Margie Harris (birth and death dates unknown) was a pulp writer from 1930 to 1939. She was one of the most popular authors in the short-lived gang pulp genre. [1] Even in an era of hardboiled crime fiction, her stories were unusually hard-edged and bitter. Her best work includes ingenious plotting, remorselessly violent characters, and colorful underworld argot. Most of her early stories appeared in the Harold Hersey-published pulp magazines Gangster Stories , Mobs , Prison Stories , [2] Racketeer Stories , and Gangland Stories . When Hersey sold off his assets, Harris continued to appear in the successor to Gangster Stories , Greater Gangster Stories .
After the collapse of the gang pulps in 1934, Harris diversified into a variety of crime pulps, The Phantom Detective , Thrilling Detective , Super-Detective Stories , Popular Detective , etc. When the gang genre was temporarily revived in the late 1930s in the pulps, Double-Action Gang Magazine and Ten Story Gang , Harris was a frequent contributor. Her published output includes fewer than a hundred known stories, low for a pulp writer, but many of them were novelettes or short novels.
Little is known of Harris' background. It is believed that "Margie Harris" is a pseudonym. The only biographical information comes from a jocular letter published in Gangster Stories . She claimed to have been a newspaper reporter; and many of her stories featured reporters and references to newspapers. From the cases she covered, she would have been in the Bay Area from approximately 1900-1915 and in Chicago from 1915-1930 (these ranges are very speculative). Criminals she knew in the Bay Area include Ed Morrell, the so-called Dungeon Man of San Quentin, and his neighbor in the solitary confinement cells, Jacob "Tiger Man" Oppenheimer. [3] In Chicago, she was acquainted with the big-time mobster Big Jim Colosimo. Given her background, a birthdate around 1880 is plausible, which would have made her about 50 when her fiction career began in 1930. [4]
Harris's last known whereabouts were in Texas. She appears to have lived in Texas during the entirety of her pulp-writing career. She wrote a number of true crime articles set in Houston and its vicinity for American Detective , which was published by the same company as Greater Gangster Stories . [5]