Broken Hallelujah: The Cultural Significance of
American Hardboiled Fiction in Paperback, 1940-1955
by Margaret Meriçli, University of Pittsburgh

I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty
in the moonlight
overthrew you
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne,
she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Maybe I've been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

There was a time you'd let me know
What's real and going on below
But now you never show it to me do you?
Remember when I moved in you?
The holy dark was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Maybe there's a God above
And all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It's not a cry you can hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Words by Leonard Cohen
http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/shrek/hallelujah.htm
(Accessed March 17, 2007)

“They shoot horses, don’t they?” asks Robert Syverten of the police officers who are taking him away after he murders his dance partner/girlfriend in Horace McCoy’s novel of the same name.1 In this story, the woman smiles as the bullet penetrates her skull; the man will be punished for easing her pain. The real victim is the protagonist. Knowing he should have left her long ago, he chose to stay and face his own brutal destiny. In the end, Syverten is “convicted by verdict of the jury…carrying with it the extreme penalty of the law…executed and put to death.”2 He finds no empathy. The judge’s final statement, on the last page of the novel, “MAY GOD HAVE MERCY ON YOUR SOUL…”3 although printed in seventy-two point, sans serif letters, is not a prayer. It offers neither hope nor absolution. It is a broken hallelujah, reminding the protagonist and the reader that the world has gone very wrong. It is the world of hardboiled fiction–stories of crime, characterized by violence, sex and paranoia and symbolized by guns and low-necklines.4

This world is the United States in the years between the end of World War I and the end of the 1950s, as interpreted by hardboiled writers. These years are marked by huge events: the Great Depression; World War II; and the Red Scare. Their effects were felt across society with the rise of poverty and the resultant social programs, the decline of urban lifestyles and an evolution of new Liberalism all of which influenced the works of writers like McCoy, Dashiell Hammett, W.R. Burnett, and Edward Anderson. They were the hardboiled or “pulp” writers, so named because they wrote largely for the cheap fiction magazines printed on pulp paper.

Less than four years after McCoy’s classic hardboiled novel was first published, fiction from the pulps, along with all genres would be welcomed into a new publishing format. In 1939, Robert De Graff reintroduced paperback publishing in America. July 2, 1939 was the start of a new “Paperback Revolution” with the introduction of Pocket Books.5 Books were about to be produced and distributed in amounts never seen before. Non-fiction, poetry, drama, mysteries–all genres were represented, but no type of story was so suited to the new format of paperback as those stories which fall under the heading hardboiled. They were the perfect complement. The paperback books were cheap and impermanent, just like life in modern America as described by writers like William Lindsay Gresham and Raymond Chandler.

Hardboiled fiction and paperback publishing together created a cultural phenomenon, marked by mass production, mass distribution and finally mass outrage that took Congressional hearings to appease. Sadly, few examples of these physical objects remain today. The once-red stained edges are now the shade of dirty tenement bricks where their urban heroes lived and died. Once shocking cover art seems campy or naive. It is hard to see the incendiary quality that inspired U.S. Senator Gathings to chair a committee on alleged pornographic materials. The copies that remain are brittle, cracking and torn. Yet, their initial qualities are still appreciated by some. These people struggle to collect what they can, scouring yard sales, second-hand book shops and of course the internet. It is a frustrating vocation. Geoffrey O’Brien describes the quandary of the collector:

“–in a few years’ time, such a book may well have crumbled into dust. The collector of hardboiled novels is often faced with the dilemma of whether to read the book and watch it disintegrate into small pieces as each page is turned, or else preserve it unread but intact.”6

