Many people who wouldn’t be caught dead with a pulp magazine still insist that they know what the quality of pulp fiction was, and it wasn’t high. The fact is that the vast majority of pulp fiction was like the majority of any kind of fiction: mediocre.
But much of that was more mediocre than usual, and Saucy Movie Tales – nestled comfortably under the counter between the hardcore girlie mags and mostly innocuous junk like Breezy Stories – was saved from the scrapheap of faded nostalgia by its cover art, much of which was supplied by the great Norman Saunders. The cover of its Sept. 1936 reprint is pretty extreme; the emphasis in the art was on the same thing it was in the text: breasts.
The stories in this issue all deal with some aspect of show business – but not always movies, despite the name of the magazine – as well as seduction of innocent young women by power-wielding men and rape.
Some of the tales are comic-saucy, as is the one in which a Broadway star has to prove she’s been vaccinated before she can cross the border from Canada back to New York; some are mystery-saucy – series character John “Satan” Devlin, cameraman and studio troubleshooter, solves the mystery of an agent’s death; and a couple of them are just pure melodrama.
In one of these, a blacklisted actress attempts to shoot her director because he seduced and abandoned her, only to be seduced and then abandoned by him again. In another, a chorus girl is expected to advance her career by way of the casting couch, but her native goodness saves a bad man and they live happily ever after.
My favorite story has the almost-clever title “Vampires Don’t Neck,” and deals with a recently deceased guy who returns as a vampire and attempts to attack his own niece. She is rescued by a Hollywood private detective in this weak weird-menace yarn.
None of the stories are by recognizable pulp authors, at least not writing under their own names or usual pseudonyms. I suspect that guys bought Saucy Movie Tales for the cover art alone, and if women bought it, it was to reaffirm that Hollywood was a place of sin. These stories contain more firm breasts, slim hips and luscious legs – with the occasional shapely buttock tossed in for padding – than an upscale burlesque show.
Pulp enthusiasts should give it a try, and it’s a must for Saunders collectors, but the mildly curious can skip it. You have to be a hopeless pulpista to get much out of this one. –Doug Bentin
Related posts:
- Spicy Mystery Stories: Feb. 1936
- My Lolita Complex and Other Tales of Sex and Violence
- Lester Dent’s Zeppelin Tales
- Different Kinds of Dead and Other Tales
- Retro Pulp Tales
