Pulp would describe the magazine, the writer and what he or occasionally she wrote. The word was not congratulatory, but at best descriptive. The first one, Munsey’s relaunch of Argosy Magazine, was geared to boys’ adventure fiction and general information (not dissimilar to the UK’s non-pulp Boy’s Own Paper) and appeared in 1896. It offered 192 pages on untrimmed paper, with no illustrations, and, remarkably given what was to come, that meant a words-only cover too. But it was a hit: the first issue sold in the thousands, and by the start of the twentieth century sales were around half a million each month. It survived until 1978. The bandwagon rolled; other publishers would combine cheap paper, less than stellar writers paid less than stellar fees, and the mass production of steam-driven presses to feed a hungry market. The covers might be slick – in terms of paper, anyway, and unlike the pioneer, now wonderfully colourful – but the rest of the content, in every sense, was pure pulp. Usually 128 untrimmed pages, seven inches wide by ten inches high and a half an inch thick. Today such magazines have become collectors’ items: back then they were built for immediate, exciting satisfaction. Like the tales they featured, and the language they were told in, they were never meant to last.
Slang’s first recorded glossaries came from ‘civilians’ trying to make sense of what criminals were saying and criminal slang has been central to the vocabulary for half a millennium. The pulps exploited that vocabulary, but also set about creating it. Readers didn’t expect standard English, they wanted rough, tough, and vivid. A tough guy used tough terminology. It was as vital to the story as James Bond’s brand-names. Sometimes it got a little absurd: the nearest some of the words came to the real-life street was sitting on a newsstand between lurid covers, but no matter. It was all part of the atmosphere. Like the stereotypes of the world it aimed to portray it was terse, urgent, in your face. It wasn’t invariably new, but what mattered was that it never cracked wise. Nothing fancy. Like the writing, no time to think. It was all action. No three-dollar words. Big on crisp synonymy: who would settle for one description when there were so many more to create. If the essence was guns and gals, cops and robbers, then you needed a good range of alternatives to spice up the basic story. Did villains and PIs really talk like this? Most likely not, but that wasn’t the point. In any case, as the spread of lines from movies such as the Godfather series or Goodfellas have made clear, the underworld isn’t above taking a few tips from its fictional peers.
To discover pulp diction, let’s take a look at the vocabulary used by one of the pulpiest of them all, Robert Leslie Bellem. This is the opening of ‘Dead Heat’ published in Hollywood Detective in January 1944.
I reached for the doorknob of Linda LaMarre’s dressing room on the Altamount lot. Before I could turn it I heard a gurgling screech from inside, followed by a heavy thud. I yanked the portal open, catapulted over the threshold. Then I froze as I lamped the gorgeous LaMarre cupcake writhing on the floor. Her squirms reminded me of a gaffed eel on a hot rock. I knew she was a goner the instant I hung the focus on her glazing glims, her bluish-purple mush, her protruding tongue. A guy doesn’t have to be a doctor to recognize the symptoms of suffocation. The quail on the carpet was obviously passing to her reward; and not from natural causes, either.
He was born in 1896. Or maybe 1904. He died in 1968 but so did John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair not to mention Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, and who was going to notice? He was called Robert Leslie Bellem but if there was a cheque on offer he’d answer to Ellery Watson Calder, Harley L. Court, Walt Bruce, John Grange, Nelson Kent, Kenneth A. Nelson, Jerome Severs Perry and Harcourt Weems. He wrote a million words a year, around three thousand stories in all, plus maybe seventy comic book scripts and when all that was through he moved into TV. There were even a pair of novels, but what he did best was pulp. He wrote for something called Culture Publications that specialised in ‘spicy’ titles which, by mid-century standards meant sexy: Spicy Detective, Spicy Adventure, Spicy Western and Spicy Mystery. He had various series characters but the one the readers loved was Dan Turner. The private dick. Bellem launched Turner in Spicy Detective with ‘Murder By Proxy’ in 1934 and finished off with ‘Murder Wears Makeup’ sixteen years on. There was a lot of murder in the titles. That and ‘death’, ‘corpse’, killer’, and ‘bump-off’. Art it wasn’t. Turner moved on: in 1942 Bellem quit the Spicy stable and gave him a mag of his own: Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective. Then dropped the moniker and made it Hollywood Detective. They all sold.