Collectors can now do both, by purchasing a new, reading copy at a bookstore. In the last fifty years, hardboiled fiction has been reevaluated and the authors have been given a new respectability. Doctoral candidates have earned degrees by studying the lives and writings of authors like Jim Thompson.7 Their stories have been reissued. Publishing companies have reintroduced works of Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes in high-quality trade paperbacks. These new editions are beautiful pieces, larger and sturdier than the originals, but that is not the only way they are different. It is more than the acid-free paper, or the reviews by The New York Times on the cover. For example, the cover of the Lion Books edition of Thompson’s 1953 book, Recoil is red on the right and white on the left. The image that fills the cover was painted in oils. In the center a large, Marilyn Monroe-like face with half-closed eyes stares down to the left at the figure of a man looking over his shoulder, running from those eyes. The title is stamped across the top in large black letters. The 1981 Vintage Crime edition cover is a black and white photo of a bespectacled man in a shirt and tie, his head flung to his left in response to the drink thrown into his face by an unseen person. Each drop is visible, as are the lines around his tightly closed eyes. The title runs across the top in small black letters on an orange banner. Twenty-five years later, the reprint shows the same brutal quality on the cover and the same harsh bold black text on bright white inside. More than fifty years later, the faded colors and yellowing pages of the original show the abject desperation of its victim-protagonist as well as its author. Thompson suffered for his art, greatly underappreciated throughout his life.8 As a result his books are difficult to find. Without Black Lizard and Vintage Crime, his stories would have been lost. Copies of his first novel Now and on Earth are so difficult to find that rare book dealers like Bibliophile Bookbase, list a first edition of the 1984 reprint for $90.00. Of course, other less significant editions can be purchased for $4.00 and $5.00 through amazon.com and half.com, because true fans of hardboiled fiction came to its rescue.

When the Creative Arts Book Company released titles like Goodis’ Night Squad under its Black Lizard imprint, noir aficionado Barry Gifford did a good thing for hardboiled fiction and its fans in the best way he could.9 Black Lizard Press alone, and after it merged with Vintage Crime in 1990, brought stories out of obscurity, satisfying old fans and creating new ones.10 It was a wise publishing decision. It is important to differentiate here between publishing history and book binding history. Philip Gaskell makes the point that paperback history has always fallen within the scope of publishing history, not book binding history.11 The paperback format is a tool used by publishers to distribute large amounts of commercial goods to large amounts of people. The goal was not to create something either beautiful or lasting. Rather it was to give the literate person some cheap, easily accessible entertainment, at the drugstore, in the train station, even through the mail.12 In America, in the 1940s, this worked better than anyone ever imagined.

This period, the Paperback Revolution, is actually the third such event in America’s history. The first attempt at large scale paperback publishing had happened approximately 100 years earlier. Literacy was increasing and the country was expanding.13 Readers were moving westward. Technical innovations like the cylinder press and stereoplates were underway in the printing industry. Printing speed was increasing. The United States, like the rest of the world, did not recognize international copyright laws. Publishers had a free hand with the works of foreign authors.14 Park Benjamin and Rufus Griswold saw how these things fit together and saw a way to make a profit. They began a mail order, serial publication called “Brother Jonathan.” Each issue was 24-28 pages in quarto-size containing a weekly installment of a British story. They used this format to get around the postal codes which charged the same rate for paperbacks as hardcover books.15

These documents were called “broadsheets,” and were quickly imitated by other publishers, many of whom called them “supplements” and placed them in their newspapers as premiums.16 In 1840, Park Benjamin and Rufus Griswold again took the lead, publishing what is considered the first American full-length paperback. It was called Charles O’Malley and it was again followed by imitators.17 The increased competition caused prices to drop. As a result, publishers had to cut costs. They did this by decreasing the page size down to something more like today’s mass market paperbacks.18 The nineteenth century free market had made a demand and it was met. In spite of cut-throat competition it was not the free market which brought and end to this experiment in mass production. Just as the size of the documents foreshadowed their twentieth century counterparts, so did the reactions they received. The majority of people purchased them; a large number of publishers supplied them. Other publishers felt the new format threatened traditional book sales. They threw support to clergy and concerned citizens who were trying to ban the books for their perceived sensational content. In 1843, Congress increased postal rates for paperbacks and newspapers containing supplements.19 The revolution ended without a shot being fired. Instead, small publishers shut down and larger ones waited to see what the future would bring.

