If you get excited by "Indonesian wüxia pulps of the 1920s and 1930s"...

October 7, 2021 11:18 AM

You may have heard of Doc Savage, Sexton Blade or Arsene Lupin, but how many other pulp characters do you know from Jess Nevins' Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes, an attempt to document pulp series and heroes from over fifty countries, published between 1902 and 1945. Caution: some of these stories could be very racist indeed.
posted by MartinWisse (11 comments total)

I read some Bulldog Drummond novels back in the 80s, and he can’t go more than a paragraph without tossing out an offensive epithet. It’s like the author was paid by the slur.

I was sad that the entry on The Spider (II) didn’t call out his critical characteristic as a crime fighter. You know how Batman’s crusade is driven by the desire to never have another child go through what he did? The Spider just really hates criminals. I used to imagine the author typing away in a boarding house, stripped to the waist and bathed in sweat, pounding that hate into the page in a venomous fugue.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:44 AM on October 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

Fans of This Sort of Thing may be interested in the metafictional theory of the Wold Newton Universe, which posits that classic pulp fiction figures - from Tarzan to Sherlock Holmes, Doc Savage, Sam Spade, and The Shadow - all share a common ancestry dating back to a Strange Meteor in the 1790s that affected the bloodline.
posted by bartleby at 12:23 PM on October 7, 2021 [4 favorites]

What an amazing trove - will be fun to explore some of these characters. Thank you!
posted by davidmsc at 1:22 PM on October 7, 2021

This is pretty cool, a mix of characters I remember fondly, ones I never really knew and many I have no desire to know about after reading their entries.

I am, of course, consumed with strong desire to talk, not about the cool stuff, but about what belongs in the category "pulp" even under its broader definition. What is wrong with me?!

Thanks for posting. :)
posted by mark k at 3:27 PM on October 7, 2021

I did find it odd to come across Jeeves in the database.
posted by goatdog at 4:21 PM on October 7, 2021 [1 favorite]

I see your Jeeves and raise you Pola Negri.
posted by BWA at 5:04 PM on October 7, 2021 [2 favorites]

Nice to see I. V. Frost a grim, and somewhat misogynist, super-scientist.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:22 PM on October 7, 2021

Sexton Blade, the Great Samurai Detective would have made an awesome, if problematic, pulp hero.
posted by Hartster at 4:32 AM on October 8, 2021

I see your Jeeves and raise you Pola Negri.

Not exactly the kind of pulp the link has, but there used to be a niche genre of books where a Hollywood star was the main character living out some fictional adventures. I have one with John Payne as the main character, and wish I'd purchased this Deanna Durbin one too.

Those were along the same lines as the books about TV characters in offscreen adventures, like The Partridge Family among many others, which of course was carried on with Star Wars/Star Trek novels and the like. When I was a kid I thought the TV character books were pretty neat, much more dramatic than the shows.
posted by gusottertrout at 5:40 AM on October 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

I recently read a collection of very early Sexton Blake stories, the ones that are more like two minute mysteries than the later (and much, much better) pulp adventures with M. Zenith and all that.

They were mostly cozy if classist, apart from one about a dead baby, which includes a description of Blake casually taking its temperature in front of the grieving father. It was a realllllllll tonal shift.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 7:44 AM on October 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

The pulp genre is one of my favorites, even with the significant content challenges to the modern reader.

I was fortunate to have joined an RPG gaming group in the late 1980s playing Crimefighters. The gamemaster was very thoughtful and considerate toward players, and he created and ran several campaigns over a fifteen-year period.

As the campaigns progressed, he incorporated more and more established pulp characters and early 20th-Century history; his research documentation was where I first learned about the Tulsa race massacre. The campaigns were a heady mix of real-world events, fantastic legends and historical figures from many global cultures.

It's just so much fun to create and play out adventures in this world; we played sessions entitled "Flaming Gold of Opar," "The Head In Miss Worley's Garden," "The Secret of the Pale Necromancer" or "The Mystery of the Phantom Floor of Empire State."

The gaming sessions evolved to include miniatures and amazing diorama settings, including many of Bob Murch's finely-crafted Pulp Figures.

I'm really grateful for the many hours of enjoyment I derived from actively participating in these adventures. I have 300MB of scanned hard-copy character sheets, adventure outlines and funny game quotes on my desktop right now.
posted by JDC8 at 2:06 PM on October 8, 2021 [1 favorite]