Thomas Thursday

Last updated

Thomas Thursday (1894–1974) was a lesser-known pulp writer who had one of the longest careers writing for the pulp magazines. [1] His first published short story, "A Stroke of Genius," appeared in Top-Notch (April 1, 1918). He submitted the story to them after finding an old issue in the subway. He used the penname "Thursday" after glancing at a calendar. His real name remains a mystery. He was still appearing in the pulps in the late 1950s, after which the magazine format all but disappeared from the newsstands.

Thursday was primarily a humorist, one of the few in the pulps. He appeared regularly in Top-Notch through the mid-1920s, then transitioned to Argosy . Many of his story titles featured wordplay, e.g. "Illiterature" ( People's Favorite Magazine , April 10, 1919), "Young Mild West" ( Argosy All-Story Weekly , February 28, 1925), "Of Lice and Men" ( The Phantom Detective , September 1940). Many of his stories centered on circuses and sideshows. Thursday had worked for numerous circuses in his youth. Swindles and scams were a frequent theme.

During the early Depression, his career seemed to peter out for a few years. Likely, with the increasing specialization in pulp magazines, the market for general humor became too narrow. Thursday resurfaced in the mid-1930s, adding a number of other specialties to his repertoire. He wrote humorous sports stories for the growing sports pulp field; straightforward detective stories; and articles for the true-crime magazine market. The true-crime stories all concerned Miami, Florida cases, where he had relocated (from New York) in the late-1920s. He was never one of the prolific fictioneers, so it's likely he wrote on the side.

Throughout his career, Thursday frequently published articles in writers' magazines like Writer's Digest and The Author & Journalist . Though always amusing, these how-to articles took on an increasingly bitter tone, as Thursday became more and more disgusted with the hardships of the writing business, especially the collapse of word-rates after the onset of the Depression. He reserved his most severe wrath for the pulp magazine editors, who he dubbed "idiotors." [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Thursday published true-crime article into the late 1960s. He was a columnist for the Miami Police News until it folded in late 1967.

Related Research Articles

Pulp magazines were inexpensive fiction magazines that were published from 1896 until around 1955. The term "pulp" derives from the wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed, due to their cheap nature. 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. Pulps were the successors to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short-fiction magazines of the 19th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murray Leinster</span> American science fiction writer

Murray Leinster was a pen name of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American writer of genre fiction, particularly of science fiction. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mystery fiction</span> Fiction genre involving characters investigating and solving a mystery

Mystery is a fiction genre where the nature of an event, usually a murder or other crime, remains mysterious until the end of the story. Often within a closed circle of suspects, each suspect is usually provided with a credible motive and a reasonable opportunity for committing the crime. The central character is often a detective, who eventually solves the mystery by logical deduction from facts presented to the reader. Some mystery books are non-fiction. Mystery fiction can be detective stories in which the emphasis is on the puzzle or suspense element and its logical solution such as a whodunit. Mystery fiction can be contrasted with hardboiled detective stories, which focus on action and gritty realism.

<i>Black Mask</i> (magazine) Pulp magazine

Black Mask was a pulp magazine first published in April 1920 by the journalist H. L. Mencken and the drama critic George Jean Nathan. It is most well-known today for launching the hardboiled crime subgenre of mystery fiction, publishing now-classic works by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Erle Stanley Gardner, Cornell Woolrich, Paul Cain, Carroll John Daly, and others.

<i>Argosy</i> (magazine) American magazine

Argosy was an American magazine, founded in 1882 as The Golden Argosy, a children's weekly, edited by Frank Munsey and published by E. G. Rideout. Munsey took over as publisher when Rideout went bankrupt in 1883, and after many struggles made the magazine profitable. He shortened the title to The Argosy in 1888 and targeted an audience of men and boys with adventure stories. In 1894 he switched it to a monthly schedule and in 1896 he eliminated all non-fiction and started using cheap pulp paper, making it the first pulp magazine. Circulation had reached half a million by 1907, and remained strong until the 1930s. The name was changed to Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1920 after the magazine merged with All-Story Weekly, another Munsey pulp, and from 1929 it became just Argosy.

Walter Brown Gibson was an American writer and professional magician, best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow. Gibson, under the pen-name Maxwell Grant, wrote "more than 300 novel-length" Shadow stories, writing up to "10,000 words a day" to satisfy public demand during the character's golden age in the 1930s and 1940s. He authored several novels in the Biff Brewster juvenile series of the 1960s. He was married to Litzka R. Gibson, also a writer, and the couple lived in New York state.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">F. Orlin Tremaine</span>

Frederick Orlin Tremaine was an American science fiction magazine editor, most notably of the influential Astounding Stories. He edited a number of other magazines, headed several publishing companies, and sporadically wrote fiction.

Lawrence Louis Donovan was an American pulp fiction writer who wrote nine Doc Savage novels under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson, a pen name that was used by other writers of the same publishing house. However, there are nine Doc Savage novels duly credited to Donovan, published between November 1935 and July 1937.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joel Townsley Rogers</span> American writer, 1896–1984

Joel Townsley Rogers was an American writer who wrote science fiction, air-adventure, and mystery stories and a handful of mystery novels. He is best known for his murder mystery The Red Right Hand, which is considered a cult classic of the genre and won the French literary award Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in 1951.