They didn’t have to wait very long. Within twenty years, there was again a strong enough market for paperbacks that publishers were willing to produce them. This time, train travel inspired the revitalization. Instead of providing books through the mail, publishers could sell books to travelers in train stations. The Rand McNally publishing company was one of the early purveyors of “railroad literature,” cheap, staple-bound disposable romance, joke and true crime stories wrapped around railroad timetables.20 The Beadle Brothers, Erastus and Irwin, improved on this format and in 1860 issued 4? x 6½, 96-page paper cover books with a sewn binding.21 These books again foreshadowing their twentieth century counterparts, found a new market with Civil War soldiers. Beadle’s dime novels (so-called because of their price) of reprinted magazine stories could not keep up with the demand these readers created. While other companies published works of British authors, like Charles Dickens, who had no copyrights in the United States, the Beadles created writing stables, hired hack writers to produce series based on the adventures of heroes like Deadwood Dick and Jumbo Joe.22 This phase of paperback publishing lasted far longer and found wider acceptance within the publishing industry. Established companies like Chicago’s RR Donnelly Company began printing paperback collections like the Lakeside Library.23

For thirty years paperback production was successful, so successful that the market became saturated and in 1890 simply imploded under weight of thousands of books that could not even be given away.24 The official end came the following year with the passage of the Chace Act which allowed British authors to copyright their works in America.25

Although Americans did not buy paperbacks in the amounts being printed in the last years of the nineteenth century, this did not mean that there was not a market for inexpensive story publications. Pulp magazines expanded to fill the void left by the demise of dime novels. This format had been around for years. A notable example is Detective Magazine which was first published in 1886 and continued until 1915 to showcase the adventures of its hero, Nick Carter.26 Detective Magazine became the template for pulp magazines. It was genre-specific, produced cheaply, printed on cheap paper and filled with sensational wash illustrations.27 This type of artwork was critical to the success of the pulps because it caught the eye of potential customers at the newsstands where they were sold. Hundreds of weekly publications with titles like Adventure Magazine, Doc Savage, Spicy Mystery, Strange Detective and Detective Fiction Weekly sold hundreds of thousands of their weekly editions well into the 1930s when the format hit its apex and was in turn displaced by twenty-five cent novels.28 Fiction magazines began a quick decline in the Second World War, but before this happened, the pulps managed to change detective, crime and mystery fiction forever with the introduction of the tough or “hardboiled” detective, a distinctly American figure.29 This evolution from the British armchair detective into the bar-crawling gumshoe began with John Carroll Daly’s story “The False Burton Combs” and Dashiell Hammett’s “The Road Home” and it began in a pulp magazine called The Black Mask.30 That the magazine would affect literature much less American culture was not something foreseen by its creator, H.L. Mencken. In fact, all he wanted to do was make a profit to support his other “respectable” magazine, The Smart Set.31 Mencken, a publisher and critic, was most critical of pulp magazines, but he was desperate. In April 1920, the first 128-page issue containing twelve stories hit the stands. The masthead read: The Black Mask: An Illustrated Magazine of Detective, Mystery, Adventure, Romance and Spiritualism–Mencken’s name, at his insistence, was nowhere on the document.32 Less than a year later, Mencken himself was nowhere to be found, having sold the enterprise to Eltinge “Pop” Warner and Eugene Crow who gave editorial duties to George W. Sutton, Jr.33 It was Sutton who pushed writers to create hero-driven serials for Black Mask. Sutton promoted characters like Hammett’s nameless “Continental Op” and when Phil Cody stepped into the editor’s role, he continued this format by encouraging Daly to build a series around his character, Race Williams.34 “The Black Mask school of fiction” was firmly in place when Joseph “Cap” Shaw took over editorial duties in 1926.35

Shaw was a horrible writer with an incredible gift for editing.36 He wanted the magazine to be respected so he used his gift to guide skilled writers like Raymond Chandler who created prototypes of his Philip Marlowe for the magazine. His editorship lasted ten years. In the end he left over a salary dispute, but during his tenure, Cap Shaw helped the pulp writers develop a new kind of crime fiction.37 Not long after Shaw’s exit, the pulp magazine industry followed. In the 1940s, television gained popularity as did comic books and paperback books both of which displaced the pulps on newsstands.38

