It had been nearly three years since he’d left Black Mask when author agent Joseph T. Shaw approached his successor, Fanny Ellsworth, about a new author.
It was 1939 and the World Fair was taking place in the Big Apple. Morton Wolson was working at the Cuban Village as a bouncer, protecting “strippers from overly enthusiastic men.” He wrote an article about it, “I Guard Nudes.” Ellsworth ran it in the September 1939 number of Black Mask.
That was how a former member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, became hardboiled author Peter Paige. A couple of anti-fascist-tinged stories would follow shortly after — “Swastika Scourge” and “The Fatherland of Otto Bloch” — before Wolson/Paige came up with his bread-and-butter.
Pint-sized private eye Cash Wale and his ex-boxer sidekick, Sailor Duffy, debuted in “Voodoo Frame,” published by Ellsworth in the January 1940 Black Mask, scant months before the magazine was turned over to Popular Publications. Cash and his sailor pal would go on to appear in twenty more stories, most of them published in Ken White’s Dime Detective Magazine.
Please join us at 7:40 pm on Saturday, August 3, as we once again welcome author and enthusiast John Wooley to the PulpFest stage for a talk with Dr. Peter Wolson, the son of hardboiled scribe, Morton Wolson.
A founding member of the Confederation of Independent Psychoanalytic Societies and former President of the Los Angeles Society of Clinical Psychologists, Dr. Wolson has published psychoanalytic papers on the influence of adaptive grandiosity on artistic creativity and fatherhood, on the existential dimension of psychoanalysis, on working with the relational unconscious, on the therapeutic importance of analytic love, and about political power as a stimulant for regression and omnipotence. In the area of applied psychoanalysis, he has published numerous op-ed pieces in the Sunday “Opinion” section of the Los Angeles Times and blogs for such online journals as The Huffington Post, Counterpunch, and Thomson Reuters, illustrating how a psychoanalytic perspective can deepen the public’s understanding of contemporary political and cultural issues. His essays were collected in Psychoanalysis Enters The Political Fray: The Op-Ed Articles and Journal Blogs of Peter Wolson, published in 2019 through International Psychoanalytic Books. Dr. Wolson practices in Beverly Hills.
John Wooley is probably the leading authority on Dan Turner, the “star” of Spicy Detective Stories. Wooley became interested in the work of Robert Leslie Bellem during the 1960s when he acquired some issues of Trojan Publishing’s Hollywood Detective. A writer, novelist, lecturer, filmmaker, radio and TV host, and podcaster, John’s specialties include movies, literature, and music. He’s also a pop-culture historian.
John has written, co-written, or edited nearly 50 books, including the recent 1930s-set horror trilogy — The Cleansing — with Robert A. Brown. Besides that, John has scripted several documentaries, including the Learning Channel’s Hauntings Across America, as well as the made-for-TV feature Dan Turner — Hollywood Detective and the award-winning independent movie, Cafe Purgatory. His scripting extends to comic books and graphic novels, including Plan Nine from Outer Space and The Miracle Squad, which he co-created with artist Terry Tidwell.
Along with movie historians Michael H. Price and Joey Hambrick, John does a monthly podcast called Forgotten Horrors. For the past 18 years, he has also hosted a weekly western-swing radio show and writes, co-hosts, and co-produces a weekly TV program, Film Noir Theatre, for public television.
PulpFest 2024 begins on August 1 and runs through August 4 at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Pittsburgh – Cranberry in Mars, Pennsylvania. We’ll be celebrating “Spice, Spies, Shaw, and More” at this year’s convention.
The general public is welcome to attend our evening programming events free of charge. To learn more about our programming, please click the Schedule button at the top of this page.
For those who also want to enjoy our dealers’ room, you can join PulpFest by clicking the registration button at the top of this page. And don’t forget to book a room. The DoubleTree is sold out, but there are other hotels nearby.
If you want to sell at this year’s PulpFest, our wall tables are sold out. Island tables are still available, but they won’t last long. Register soon!
Our lead image was adapted by William Lampkin from Rafael DeSoto’s cover for the February 1942 issue of Black Mask. One of the works featured in the issue was Peter Paige’s short story, “The Night You Shot Hitler.” How’s that for a title?
While Morton Wolton introduced Cash Wale in Fanny Ellsworth’s Black Mask, he quickly moved the character over to the Popular pulps. Paige’s private eye landed for a single issue of Detective Tales — the April 1940 number, with cover by Rafael DeSoto — before finding a home in Ken White’s Dime Detective Magazine.
Although he took his “cash cow” to Dime Detective, Wolson wasn’t done with Black Mask. In the final issue to be published by Pro-Distributors, he introduced a new — albeit short — series to the pulp magazine. The first of two stories featuring Gabby Grant and Pepito Valdez ran in the April 1940 issue, with cover art by J. George Janes. The pair would return once more in the January 1941 number, again with a Rafael DeSoto cover. All told, Morton Wolton would write a dozen pieces for Black Mask.
Our featured image is excerpted from Rafael DeSoto’s cover for the November 1941 number of Dime Detective, featuring the Cash Wale story, “Local Corpse Makes Good.”
To learn more about Peter Paige and his work, please visit Steve Lewis’s Mystery*File blog. And coming this July from Encyclopocalypse Publications is Nightmare Blonde, a noir novel by Morton Wolson and originally published by Pocket Books in 1988. It’s based on the story, “Softly Creep and Softly Kill,” first published in 1947 in Detective Tales.
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