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Hot ’N’ Spicy
The gaudy pulp mags of yore delivered the goods: brisk action, slam-bam violence and gobs of sex!
You think the “good old days” were sedate and prissy? Guess again. Sex and violence have always been a dynamite combo, and never more so than in Spicy Detective Stories, one of the standouts in the heyday of pulp magazines. Nicknamed for their cheap, coarse paper, pulp magazines were everywhere from the 1920s through the mid-1950s. Each title focused on a particular exploitive genre: crime, supernatural horror, futuristic sci-fi, cowboys or foreign adventure.
In the 1930s, Culture Publications produced the Spicy line of pulps, including Spicy Adventure, Spicy Mystery and Spicy Detective Stories, which premiered in April 1934. Although most contributors were just fasttyping hacks working for a penny per word, a few notable scribes got their literary start in the pulps: Tarzan mastermind Edgar Rice Burroughs, fantasist Ray Bradbury, horror master H.P. Lovecraft, Conan creator Robert E. Howard and tough-guy writer Mickey Spillane. Packed with crime and violence, Spicy Detective Stories wasn’t great literature, but for 25 cents the lucky reader got a monthly dose of two-fisted heroes, scantily clad virginal damsels in distress and gorilla-size goons, all dodging bullets, torture and mayhem on every page.
But prudes and Uncle Sam would eventually spell trouble. Once President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Frank Walker as Postmaster General in 1940, the Feds turned on the heat. A conservative Catholic, Walker revoked the second- class mailing privileges of more than 60 publications he deemed offensive, including dozens of pulps and even Esquire. Without this discounted postage, publishers saw virtually no profit on subscription sales. Additionally, during the war years, the military’s post exchanges (PXs) were forbidden to carry these “obscene” magazines. This further eroded the ability of a dame-hungry reader to get his mitts on a new monthly dose of sex and adventure. Undaunted, Culture Publications changed the name of Spicy Detective Stories to the more-sedate Speed Detective in 1943. The front-cover nudity was toned down—slightly— although bondage and peril remained. Regardless of the title, the mag’s covers still outsexed the stories themselves, with an abundance of undraped babes, blazing gats and threats of fate worse than death. The pulps thrived during the ’40s alongside the growing comic book market, but the end of the glory days was within sight. Men’s magazines like True and Stag filled the male hunger for action stories; paperback novels provided even more competition for the consumer dollar; television offered entertainment for free. Speed Detective Stories né Spicy Detective bit the dust in 1947, and by the mid-1950s the classic “pulpzine” expired.
The pulps weren’t “respectable.” Nevertheless, movies and TV drew a great amount of plot material from them, and their lurid covers continue to inspire comic book artists and poster designers even now. Put on your slouch hat and trench coat and cast your peepers over this collection of unforgettable covers.
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