How exactly does a twenty-five cent book replace a twenty-cent collection of similar stories? Robert de Graff believed it could happen. He had the advantage of timing his publishing experiment with the beginning of World War II. Paper rationing shut down most pulp publishers almost overnight and, just as had happened in the Civil War, soldiers created an instant audience and the government was an excited buyer of cheap, disposable books to send overseas.39 Paperbacks made perfect sense for soldiers, but why would anyone walking through the drugstore choose a paperback over a hardcover book? First, because paperbacks were available in drugstores and newsstands, hundreds more outlets than the bookstores that were selling hardcover books. Secondly, because they could, in fact, get a complete and unabridged book40 (de Graff was insistent on stressing this, to the point of having the words printed on the foot of the front cover and on the free endpaper) for a quarter. In turn, publishers asked: how it could cost a quarter? De Graff’s plan was easy, explains Kenneth C. Davis, “reduce costs and increase volume.” He goes on to admit that this was “easier said than done” and putting de Graff’s plan into action had certain complications:

“In attacking costs, de Graff first sliced the royalty paid to the author and the originating hardcover house…de Graff got publishers and authors who were certain that it would never amount to much to agree to a 4 percent royalty instead of the 10 percent that Modern Age had been paying…he reduced the discount to dealers…He also reduced production costs by borrowing the original publisher’s plates whenever possible, reducing the size of the book to a purse-sized 4 1/4 by 6 1/2 inches…and using the “perfect binding,” an incongruously named gluing process that is vastly cheaper than the regular stitched binding of hardcover books. But the most important factor in dropping costs was the increase in print runs to ten times the size of a typical hardcover run.”41 

With the release of Pocket Books’ first ten titles, de Graff had struck gold. His plan succeeded to such a degree that, “the real headache was printing books fast enough to meet the demand.”42

They did print them, huge numbers of paperbacks and in those that survive today, one can see Pocket Books’ distinct “look.” It begins with its issue number. Each Pocket Book is marked with its titles’ place in the canon printed on the spine. This is followed by the colophon of “Gertrude” the Kangaroo, named after designer Frank Lieberman’s mother-in-law.43 She has gone through nearly a dozen manifestations, beginning in 1939 where she stands with one book in her pouch, another book in her hands and pair of glasses on her nose and ending nearly forty years later as a leaping profile merged into the letter “P.” For some reason, in 1942-43, Gertrude was relegated to the back cover and in her place on the head of the front cover are the letters “pb” in a circle. This marked the beginning of the three-year long, framed front cover period of Pocket Books where two-toned, quarter inch lines set against rounded white lines of an eighth of an inch made a border around the image.44 For example, Pocket Book number 201, Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Stuttering Bishop has a red edge around the scene of the terrified man in the rain looking over his shoulder at a car’s headlights. Pocket Book number 211, Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key has a blue border around the image of a cigarette-smoking man being held at gunpoint. This title also has the distinction of having the artist’s name included in the image. Leo Manso created the cover art for this 1943 Pocket Book.

After Pocket Books’ initial success, other publishing companies quickly followed with paperback imprints of their own. New paperback lines appeared almost annually. In 1941, Joseph Meyer began Avon Books for the American News Company.45 George Dellacorte’s Dell Books appeared in 1943.46 Two years later, Ian Ballantine introduced Bantam Books.47

All of these publishers were careful to keep their formats as close to Pocket Books’ as legally possible. Only Avon Books crossed the line so far that the matter went to court. Avon Books, with the scraggly Shakespeare-head colophon, gives truth to the “American paperback” stereotype: “a book put together without care, consistency, taste or style.”48 But Avon Books do have a style, one taken directly from Pocket Books: issue number on the spine, red-stained edges and the word “pocket book” displayed clearly–which was the real problem.