It was such crime sheets, ranging from Black Mask (the first and best) to such as Double-Action Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and, inevitably, Spicy Detective, with dozens more on the newsies’ racks, that remain the most celebrated of the genre. Hammett started there, on Black Mask (which, at least for a while, was what H.L. Mencken edited when he wasn’t running The Smart Set or writing The American Language); Chandler too, and a whole bunch of others. But those two were the big boys and when they could they quit the pulps and started on novels and movies and as the best of breed were allowed to qualify as literature.
Most didn’t, and didn’t want to. Most hacks were more like Bellem, or Joe Archibald, who knocked out tales of his hen-pecked sad sack PI Willie Klump, the ‘Hawkeye Hawkshaw’ and bumbling ‘president of the Hawkeye Detective Agency’ (as well as the Dizzy Duo: ‘Snooty Piper and Scoop Binney, those two newshawk scalawags’and several others). If Bellem’s prose got unintentional laughs through its excess, Archibald played strictly for yuks. Either way he could knock it out week after week (after the pulps died he carried on with prototype YA titles: sports-themed books for boys and teens). You get the flavour from this ad for a bunch of ‘classic Willie Klump Tales’:
‘BIRD CAGEY: A Fowl in the Hand May Be Worth Two in the Hedge, But Willie Klump Goes After Two Jailbirds with One Grindstone! ALIBI BYE: When Lady Luck Knocks On Willie Klump’s Door, the Ingrate Detective Checks Up On Her Fingerprints. DOG COLLARED: When Willie Sees Red and Battles Saboteurs who Threaten the Navy Yard, He Wins the Fur-Lined Pooch for Sleuthing!’
Tongue well in cheek, puns aforethought: Archibald’s stories were much the same.
It was a publishers’ paradise. You could play one word a dozen ways and slap them each on a cover: All Detective, Crack Detective, Double-Action Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, Headquarters Detective, Lone Wolf Detective, Romantic Detective, Sure-Fire Detective, Ten Detective Aces, Thrilling Detective, Vice Squad Detective.
Between them they put together a new star: the hard-boiled dick. The eye. The shamus. The private operator. Superstars like Hammett’s Continental Op and Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and near-peers (but never quite near enough) like Flashgun Casey (from George Harmon Coxe) or Race Williams (from Carroll John Daley) and lesser players (in celebrity if not output) such as C.S. Montanye and Thomas Thursday. The public couldn’t get enough. Voyeurs really, reading the pulps, watching the movies: Public Enemy, White Heat, Scarface and the rest, usually products of the Warners Brothers lot. Guns, girls, glamour and what the mob, at least on pulp paper, would call geetus, which was money. Maybe not aspirational, like the slicks, but definitely day-dreams. The underworld, as ever, looked a lot sexier than the daily grind. One pulp title billed itself as Racket and Gangster Stories. No one bitched. The penny-a-liners just had to remember to toss in a moral ending.
Bellem took it to the limit. Slang in excelsis. Synonyms like a thesaurus. Tough guy: tough terminology. Looking back, maybe he was parodying the whole form. You weren’t an investigator but a private dick, pry, skulk or snoop. There were even hat-tips to culture: Hawkshaw and Sherlock. You met women, had women (none of Chandler’s squirming, euphemistic ‘erotic as a stallion’ for Dan: no limp-wristed gazooks, jessies or she-males – though confusingly a she-male can also be all-woman – invited to his spartan shebang). You called them chicks, cookies, cupcakes, cuties, dames, muffins, tomatoes and dishes, dolls, janes, numbers, patooties, tricks, twists, wrens, frails, tails and quails. As ever, when slang
meets women, the emphasis was on food or birds.
Linguistically at least, Bellem was a tit-man (though the term isn’t known before 1960): glims wide open he lamps a range of bonbons (‘voluptuous’), doo-dads (‘full, rounded’), tidbits (‘perkily mounded’), half-melons (‘heaving, panting, ripe’) and thingumabobs (‘jiggling like mounds of aspic in an earthquake’), but merely gams, pins or stems for legs (and he elaborates on none of them). Of course there was nothing extreme. Like what Turner called the galloping snapshots or tintypes even at the spicy end where the illustrations – with a regular nipple count and plenty of flesh: hot stuff for the period – were probably the sexiest aspect of the story, the pulps exerted their own self-censoring version of Hollywood’s Hays Code. S.J. Perelman, who penned scripts for the Marx Brothers and called his journalism feuilletons, wrote up Turner for the New Yorker. Bellem’s boy was ‘the apotheosis of all private detectives’ and Perelman paired (or as he put it ‘juxtaposed’) ‘the steely automatic’ with ‘the frilly pantie’. But while Turner might enjoy the occasional hook-up (long before today’s relaunch of the term), and a pair of cute stems or a flash of lingerie has him ga-ga, he always shut the door (or cut the narrative) right there.
