To all hep cats and she-males within the sound of my bleat:
It’s not often that a humble Tinseltown gumshoe like yours truly gets asked to sling some ink about a la-de-dah literary topic like “Why PulpFest?” Yr. faithful correspondent is a gee who hardly ever asks “why” about anything. I favor the direct approach, whether it’s a bop to the beezer or a clinch with a quail. The way I cipher it, queries can come later, after everything’s cooled.
On top of that, I figured those old pulpwood publications were as defunct as Confederate money.
So, imagine my surprise when I glommed onto the fact that there are still folks out there who not only read ‘em, but collect ‘em and, I guess, love ‘em. You could’ve flattened me with a peignoir!
I did a little more poking around and, pretty soon, I’d found out that a whole lot of these same people get together once per annum up around the Steel City to buy, sell, and swap these moldy old mags and gas about their favorite yarns and characters. Then, to drop the maraschino onto the whipped cream, I dug up some more dope on this particular pulpwood-fueled blowout and glimmed that it was going to celebrate Spicy Detective Stories – the mag that provided a launching pad for a stripling snoop who went by the monicker of Dan Turner, esquire!
So, when the big mukluks who run PulpFest made their request for a few lines from me, how could I have turned ‘em down?
You and I both know that the top choice for this piece of business would’ve been the ink-stained scribe who stuffed all those words about me into the pages of the pulps: my good chum and official biographer Robert Leslie Bellem. Unfortunately, Bob departed this mortal coil back in 1968. The pulp mags had croaked long before that, of course, but pro that he was, he jumped right to television and pretty soon was knocking out scripts as fast as Carter made Little Liver Pills.
Without Bob B., I’m afraid you’re stuck with a Hollywood snoop who’s not nearly as brainy or as wizardous with words. But I’m taking up my quill anyway, and doing my damndest to put down a thought that’s been doing lots of chasing around in my cranium. Assisted by a few jorums of skee, I think I’ve finally put my finger on it. In fact, from where I sit, it’s as obvious as a wart on a witch’s nose. Problem is, I can’t keep it from sounding like old Dan’s a selfish egomaniac, with narcissistic tendencies.
But I guess I’d better let it fly.
Why PulpFest? Because if not for PulpFest and its attendees, this Tinseltown dick might be M.I.A.
No fooling. For all those hundreds of stories RLB wrote about me, I could be as good as morte. Expired. Dead as iced catfish. Because if there’s no one reading about yours truly anymore, I’m effectively croaked — snoozing the big snooze in some forgotten skull orchard.
And that’s a thought that gives me a hard case of the quivering pips.
It’s like that proverbial tree that crashes in the forest without anyone around to hear it.
No matter how many times I’ve perforated some thug with a few sneezes from my roscoe, run down a wrongdoer during a shoot on a Paravox Pictures set, or invaded some lovely’s boudoir with osculation on my mind — if nobody’s reading it, it might as well not have happened.
That doesn’t just go for me, either. All of us pulpwood personalities – private snoops, hoss-opera heroes, devil-may-care flyboys, gritty G-men, two-fisted adventurers, ginzos in capes and masks – live just as long as there’s someone out there who cares enough to bury his or her nose in the moldering pages of one of our mags and, simply by the act of reading, climb into our world.
I’ve been hipped that some at PulpFest collect the books just because they love the covers, and that’s jake with me. I like lamping an undraped wren as well as the next gazabo.
But you wouldn’t plop down good lettuce for a seat at the flying tintypes and ankle the place after the cartoon, wouldja? Besides, with the abundance of pulchritude displayed on every cover of my books, there was seldom any room for me.
Guess I got a little windy, there. Like I say, I’m used to action, not words. So let me just spin it out in one fell swoop.
Why PulpFest? Because every blessed one of you ginks is keeping us out of the boneyard.
Hearty regards from Hollywood,
Dan Turner, Esq.
Robert Leslie Bellem introduced Mr. Turner to the reading public in the June 1934 issue of Spicy Detective Stories, the second issue of the Culture Publication (pictured above with front cover art by H. L. Parkhurst. After that first appearance, Turner would be featured in every issue of Spicy Detective Stories straight through the pulp’s demise as Speed Detective in the issue dated February 1947. In between, Dan would also appear in Private Detective Stories and Hollywood Detective (which was called Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective for its first ten issues). Bellem’s wise-cracking gumshoe is thought to have appeared in more than 300 prose stories and about sixty comic strip tales.
We’ll be saluting the 90th anniversary of the “Spicy” pulps at this year’s PulpFest. We hope you’ll join PulpFest 2024 on Thursday, August 1, at 7:45 pm as we welcome writers Will Murray and John Wooley who climb “Under the Covers with the Spicy Gumshoes.” Our lead image was adapted by PulpFest advertising director William Lampkin from H. J. Ward’s original cover art for the May 1939 issue of Spicy Detective Stories, published by Harry Donenfeld’s Culture Publications. Spicy Detective Stories was home for Dan Turner and other “Spicy” gumshoes.
Our featured image was excerpted from Ward’s original cover painting for Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective No. 2, dated April 1942.
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