De Graff’s choice of name for the imprint created a dilemma for his competition. At the time, “pocket book” was the common term, not paperback. By taking it, other publishers had to find a different way to explain their product to consumers. The courts settled the issue for them after a series of appeals by both Pocket Books and Avon. All other publishers must use the term “pocket-sized books” to differentiate their products.49

This seemed to settle things for the paperback industry; essentially it was open to all. Any publisher could put a book roughly 4x6 inches on the newsstands and try to sell it. Publishers knew that whether the cover read “pocket book” or “pocket-sized book” was not going to make a difference. What mattered was the image on the cover. This is what sold the book: the three “G’s:” gals, guts and guns.50 Promises of sex and violence sold paperbacks so that is what the artists created.

Paperbacks were a money-making industry.51 The artists, those whose names are known, like Manso, Charles Attie, Charles Andres, Robert Jonas and James Avati, did so for the money, as did the other artists whose names are lost because they did not bother to or were instructed not to sign their work. These artists would take one moment from the story and turn it into an intensely violent and erotic tableau.52 True success came when the image did both, like Dell issue number 473, Donald Hamilton’s The Steel Mirror. The cover shows a scene of a man bending down to fix a flat tire. Behind him stands another man who is about to strike him with a metal rod. A blonde woman smiles down at the sight, tilting forward to offer a view into her blouse. This is what the publishers wanted and this is what paperback buyers wanted, so this is what the artists gave them.
The artwork on the cover of the Dell book is not signed. It could be the work of Attie. He is known to have done some work for Dell around that time. In 1954, he quit painting and turned exclusively to photography.53 Many paperback cover artists left the field as soon as they could. Manso took a teaching position at Columbia University and Andres was a successful painter of western scenes. Definitely the most prolific and arguably the longest lasting professional paperback cover artist was James Avati, who turned his job into a forty-year career.54

Avati is “the most important paperback illustrator” which is why his work is seen as the quintessential image of the 1940s paperbacks. His covers “portray men and women in emotionally intense situations,” yet his characters have a “burlesque quality,” but they are not purely prurient.55 Avati’s cover for McCoy’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye seems at first glance to give lie to this. A man sits on a bed smoking a cigarette, watching a woman undress. Her shirt is falling off and her eyes are closed. It is the very picture of seduction. A second look shows his hand wrapped tightly around the bed post, his forearm muscles tense under a blue prison work shirt. These are two people who use their bodies to get what they want. They are two strong forces and they are about to collide.

Images like this sold the promise of violence and sex within the covers of the paperback. To fulfill this promise, publishers needed stories that had both. Hardboiled fiction writers were called upon by publishers to meet this need. The potential synergy between the stories of the pulps and the nascent paperback industry was obvious. They were made for each other.

Paperbacks were the perfect platform to serve the political agenda of true hardboiled writers. “While pulp culture fiction contains few overt political statements, its subject matter–capitalism’s relationship to crime, corruption, desire and power–remains highly political” writes, Woody Haut and he is correct.56 Thompson and Himes, participants in WPA programs, Hammett and Willeford, both veterans of World Wars, and later David Goodis all needed to show America how it had failed them.

Thompson also had something to say about liberalism and the New Deal after working not only as a ditch digger for the WPA, but also as the Director of the Oklahoma Writers Project. The setting of his first novel, Now and on Earth is an airplane factory in California where the government trained people for this work that would support the war effort. In this book, Thompson “performed an autopsy upon the American Dream, assailing in the same breath both God and the God that failed…”57

Hammett, despite having been treated for pulmonary tuberculosis after World War I and still suffering from its after effects, served in World War II as well. He was disappointed with the way America seemed to discount its citizens. He showed this through his character of Sam Spade and the events in The Maltese Falcon by redefining the role of the detective. Spade was not called to investigate a crime scene as a consultant who would inevitably recreate a threatened social order; he was brought to the spot where his partner was killed as a potential suspect.58 Hammett’s detective story is an allegory representing how “people could be shaped, molded, and manipulated by the very institutions and beliefs that once seemed transcendent and disinterested.”59 The cover of the 1957 Perma Books edition of this book shows a woman undressing in behind a curtain. On the other side of the curtain is the partial view of a man seated and holding her high-heeled shoe. This is the image that sold the book.

