Essay

Red Meat, Red Blood and Pure Americana

The American patois of the twentieth century was born in the pulps. More specifically, the common language was born in pulp magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective Magazine. There, in between flimsy, pulp wood paper advertisements for correspondence courses and vril-inducing pills, hardboiled detectives like Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op or Frederick Nebel’s Cardigan duked it out with gangsters and gun molls, all the while keeping as cool as can be with endless glasses of hard liquor.