At 04:51 PM 1/3/01, you wrote:
>I don't really agree that pulp writing is, in the main, (at least as I'm
>familiar with it) about mature conflict. Doc Savage, The Shadow, Op. 5,
>etc. are adults fighting adults but "mature conflict" seems too heady a way
>to describe them.
I don't mean necessarily adults fighting adults. I know that when I was
young I loved the Hardy Boys books. But by the time I hit fourteen or
fifteen they no longer interested me. They weren't solving murders, IIRC,
or really facing believable or credible life-threatening perils. Give a
guy a sword and send him charging into the midst of six armed guards and
the conflict is more mature than if a kid goes charging into a fake antique
store yelling, "Give me back my money!" That is an actual line from a
Hardy Boys book, but I don't remember much about the story.
Their fiction wasn't pulp fiction. It wasn't gritty and raw, the way pulp
can be.
I kept my love for mystery fiction for many years after I gave up on the
Hardy Boys, although I don't read it any more. I used to subscribe to a
mystery magazine which didn't really carry pulp mysteries. One story I
recall fairly vividly had a man telling his story to several
detectives. He had been robbed in a foreign country (apparently the Soviet
Union, but possibly one of its satellites). He couldn't understand why the
authorities let him go after insisting they would have to incarcerate him
for having no papers. It turned out his name and address were on a
prescription medicine bottle and the policeman interrogating him figured
out where he was staying from that. The detectives, of course, deduced
everything perfectly and the character was amazed (despite my bad retelling
of the story).
I describe the story as an example of the kind of "armchair sophistication"
that some mysteries try to achieve (or used to). The detectives can be
subtle and brilliant, and a child might not appreciate their cleverness,
but that's not "mature conflict".
I guess if you say the character walks into believable or credible
life-threatening peril where there is a good chance he should die, that is
mature conflict. Of course, we don't expect the character to die. That
is the essence of the action/adventure hero, even outside the pulp genre.
Gandalf dies, Aragorn doesn't.
>Also, don't sell "kids" books short. Robert Cormier, S.E. Hinton and Paul
>Zindel all wrote some kick-ass kid fiction. The Chocolate War is very
>MATURE stuff geared for 14 year olds. Arguably more mature than anything by
>Burroughs, Dent, REH, et. al. (And I LOVE Burroughs, Dent, and REH.)
Wouldn't dream of it, and ERB did write on two levels. His satire can go
right over the head of a young or inattentive (or uncaring) reader and the
story still works.
>I'm pretty sure pulp writer fans my age (43) became fans from reading
>paperback pulp reprints when they were teenagers. The Bantam Docs, the
>Lancer Conans, the Ballantine/ACE Burroughs, etc. So I don't think equating
>the HERO pulps (weird pulps, detective pulps could be exceptions) with youth
>is wrong.
I'm not convinced. A lot of people develop their reading habits during
their teenage years. Functionally illiterate people (I mean truly
functionally illiterate people) don't even read comic books by the time
they reach their twenties. And I don't mean to cast aspersions on the
comics. But I tutored people in reading and when you don't read you simply
don't read. Nonetheless, we don't see the deeper resonances in mature
stories until we have some life experience under our belts. I think a lot
of the pulps have those deeper resonances. The Hardy Boys books really
don't have them. I'm sure other books targeted specifically toward kids
similarly lack the deeper resonances. The life-threatening situations, or
how they are portrayed, are probably just one aspect of such distinctions.
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