Sunday e-mail 8th June: The cover image

Pulp fiction; art; crime; Conan the Barbarian; social stereotypes

I bet most people don’t really like pulp fiction. Not really. They say they do – hell, I say I do – but be honest – if you’re stuck on a long-distance flight wouldn’t you rather have Milan Kundera for company than Mickey Spillane? Kundera will keep you entertained, thinking Interesting Thoughts. Mickey Spillane won’t. You might imagine he would but take it from me - by the time Mike Hammer rescues his eleventh dishevelled blonde from his eleventh blue-chinned gangster and the entire cast has once again told him how great he is, you’ll start feeling all, well, digestive about it. There’s not much to get your teeth into. Not much to chew over. It’s all a bit hard to swallow.

Why do we (and when I say ‘we’, obviously I mean ‘I’) keep getting drawn back to this flimsy genre? I blame the cover art. The pictures below show a few pulp fiction titles I happen to have handy. Here’s what strikes me. With one exception (the John Godey book - who drew that anyway??), in every case the standard of the art on the cover exceeds that of the writing inside.

Even John D Macdonald – and I bow to no one in my admiration – struggles to live up to the painting his publishers have cursed him with.

Have you heard that common phrase, ‘talent is cheap’? It means there’s a lot of it about: cast a net down the high street and you’ll catch half a dozen talents straight away. Is graphic talent, then, simply cheaper than writing talent? Is there more of it about? Much as we Substackers might like to believe that, we have to wonder.

Know who used to illustrate Tarzan of the Apes in the dailies? Burne Hogarth, that’s who (it’s how he got famous). Burne Hogarth, called the ‘Michelangelo of the comics’. No one ever called Edgar Rice Burroughs the ‘Shakespeare of the pulps’. Sadly, I can find no copyright-free images for you, but you know what? Frank Frazetta did a few covers…

Speaking of Frank Frazetta… Know what I picked up the other week? Conan the Barbarian (I mean, one of the books, not Conan the Barbarian himself). No, I didn’t expect it to be any good (of course I didn’t). In fact, I was confident that big disappointments were on their way. But…but…there was no avoiding that Frank Frazetta artwork. And so I found myself trudging through adventure after boring barbarian adventure.

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Frank Frazetta was a far better painter than Robert E Howard was a writer. Howard was capable of writing about a woman, sunning herself on a ship’s deck in the exact middle of the ocean, glancing up to see a waterlogged barbarian climbing on board and asking, ‘Whence do you come?’ I mean, whence? Whence? You or I would be terrified. You’d think the woman would dash off to find the crew, screaming about some weird man-shaped sea-monster. But not her. She says Whence. Perhaps she thinks grammar will frighten Conan off. In Cimmeria, maybe.

That was my first exposure to ‘real’ Conan, by the way. Previously, I’d only ever read the Marvel Comics adaptations. And I read them only because of John Buscema’s artwork. The actual stories were all identical. The only way to tell them apart was that in some of them, Conan wore a hat.

I wish I could finish by writing this: ‘You can visit the Frank Frazetta Museum any time you like, but if there’s a Robert E Howard Museum, no one’s told me about it’. But I can’t. Turns out there is a Robert E Howard Museum. Drop in next time you’re passing through Cross Plains, Texas. I’m sorry to say I shan’t see you there. I’ll be in Stroudsburg PA, at the Frank Frazetta Museum.

The question you are doubtless asking yourself right now is, ‘When’s Jason going to use the phrase Judge a book by its cover?’ Let me answer with another question: Can you wait a couple of weeks? I’m hoping to publish something about social stereotypes. I have some big thoughts on the subject.

Meanwhile, Wednesday’s newsletter will be all about fiction. Good crime fiction, I mean. There will be clue-puzzles, there will be hard boiled, there will be costumed crime-fighters. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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