Craft · Nonfiction · Restored text
Pulp Fiction
Techniques of a pulp-era master.
Also available as an ebook. Audiobook coming soon, narrated by David Sparks.
Robert Turner (1915 to 1980) sold more than five hundred stories and wrote something close to fifty million words for the detective, western, and romance pulps, then for television. In 1948, working from the trenches of magazines like Manhunt, Dime Detective, and Thrilling Detective, he wrote a short, blunt manual on how to do it for a living.
The booklet was printed on cheap pulp stock and all but vanished. A book scout turned up a crumbling copy in a used bookstore in the late 1990s, and it has circulated among pulp collectors as a kind of ghost ever since. This Legacy Edition restores the full text with period magazine cover art.
Turner's subjects are the ones that still matter: building real people instead of stock characters, plotting for momentum, the business side of selling words, and the nerve to write fearlessly instead of by formula. He is funny about all of it. For writers, it is a working manual. For readers of the era, it is a look over a pulp writer's shoulder.
