Speaking Volumes
Pulp Paperbacks in Conversation
My sister (a literary translator who’s been nominated for and is winning all sorts of awards these days) and I used to enjoy sorting through my substantial collection of paperbacks and find groupings that amused us. For a while we imaged we’d put together a book of them. That was almost twenty years ago. I found a few of these other day and it seemed like time to air them out.
This pairing always reminds me of a joke I remember hearing when I was so young I didn’t know what the words in the joke meant (which is surely why it stuck in my head): “Masochist says to sadist, ‘Whip me!’ Sadist says to masochist, ‘No!’”
Some of these imply larger stories, others just have a rhythmic quality that suggests a completed poem. Even the author’s names contribute weird energy to this grouping. Mooney and Wormser.
There are more of these “artists and models” pulps, but these three made a good cross-section. The Procurer seems like she could be an X-rated supervillainess. “I felt a shudder as she brushed me.”
Long before the woman in the window and the train and so forth, there was the girl.
Some hadn’t organized themselves into sequences of titles, but made thematic clusters.
Others seemed completely aware of each other.
It makes sense eventually.
These are personal for me.
Then there was the all-time winner. If we’d had ten or fifteen as good as this, we’d have had to do the book.