Popular Publications was one of the largest publishers of pulp magazines during its existence, at one point publishing 42 different titles per month. Company titles included detective, adventure, romance, and Western fiction. They were also known for the several 'weird menace' titles. They also published several pulp hero or character pulps.

Henry James O'Brien Bedford-Jones was a Canadian-American historical, adventure fantasy, science fiction, crime and Western writer who became a naturalized United States citizen in 1908.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fulton Oursler</span> American dramatist

Charles Fulton Oursler Sr. was an American journalist, playwright, editor and writer. Writing as Anthony Abbot, he was an author of mysteries and detective fiction. His son was the journalist and author Will Oursler (1913–1985).

Anatole France Feldman (1901–1972) is primarily known as a pulp magazine writer from the late-1920s to the late-1930s. He specialized in gangland fiction, appearing primarily in Harold Hersey's gang pulps, Gangster Stories, Racketeer Stories, and Gangland Stories. He also appeared in the rival magazines, Gun Molls and The Underworld.

Margie Harris was a pulp writer from 1930 to 1939. She was one of the most popular authors in the short-lived gang pulp genre. 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, Racketeer Stories, and Gangland Stories. When Hersey sold off his assets, Harris continued to appear in the successor to Gangster Stories, Greater Gangster Stories.

Stephen Gould Fisher was an American author best known for his pulp stories, novels and screenplays. He is one of the few pulp authors to go on to enjoy success as both an author in "slick" magazines, such as the Saturday Evening Post, and as an in-demand writer in Hollywood.

Norbert Harrison Davis was an American crime fiction author.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Benjamin Allen (cartoonist)</span> American cartoonist (1903–1971)

Benjamin David "Stookie" Allen was a cartoonist who specialized in nonfiction and inspirational features. He created the nationally syndicated comic strips Heroes of Democracy and Keen Teens. For the pulps, he created and drew Argosy magazine's Men of Daring and Women of Daring, and Detective Fiction Weekly's Illustrated Crimes.

<i>Scientific Detective Monthly</i> US pulp science fiction magazine

Scientific Detective Monthly was a pulp magazine that published fifteen issues beginning in January 1930. It was launched by Hugo Gernsback as part of his second venture into science-fiction magazine publishing, and was intended to focus on detective and mystery stories with a scientific element. Many of the stories involved contemporary science without any imaginative elements—for example, a story in the first issue turned on the use of a bolometer to detect a black girl blushing—but there were also one or two science fiction stories in every issue.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of US science fiction and fantasy magazines to 1950</span> Science-fiction and fantasy magazine history

Science-fiction and fantasy magazines began to be published in the United States in the 1920s. Stories with science-fiction themes had been appearing for decades in pulp magazines such as Argosy, but there were no magazines that specialized in a single genre until 1915, when Street & Smith, one of the major pulp publishers, brought out Detective Story Magazine. The first magazine to focus solely on fantasy and horror was Weird Tales, which was launched in 1923, and established itself as the leading weird fiction magazine over the next two decades; writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard became regular contributors. In 1926 Weird Tales was joined by Amazing Stories, published by Hugo Gernsback; Amazing printed only science fiction, and no fantasy. Gernsback included a letter column in Amazing Stories, and this led to the creation of organized science-fiction fandom, as fans contacted each other using the addresses published with the letters. Gernsback wanted the fiction he printed to be scientifically accurate, and educational, as well as entertaining, but found it difficult to obtain stories that met his goals; he printed "The Moon Pool" by Abraham Merritt in 1927, despite it being completely unscientific. Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories in 1929, but quickly started several new magazines. Wonder Stories, one of Gernsback's titles, was edited by David Lasser, who worked to improve the quality of the fiction he received. Another early competitor was Astounding Stories of Super-Science, which appeared in 1930, edited by Harry Bates, but Bates printed only the most basic adventure stories with minimal scientific content, and little of the material from his era is now remembered.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tom Curry (writer)</span> American pulp fiction writer

Thomas Albert Curry (1900–1976), was a 20th-century American pulp fiction writer who began writing crime and detective stories but went on to become one of the more prolific western writers in the genre.

References

  1. ↑ "A Beezark From the Bozarks," by John Locke, Blood 'n' Thunder #12-#13.
  2. ↑ "Why I Write for Money," by Thomas Thursday, Writer's Digest , May 1921.
  3. ↑ "To Hell With the Pulps," by Thomas Thursday, Writer's Digest , May 1939.
  4. ↑ "Humor Is Supposed To Be Funny," by Thomas Thursday, The Author & Journalist , October 1943.
  5. ↑ "Wild Editors I Have Known," by Thomas Thursday, The Author & Journalist , August 1952.
  6. ↑ "The Pulps--May They Rest in Peace," by Thomas Thursday, Report to Writers , October 1952.
  7. ↑ "45 Years a Freelancer," by Thomas Thursday, Writer's Digest , August 1956.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.