I would have loved to have one of those "million word a year" authors as a creative writing teacher- they put out a lot for their "eats", but for most of them the good stories outnumbered the bad ones.
You can tell the vintage of the story by the fact that certain words are replaced by blanks ( "The ------ I didn't."), although most of us now can figure out what the missing word likely was.
This was the era when the pulps advertised being "clean" rather strenuously. *Western Story Weekly,* which got going in 1920, had "Big, CLEAN Stories Of Outdoor Life" on its cover for most of the decade.
As for the "million word a year" men, yes, they were generally quite good in addition to being prolific. Dunn has only had one real clunker I've found so far. Max Brand can be somewhat variable in quality, but I've only republished one book of his that I would call "bland", in that everything else has taught me something about writing or editing, good and bad. I've only dipped my toe into Johnston McCulley's work, but he probably comes closest to being a hack out of the ones I know about.
Zorro was definitely his ticket to immortality, but he would persist in footnotes, at the least, as being an influence on later pop culture in other ways. He was the first to use the masked-supervillain-who's-really-a-hero thing that Fran Striker's The Green Hornet did so well, for example.
How delightful! Thanks so much. I adore the older, pulpier stories, with their older language. The sparse modern stuff is like a sugar-free cake. Looks good, but none of the richness of the older language. Although the commas are so frequent, the subclauses and modifiers…it’s a little bit jarring after too much modern. Too bad we can’t just go back to the old ways.
That is not a perspective I had ever considered Dunn from. I've republished four or five of his novels, and love his stuff, but "complex" and "rich" would not have occurred to me. I like it!
If you ever need to fundraise for a charity, these stories: Golden tales from the golden age of pulps would make a good offer. Have not found a wooden nickel yet.
Wikisource was literally the source of this text. I was going to do it myself when I decided to re-check Dunn's page there, and decided to save myself some work. But Substack is apparently wonky in how it interprets what.
There are some other Dunns that I'm going to be doing myself.
I would have loved to have one of those "million word a year" authors as a creative writing teacher- they put out a lot for their "eats", but for most of them the good stories outnumbered the bad ones.
You can tell the vintage of the story by the fact that certain words are replaced by blanks ( "The ------ I didn't."), although most of us now can figure out what the missing word likely was.
This was the era when the pulps advertised being "clean" rather strenuously. *Western Story Weekly,* which got going in 1920, had "Big, CLEAN Stories Of Outdoor Life" on its cover for most of the decade.
As for the "million word a year" men, yes, they were generally quite good in addition to being prolific. Dunn has only had one real clunker I've found so far. Max Brand can be somewhat variable in quality, but I've only republished one book of his that I would call "bland", in that everything else has taught me something about writing or editing, good and bad. I've only dipped my toe into Johnston McCulley's work, but he probably comes closest to being a hack out of the ones I know about.
If McCulley hadn't created Zorro, we might not know about him at all.
Zorro was definitely his ticket to immortality, but he would persist in footnotes, at the least, as being an influence on later pop culture in other ways. He was the first to use the masked-supervillain-who's-really-a-hero thing that Fran Striker's The Green Hornet did so well, for example.
How delightful! Thanks so much. I adore the older, pulpier stories, with their older language. The sparse modern stuff is like a sugar-free cake. Looks good, but none of the richness of the older language. Although the commas are so frequent, the subclauses and modifiers…it’s a little bit jarring after too much modern. Too bad we can’t just go back to the old ways.
That is not a perspective I had ever considered Dunn from. I've republished four or five of his novels, and love his stuff, but "complex" and "rich" would not have occurred to me. I like it!
There is more Dunn coming, in a month or two.
Fine tale you passed on to your readers, Mr. Deej: thanks.
Since it got a bit dinged up coming here where we'd find it, I picked up a clean copy.
It deserves it: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ferret_and_the_Bet
If you ever need to fundraise for a charity, these stories: Golden tales from the golden age of pulps would make a good offer. Have not found a wooden nickel yet.
Wikisource was literally the source of this text. I was going to do it myself when I decided to re-check Dunn's page there, and decided to save myself some work. But Substack is apparently wonky in how it interprets what.
There are some other Dunns that I'm going to be doing myself.