There was no doubt people wanted paperbacks and they wanted hardboiled fiction. This combination sold millions of copies every year. Hardboiled paperbacks were so successful that in less than a decade after Pocket Books appeared, publishing companies deciding to take a chance and publish original fiction, not reprints of established hardcovers, chose hardboiled writers.

Lion Books began publishing Goodis and Thompson originals in the late 1940s. Thompson continued to use psychopathic protagonists to “strip illusory surface” from society and “denounce what he sees.”60 For example, in his 1953 title Savage Night, Thompson’s morally-ambiguous hired killer Carl Bigelow stalking his prey is Thompson’s social commentary. The victim-villain-protagonist finds empathy with the woman who cleans the house where he stays. She has a deformed leg, unlike his victim, a gambler and thief who is deformed on the inside. Their rapport grows. In the end they are together, in the basement of the house where she has been chopping pieces of him off with an axe for days. The cover of the Lion Books edition shows a tall, dark handsome man sitting on porch steps. A blonde woman sits on a chair, rubbing his leg with her bare foot. Another dark-haired woman stands in the doorway, holding a broom and looking longingly at him, promising him–and the reader–something very different.

David Goodis also found success writing original stories for paperback publishers like Gold Medal Books. Like Thompson, he was ashamed of this. As a writer he was a failure, “condemned to pulps and paperbacks.”61 His protagonists reflected his frustration by, “reject[ing] fame, or artistic talent…find[ing] refuge amongst tramps, thieves, whores and drunks.”62 Along with what Haut describes as literary paranoia, Goodis was equally unsettled by women and this too came out in his writing, but it was well-received by fans of hard-boiled fiction. His 1951 title, Cassidy’s Girl told the story of a man in a marriage based on his submission to his wife’s physical violence who he dreams of leaving for the “alcoholic waif-like” Doris.63 In the same way that Goodis trapped himself into writing hardboiled fiction from an apartment in Philadelphia, Cassidy too will not escape the unhappy life that he chose. On the cover, Cassidy stands in the background, facing away from the woman lying on bed in a thin, white negligee. His head is turned; he watches her. She stares straight ahead. The book was Goodis’ most popular title.64

The stories of Goodis, Thompson and others were changing hardboiled fiction as 1950 dawned. In spite of Hammett’s and Chandler’s advances in the detective story, that format no longer held the interest of hardboiled writers. Paperback originals that appeared after 1945 were moving away from the hardboiled detective stories like those created by Hammett and then Chandler.65 This is true, even of the stories that were about detectives. Hardboiled writers had little enough respect for their own work; it is no wonder they felt nothing for the genre’s forefathers, or each other. For example, in I, the Jury, Mickey Spillane managed to throw Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe in the faces of their creators by creating the über-violent private investigator Mike Hammer. His blood-thirsty protagonist was also an affront to writers like Thompson and Chester Himes who used violence to make political statements. When I, the Jury first appeared in 1947, Mickey Spillane found a simple device to move the plot along: let Mike Hammer enjoy violence, extremely and often. On the cover of the Signet edition, a blond woman undresses for the man who holds a gun on her. In the book, far away from the front cover, on the last few pages, the man, Spillane’s anti-Communist, vigilante protagonist does in fact shoot the woman, whom he actually loves. This story sold two million copies in its first two years and helped bring about the end of the glory days of post-World War II paperbacks.66

The success of I, the Jury and other flashy paperbacks promising sex and violence pulled this marginal genre into the mainstream. Millions of dollars were spent annually, twenty-five cents at a time, on paperbacks sold in drug stores, newsstands and at train and bus stations. Paperbacks were inexpensive and attractive to consumers with little pocket money, for example, teenagers. Middle America looked at its youth and was frightened by what it saw: young men and women reading books that cost a quarter.