This stuff jostled with much more respectable material on the news-stands so self-censorship ran through the text. Obscenity was out, so too blasphemy and even the milder oaths. Turner beats ‘the bejunior’ out of some luckless victim, ‘Pal . . .’ says another, ‘Pal, my elbow’ demurs our hero. Others fall ‘end’ or ‘neck over appetite’. Nonsense is ‘sheepdip’.
Other pleasures? The occasional cokey or hophead might hit the hype with a bit of nose candy but such were not Turner’s drugs of choice. Philip Marlowe was equally squeamish and like Marlowe and any other PI, Dan was a hard liquor man. You belted the bottle, bent the elbow, inhaled and irrigated. You downed jolts, slugs and snootfuls of giggle-juice or grog, jiggers of joy-water and jorums of skee (skee being whisky, a jorum was an eighteenth-century punch-bowl). Occasionally someone slipped you a mickey finn (from an 1890s Chicago bartender who supposedly picked up the recipe from voodoo operators in New Orleans). You got oiled, stinko, wacked, fried (to your hat, to the gills, to the tonsils), drunker than a fiddler’s bitch or so bottled you couldn’t hit the sidewalk with a handful of soybeans. Of course you smoked: coffin nails or wheezers which you never merely lit, but torched or fired..
Back at work it was all about the money, which was chips, fish, geetus, gravy, cabbage, greenery or salad, kopecks, marbles, pelf, iron men, spondulicks, moola and ducats. Guns were cannons, gats, rods or rodneys, peashooters, persuaders, roscoes and equalisers. Guns that fired slugs but mainly lead or lead pills and gave the unfortunate target lead poisoning or a lead supper. Guns that didn’t simply shoot, but burned, cracked, whopped, squibbed, coughed and yapped. And didn’t kill but beefed, biffed, blipped, bopped, belted, browned, bumped and butched and that was just the Bs. If you held back a little there was fisticuffs and you doled out knuckle medicine or knuckle tonic. The dead had croaked (murder was croakery) and cashed in their chips, unless they did it themselves, which was the Dutch act.
Off on another case you drove to the wigwam, igloo, tepee, stash or shebang in your go-cart, go-buggy, jitney, jalopy, heap, bucket, chariot, wheels, tub, kettle, hack, skate or sled. When the flatheads, gendarmes, harness bulls and slewfoots (Irish to a man) came in, late as ever and if you’d left the ginzos, grifters, bimbos, bozos, slobs, bohunks, apes, gorillas, slugs, tough boys, bruisers, muggs, strongarms and jibones alive, they took them off to the bastille, the gow, the slammer or the big house. (If not, they’d need the meat basket, which took the body to the morgue.) Later, when they got the juice, they’d cook in the smokehouse, astride the sizzle sofa.
If Bellem represents one extreme, he and his fellow-pulpsters had no monopoly. We are talking pulp, but paradoxically one of the great exploiters of gangland language never met that downmarket medium. Damon Runyon wrote strictly for the slicks.
In January 1934 W.J. Funk, of the dictionary publisher Funk and Wagnalls, offered his list of the ‘ten modern Americans who have done most to keep American jargon alive’. His candidates included Sime Silverman, editor of the ‘show business bible’ Variety, which boasted a lingo all of its own, the cartoonist ‘TAD’ (Theodore Aloysius) Dorgan, regularly credited with many more coinages than he actually achieved, mid-West humourist George Ade who wrote best-selling ‘Fables in Slang’, sports journo-turned-short story writer Ring Lardner, the Broadway showbiz columnist and one-time vaudeville hoofer Walter Winchell, and Winchell’s best buddy, another ex-sports-writer, Damon Runyon.
Runyon (1880–1946), in a phrase, is what happened when pulp hit the slicks. In terms of linguistic creativity and his influence on slang – as much in his popularisation as in his coinages – from the point of view of Black Mask or even Spicy Detective, Damon Runyon is the one that got away. By any standards – the big city backdrop, the low-life ‘Guys and Dolls’ who peopled his tales, the slang they gave them – he seemed a natural for the pulps. In the event they never crossed his mind.
