Foes of the North, by prolific pulpeteer William Merriam Rouse, combines fast action writing, an isolated setting, and a shoestring plot. It’s a terrific example of the form.
Foes of the North
🔪🔪🔪🔪🔪
By William Merriam Rouse
4,500 Words.
Thrilling Advenures, May, 1937.
William Merriam Rouse was a pulp writer whose works appeared in Argosy, Astounding Stories of Super-Science, Popular Detective, and All-Story Weekly. Thrilling Adventures published Foes of the North in 1937, the year of Rouse’s death at age 53.
His step-daughter, Miriam DuBois Babcock, wrote this of him:
He was a prolific freelance author in the heyday of the pulp magazine era. He wrote hundreds of short stories, novelettes, serials of adventure, mystery, comedy, detective, romance and horror as well as his favorite colonial and Quebec…
Johnston McCulley, creator of “Zorro,” never quit writing pulp—even 30 years after finding success. Rot Gut Pulp brings you this review of a minor work we still love.
The Marshal of Tadpole Gulch
⭐⭐⭐⭐
By Johnston McCulley
5000 Words.
Range Riders Western, September, 1948
Writer Johnston McCulley, who died in 1958 at age 75, had an oeuvre of hundreds of short stories and screenplays. His most famous character was Zorro, whom he invented and wrote almost thirty years before The Marshal of Tadpole Gulch appeared in Range Riders Western.
Why would a successful author with nearly a dozen series to his name write a middling 5,000-word short story pulp at age 65? Because fast writing meant fast money that was there for the taking. …
Rot Gut Pulp
A high-end outfit publishing neo-pulp e-rags from a Potemkin village in Ha Long Bay. Rot Gut Pulp: Entertainment, not Genius.™
