Want to know all about the world of pulp fiction? Ask somebody who's been there. That would be Frank Gruber, a summa cum laude graduate of the Black Mask "School of Writing." He tells us all about it in his book, The Pulp Jungle. All he did was write four hundred stories, fifty-three novels, sixty-five feature motion picture screenplays, and a hundred television scripts.

Pulp fiction in 1930's paid about one cent per word, maybe two cents for the most popular writers. Gruber knew most of them and tells some great stories about his favorites. Indisputably, "Max Brand" was the "King of the Pulps." Gruber met "Brand" when both of them were writing for Warner Brothers.  Brand's true name was Frederick Schiller Faust, but Gruber always called him Heine Faust.  Many consider Faust to be the most prolific writer of all time. Faust modestly estimated he wrote approximately one and a half million words per year for thirty years—and that was with a heart condition.  His secret was to write fourteen pages per day, every day, come rain or shine.  It was reported he also drank about two quarts of whiskey per day. Add that up and you'd think he would have died of alcoholic poisoning at a tender age. Instead he died of shrapnel wounds suffered as a war correspondent during World War II.

By the way, Gruber has an interesting theory about the influence of pulp fiction on Ernest Hemingway, and James M. Cain, among others. Black Mask published the "sparsest" prose of any of the pulp magazines. The editor, Joe Shaw, instructed his pulp writers, "Prune and cut, don't use a single word that you can do without." Gruber insists that Hemingway's style "when he found it" was straight out of the Black Mask.  

The world of publishing started to change in 1939 when a company called Pocket Books started publishing paperback books. Avon Books then came out with their own line of paperback books. A young man named Ian Ballantine came over from England to set up Penguin Books. The American branch of Penguin became the New American Library which published Signet and Mentor Books.  Ballantine later created Bantam Books, then, a few years later, moved on to establish Ballantine Books. 

Paper quotas were frozen during World War II but once the war was over, the paperback business took off like a rocket. The times had changed and the descendants of pulp struggled to survive. Then E-publishing came along and created new access to old markets. The ghosts of pulp fiction logged on and found refuge in the dense undergrowth of the digital jungle.  The Beat goes on.