The facts are these: I have aimed at writing some old
fashioned pulp novels, albeit with a modern flavour. Sauce and sex have long
been a part of the pulp tradition, so it seemed natural to include them.
Perhaps it is worth pausing to ask what that tradition is...
Pulp refers to the cheap paper pulp that was used for
printing equally cheap fiction magazines that had their heyday in the first
half of the Twentieth Century. There were very many of these titles, covering a
full range of genres, such as western, mystery, horror, adventure, detective,
and romance. While some of the mainstream titles could be a little suggestive,
there were many with titles such as Spicy Detective, or Spicy Horror, which
were more overtly suggestive, featuring black and white illustrations that
often featured a little nudity - albeit, never full frontal, but still
favouring plenty of bosoms, bottoms, and long legs. If you hunt around, you can
find a number of these stories available on-line, though I’m not sure of their copyright
status. I have read a fair few of them now and have to say that some are very
good, with sharp prose littered with witty quips - though others are pedestrian
and clearly bashed out to fill empty pages. They can also be rather shocking,
bringing home just what the accepted attitudes were in our very recent past -
something worth remembering, as it is all too easy to forget how racist and
misogynistic we have been in the West. The media are naturally
self censoring - as society’s attitudes change, the media give us what our new
attitudes approve of and so we can end up with a sanitised view of the past.
While the pulps slowly vanished, their style of stories
continued in short ‘pulp’ novels - or novellas by today’s standards. These have
all but vanished in
print and to some extent this would seem to be
the result of changing economics in publishing in this country. Still, these
books continued into the early 1990’s.
Stylistically, what connects them is their brevity, fast
pace, cheap thrills, lowbrow entertainment, complete with all the action,
corruption, gore, and sex that their genres allowed. Not to mention their
covers! Long before the days of PhotoShop, these were all painted, colourful,
and frequently a bit saucy (irrespective of the story being so). One way or the
other, they were about titillation, if not always sexual.
So, that is what I’ve aimed for. Lowbrow, lightweight, fast
paced, and short, peppered with a measure of action, gore, and...just the one
sex scene. And that short scene was the hardest to write. Still, the question
is, should I have written it? Is it really an expectation of the genre that I
had committed myself to meeting? Does the expectation still exist? Or am I
missing the point by wondering that? Perhaps these books are about offering a
cheap banquet of thrills, with each course offering a little something that
won’t be to the taste of all but which is ok because the next course will be
something different. I suppose I shall just have to wait on reviews - book two
doesn’t have any sex, though there was one opportunity in the story, I felt it
would be a little too nasty for my taste, so I skipped that. There is also an
opportunity in book three for something between a couple of the main
characters, but its inclusion will rest upon the response I get with regards
the first two.
Perhaps what troubles me is not the sex per se, I’ve
nothing against sex in life or literature, but that of all of those obligatory
sex scenes that I remember reading in the old pulp horror novels of my youth,
was that none of them was very good. From Guy N. Smith (good grief, they were
bad!) through to James Herbert (predictable in every sense), they never really
managed to be all that erotic. In fact, of all the stories, the ones that
seemed to do best at titillating were some of the old pulp magazines where they
really did have to stop short of giving the details.
So, what didn’t work for me in those two authors I
mentioned? OK. Let’s start with Guy N Smith, if only because he’s such an easy
target. He has penned a huge number of pulp horror novels in his career,
sometimes having as many as five published in a single year, and which include
some pulpy classics such as The Crabs (a series of six books featuring giant
man eating crabs - really!) and The Sucking Pit. First of all there is the
clumsy prose and use of language reminiscent of an adolescent schoolboy -
that’s never going to work. Then there is the implausibility: people meet fall
in love, into bed, and are willing to sign away vast chunks of their estates
the next afternoon. I just don’t believe it. Of course, this is not to say that
the books were all bad - I did read a bunch of them, as did very many others -
but the sex didn’t work for me.
And what of James Herbert? While his early books fell into
that category of short genre pulp, he has earned a reputation for being
somewhat more literary and original - but the sex? Well, I’ve not read all of
his books but those I have tend to have an obligatory sex scene in roughly the
same point, you just know it’s coming (no pun intended). And it’s boring, each
scene seems to read the same as the last one you read - there’s not much spice
and there doesn’t even seem to be much of a build towards it. In short, a
couple have sex and I don’t care.
So, my current thinking is...if I am going to have sex in any of the books:
- There should be some build up - if only a little.
- It should be a little bit spicy, something interesting, perhaps even forbidden.
- If it can’t be spicy, then it needs to have a point, or the reader won’t care.
- It should not be too predictable.
- It should not dominate the story - it’s just one course in
the banquet!
And that is as far as my thinking on this matter has gone.
What remains for now is to canvas you, my readers and potential readers, for
your opinions: What do you think about sex in pulp? Is it something that you
want to read? Is it something you expect to read? And if it is, how far should
it go?