In less than fifteen years, public support for paperbacks had turned 180 degrees. “What began as a democratizing element,” writes Lisa Speer, was now considered a “subversive influence,” and the twenty-five cent price went from their selling point to their downfall. 67 People in America were outraged that juveniles had access to apparently obscene materials. Reactions began at the local level, as these things are wont to do, with clergy and community leaders speaking to parents. From there, if the protest gains enough support, it becomes a movement. In Michigan, it got this far, to the point that the police created a special unit to track down and confiscate paperbacks deemed pornographic.68
Not long after Mike Hammer sold his first million copies, America asked the impossible question, “what is obscene?” They found an answer: paperbacks. How could this be? The cover art is relatively tame; the stories are not terribly explicit, at least not about sex. Violence is a different matter, but, as Eric Larrabee explains, Americans did not have as much of a problem with that. In fact, when it came to censoring literature, American rules were paradoxical:

“American mores which make love, which is legal in fact, illegal on paper, while murder, which is illegal in fact, is not only legal on paper, but the basis of the greatest publishing successes of all time…we tolerate blood and guts in a quantity and concreteness wholly denied sexual love.”69

Larrabee feels that the movement against paperback fiction is a class issue at its core. He states that the same class war happened in the nineteenth century over the Penny Dreadfuls, and it is no surprise that 1950s middle America is outraged over stories by men from Oklahoma and Texas and California who talk about life in the decaying cities that the suburbanites left behind.70 This is just what happened and they did not want to read about it. They did not want their children reading about cheap lives in cheap places and they certainly did not want the cheap books containing these stories in their homes. Hardboiled paperbacks of the 1940s can be frightening objects. They are abject, gaudy, dirty-looking and strangely alive. They needed to be stopped, but even Congress could not do it, although they tried.

In 1952, the Eighty-second Congress formed a Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials to deal with this matter.71 It is commonly known as the Gathings Committee after its chair, Senator E.C. Gathings. They came together to discuss, among other things like comic books, paperbacks. Their goal, according to Larrabee, was “to achieve sex censorship without having to endorse it.”72 They came very close. The results of five days of debate with leaders in the publishing field were an “incoherent and banal…compendium of pro-censorship ammunition…a textbook on techniques of applying local pressure.”73

The hearings began on December 1, 1952 and continued until December 5, 1952. During those five days, Senators and leaders argued in circles with leaders in the publishing industry over the definition of a good book. Publishers brought records showing the millions of copies of copies they had sold since the beginning of the decade. For publishers, sales determined if a book was good or not.74 This allowed the Senator to point out that the book may sell well, but still be obscene. In the end, Congress could not prove this. 75 The 4x6 images of men and women in intense situations may “provoke erotic thoughts,” as the dictionary defines obscene, but Congress could not admit that either these images or their corresponding texts had a corrupting influence. They could only ask that publishers censor themselves. Writing as a contemporary, Larrabee at this point calls on the dictum of New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, writing that “no girl was ever ruined by a book,”76 not even a twenty-five cent paperback filled with hardboiled fiction.

Unfortunately, the threat of the possibility was enough and the days of the cheap, flashy paperback were quickly ending. Governmental disapprobation was not the only reason. Art directors and artists themselves had grown tired of the format. Ten years is a long time for a marketing gimmick to last, even one as universal as sex. Art directors changed the look of the paperback product from images to text-based covers, not just for their own artist amusement, but because consumers growing tired of what these objects represented.

Woody Haut uses the term “pulp culture” to describe the period of American history marked by these flashy, hardboiled fiction-based paperbacks. He writes that this era came to end in 1963 with the death of John F. Kennedy.77 He is being overly dramatic. The end of “pulp culture” came with the election of Dwight Eisenhower, a war hero and a Republican. He represented the new America where the war was over and the economy was strong. Men back from fighting in the war could find a job that paid well enough to finance a house and car as well as support a wife and children. Men and women both were looking to assimilate into a community of their peers. Those mass market hardboiled paperbacks with the sensational cover art represented the economic confusion of the Depression and the social unrest that it brought into the next decade. They were stories about outcasts. In 1950s America, once again mirroring its subject matter, the hardboiled fiction paperbacks containing these stories became the outcasts.

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