Unlike his pal the gossip-monger Walter Winchell, who made a career from sucking up to the FBI’s paranoid, homophobic, cross-dressing, Red-baiting boss J. Edgar Hoover, Runyon, who arrived in New York in 1910 and was one of a number who would parlay sports journalism into something much more substantial, came at the low-life from a very different angle.
Winchell was a law and order groupie. Runyon seemed to sympathise with the gangsters and their molls. And if he made a career from fictionalising their antics, it was not as an amateur policeman, though he wrote up a number of major trials including that of Bruno Hauptmann, the Linbergh baby kidnapper, and of an old pal, Al Capone. And towards the end, unable to speak after treatment for throat cancer, he toured the night-time city alongside his friend Winchell, tracking down underworld action via Winchell’s police radio.
He was a big gambler and moved regularly in those less than legitimate circles. His best friend was Dutch Schultz’s accountant, Otto ‘Abbadabba’ Berman who died in 1935 in the same burst of machine-gun bullets as did his boss. Runyon put him into his stories as ‘Regret, the horse player’. He put Winchell in too, as the newspaper scribe ‘Waldo Winchester’.
The first story of what would be known as the ‘Guys and Dolls’ of Broadway appeared in 1929. The tale runs that Runyon, with his knowledge of gangland, was told to write about the assassination that year of ‘Mr Big’ Arnold Rothstein. He dried but turned for rescue to a fictional take, writing: ‘Only a rank sucker will think of taking two peeks at Dave the Dude’s doll, because while Dave may stand for the first peek, figuring it is a mistake, it is a sure thing he will get sored up at the second peek, and Dave the Dude is certainly not a man to have sored up at you.’ The New York American, the tabloid for which he wrote on baseball and boxing, bought the story for $800.
There would be eighty more and they would be published in high-selling and high-paying magazines like Cosmopolitan, Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post where you might also find such literary superstars as Hemingway or Scott Fitzgerald. They were printed, predictably, on slick stock. Runyon’s characters may have walked out of the hard-boiled section of the pulp magazines, but they would never be bracketed with even the best of them. Apart from the sheer quality of the writing, Runyon’s robbers and good-time girls were paradoxically soft-boiled. Hearts were invariably golden (even if the usual possessor of such an organ, the whore, was absent). Their creator claimed that his basic plot was that of the fairy-tale Cinderella. And although there is a good deal of violence and not a few murders, the stories do have a fairy-tale element. They are perhaps fables, although the reader has to work out the moral for themselves. The good may not always win, but the bad always get their deserts. There is sentiment in Runyon’s Broadway as well as sensation. Runyon celebrated the underworld, but his mobsters were strictly for those who bought the slicks. Like the middle-class readers who revelled in th
e canting terms that Dickens put into Oliver Twist, but tut-tutted over those who actually used them, Runyon’s readers found his stories as near real-life villainy as they wished to go. The middle classes wouldn’t read Black Mask, even when Hammett or Chandler were on the cover; they did take Cosmopolitan and the SEP.
Readers did not turn to Runyon for his plots, even if several of them became movies and one the regularly revived musical Guys and Dolls. Runyon was about language and while many observers swore that Runyon was making it up as he went along, it wasn’t so: the bulk of that language was well established, whether within the underworld or elsewhere. His works can be mined for over a thousand terms, and while there are occasions on which he tinkers, typically by adding suffixes (-eroo, -aroo, -ola, and -us), or tweaking an established slang term with a variant synonym (e.g. Francesca for fanny), Runyon’s slang is sound. Terms such as bim, collar, cut up old touches, duke, ear-ie, flogger, keister, moxie, potatoes, roscoe, scratch and yard were all established part of the speech-worlds in which he moved. Even the seemingly echt-Runyon ever-loving (usually applied, ironically or otherwise, to a wife) was two decades old. That didn’t disqualify him from originality: the old ackamarackus, walk-about money, an umbrella (a useless boxer who ‘folds up’) and zillionaire plus around 250 more were all his own work.
Bellem may have shared far more of his vocabulary with the rest of the pulp crew (for instance over 120 terms with Chandler) but there were places where he and Runyon overlapped. Deal them off the arm (to wait tables), behind the eight ball (in trouble), crush out (to escape), elly-bay (backslang for the stomach), lamster (an escapee), the shorts (poverty), sconce (the head), yard ($100) and maybe thirty more.
The Stories of Slang: Language at its most human Page 23