Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 to the late 1950s. The term "pulp" derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. In contrast, magazines printed on higher-quality paper were called "glossies" or "slicks". The typical pulp magazine had 128 pages; it was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, and 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, with ragged, untrimmed edges.
Crime fiction, detective story, murder mystery, mystery novel, and police novel are terms used to describe narratives that centre on criminal acts and especially on the investigation, either by an amateur or a professional detective, of a serious crime, generally a murder. It is usually distinguished from mainstream fiction and other genres such as historical fiction or science fiction, but the boundaries are indistinct. Crime fiction has multiple subgenres, including detective fiction, courtroom drama, hard-boiled fiction, and legal thrillers. Most crime drama focuses on crime investigation and does not feature the courtroom. Suspense and mystery are key elements that are nearly ubiquitous to the genre.
Kim James Newman is an English journalist, film critic and fiction writer. Recurring interests visible in his work include film history and horror fiction—both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's Dracula at the age of eleven—and alternative fictional versions of history. He has won the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and the BSFA award.
Philip Marlowe is a fictional character created by Raymond Chandler, and exemplifying the hardboiled crime fiction genre. Marlowe first appeared under that name in The Big Sleep, published in 1939. Chandler's early short stories, published in pulp magazines such as Black Mask and Dime Detective, featured similar characters with names like "Carmady" and "John Dalmas" starting in 1933.
Robert Sheckley was an American writer. First published in the science-fiction magazines of the 1950s, his numerous quick-witted stories and novels were famously unpredictable, absurdist, and broadly comical.
David Rowland Langford is a British author, editor, and critic, largely active within the science fiction field. He publishes the science fiction fanzine and newsletter Ansible, and holds the all-time record for most Hugo Awards, with a total of 29 wins.
Kate Wilhelm was an American author. She wrote novels and stories in the science fiction, mystery, and suspense genres, including the Hugo Award–winning Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang. Wilhelm established the Clarion Workshop along with her husband Damon Knight and writer Robin Scott Wilson.
Thomas Ligotti is a contemporary American horror writer. His writings are rooted in several literary genres – most prominently weird fiction – and have been described by critics as works of philosophical horror, often formed into short stories and novellas in the tradition of gothic fiction. The worldview espoused by Ligotti in his fiction and non-fiction is pessimistic and nihilistic. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction."
Hugh Barnett Cave was an American writer of various genres, perhaps best remembered for his works of horror, weird menace and science fiction. Cave was one of the most prolific contributors to pulp magazines of the 1920s and '30s, selling an estimated 800 stories not only in the aforementioned genres but also in western, fantasy, adventure, crime, romance and non-fiction. He used a variety of pen names, notably Justin Case under which name he created the antihero The Eel. A war correspondent during World War II, Cave afterwards settled in Jamaica where he owned and managed a coffee plantation and continued his writing career, now specializing in novels as well as fiction and non-fiction sales to mainstream magazines.
Karl Edward Wagner was an American writer, poet, editor, and publisher of horror, science fiction, and heroic fantasy, who was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and originally trained as a psychiatrist. He wrote numerous dark fantasy and horror stories. As an editor, he created a three-volume set of Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian fiction restored to its original form as written, and edited the long-running and genre-defining The Year's Best Horror Stories series for DAW Books. His Carcosa publishing company issued four volumes of the best stories by some of the major authors of the so-called Golden Age pulp magazines. He is possibly best known for his creation of a series of stories featuring the character Kane, the Mystic Swordsman.
Richard Allen Lupoff was an American science-fiction and mystery author, who also wrote humor, satire, nonfiction and reviews. In addition to his two dozen novels and more than 40 short stories, he also edited science-fantasy anthologies. He was an expert on the writing of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and had an equally strong interest in H. P. Lovecraft. He also co-edited the non-fiction anthology All in Color For a Dime, which has been described as "the very first published volume dedicated to comic book criticism"; as well as its sequel, The Comic-Book Book.
Peter Schuyler Miller was an American science fiction writer and critic.
Robert Edward Weinberg was an American author, editor, publisher, and collector of science fiction. His work spans several genres including non-fiction, science fiction, horror, and comic books.
William Murray is an American novelist, journalist, short story, and comic book writer. Much of his fiction has been published under pseudonyms. With artist Steve Ditko, he co-created the superhero Squirrel Girl.
Michael Raymond Donald Ashley is a British bibliographer, author and editor of science fiction, mystery, and fantasy.
Fedogan & Bremer is a weird fiction specialty publishing house founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1985 by Philip Rahman and Dennis Weiler. The name comes from the nicknames of the two founders when they were in college.
Death Stalks the Night is a collection of fantasy and horror and Mystery short stories by author Hugh B. Cave. It was originally to have been the fifth volume published by Carcosa, the North Carolina joint publishing venture founded by Karl Edward Wagner, Jim Groce and David Drake. However, Lee Brown Coye, who was completing the illustrations for the volume, died, stalling its publication by Carcosa.
The Door Below is a collection of fantasy and horror and mystery short stories by author Hugh B. Cave. It was released in 1997 by Fedogan & Bremer in an edition of 1,100 copies, of which 100 were signed by the author. Many of the stories originally appeared in the magazines Horror Stories, Spicy Mystery Stories, Detective Fiction Weekly, Terror Tales, Fantasy Tales, Whispers, Crypt of Cthulhu, Shudder Stories, Borderland, Phantasm and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.
Frost is a collection of mystery stories by author Donald Wandrei. It was released in 2000 by F & B Mystery in an edition of 1,100 copies of which 100 were signed by the editor and artist and released in a slipcase with Wandrei's Three Mysteries. The stories features Wandrei's scientist detective I. V. Frost and originally appeared in the magazine Clues Detective. It collects the first 8 stories, with the final 10 planned for a subsequent volume. This never appeared. Haffner Press has put out a complete collection of I.V. Frost (2020).
Murgunstrumm and Others is a collection of horror short stories by author Hugh B. Cave. It was released in 1977 by Carcosa in an edition of 2,578 copies of which the 597 copies, that were pre-ordered, were signed by the author and artist. Many of the stories originally appeared in the magazines Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, Weird Tales, Spicy Mystery Stories, Ghost Stories, Thrilling Mysteries, Black Book Detective Magazine, Argosy, Adventure, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Whispers. It has since been reissued by Wildside Press in trade paperback and hardcover.
