Dangerous Dames of Kenneth Robeson,” Hollywood detective Dan Turner, Pat Savage and the Domino Lady, Philip José Farmer, and much more. PulpFest 2017 will take place at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh – Cranberry from July 27 – 30.
We’ll keep you informed about all of these exciting topics through our website and social media sites. So please be sure to bookmark PulpFest.com and visit at least once a week. We’ll be offering a new post every Monday morning around 9 AM, eastern time. Alternately, you can read our posts via our facebook site or catch our tweets by following us via our Twitter page.
(Debuting with its November 1931 number, DIME DETECTIVE MAGAZINE was one of the leaders in its fiction category. Part of the reason for its success was its great covers. Featuring work by such artists as Walter Baumhofer, Samuel Cherry, Rafael DeSoto, Albert Drake, John Newton Howitt, Tom Lovell, William Reusswig, Norman Saunders, and Robert Stanley, DIME DETECTIVE flew off America’s newsstands. Unfortunately, the cover art for the August 1939 issue was not credited.)
