Vigilante Crime and Pulp

Our rotund raconteur accepted a $50 cash bribe from shady new pulp fiction author Frank Kidd (Once Upon A Time in Argentina) to read bestselling chick thriller Brain Damage by Freida McFadden aka Dr. Sara Cohen. Hear all about it! Come for the sadistic voyeurism, stay for the misogyny, misandry, and money-grab!

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Philip “Big Philly” Smith took time away from talking smack about bad books to deeply diving into good books about smack! It’s 1952 and New York native Salvatore Lombino is a 26-year-old short story stud in the nadir of the pulp fiction magazine market. So what does he do? He legally changes his name to Evan Hunter and publishes his first crime novel, The Evil Sleep! from Falcon Books. Eventually, it was reissued as So Nude, So Dead (2015) by Ed McBain thanks to Charles Ardai and his temple to mid-century classics, Hard Case Crime. Listen now to learn how McBain’s debut transcended its modest prose and window dressing thanks the author’s eagle eye for targeting popular subgenre expectations to subvert. So Nude, So Dead is heroin, hoes, and prose—all a pulp writer knows.

Other books mentioned in this episode:

The Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter

Roots Down to Hell by Matthew Louis

The Wrong Man by Matthew Louis

Frenzy by Jonathan Craig - Not specifically mentioned, but this is the other junkie amateur sleuth novel I was referring to.

As promised in the episode, here is a picture of a street from my neighborhood.

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For over 30 years John M. Floyd, a writer you’ve never heard of, has published over 1,000 short stories—mostly in crime fiction—in over 600 publications. Here we analyze his career and extrapolate effective craft and process rules. Further, Big Philly recalls his correspondence with Mr. Floyd and shares some insider tips on how to up your short fiction game. You can find Mr. Floyd’s short story collections for purchase HERE.

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Philip “Big Philly” Smith reflects on the potential deleterious effects of entering his adolescence at the exact moment Kurt Cobain and his ilk commandeered the culture. The ethos of Nirvana was toxic garbage that destroyed rock music forever—rock is dead.

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Megan Abbott is the Gen X queenpin of literary noir crime fiction, and not enough appreciative readers know it. Abbott writes smoldering, classic noir New York suits foolishly package as everything from YA adjacent high school angst to wine-soaked mom drama.

BUY THE BOOK: Queenpin by Megan Abbott

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In this installment of the gonzo off-week podcast, host Philip “Big Philly” Smith shoots the manure about classic literary stories that entertain nearly as well as genre fiction… plus he confesses to a forbidden guilty pleasure.

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A discussion of Raymond Chandler’s sweeping essay on crime fiction, The Simple Art of Murder (1944). How do the master’s ideas apply today? Chandler argued, among several other things, sanitized murder mysteries are lame, good formulaic fiction is hard to write, and detectives should be the moral centers of their stories.

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Philip M. Smith is the name on his sub-500 credit report, but the real ones know him as Big Philly. The home offices of Vigilante Crime and Pulp, in consultation with Philly’s psychiatric care team, authorized a new series of bonus episodes where America’s favorite blue collar scholar goes hog wild on random topics between main episodes. This week: the trauma of a violent Christmas vacation murder is softened by the literary condom of a cute dog and gorgeous Alpine locale.

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Horace McCoy is now best known for his depression era classic They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (1935) and its 1960s film adaptation starring Jane Fonda. But Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1948) is a shocking cocktail of brutal violence, loose sex, and corrupt elites. Author and Editor Philip M. Smith (“Big Philly”) discusses the novel’s place as foreshadowing of the literary darkness to follow in the form of one Jim Thompson.

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