The weird tales, spicy detectives, and startling stories of Irish-America: Irish characters in American pulp magazines

Abstract

The pulp magazines that dominated early twentieth-century American popular culture helped shape popular understandings of Irish-American identity. Several notable types of pulp hero (cowboy, detective, G-Man, masked hero) were defined in part by Irish stereotypes and counter-stereotypes. They played upon notions of the Irish as figures straddling the border between civilisation and savagery to evoke an image of a new kind of American who was well equipped for the rapidly changing and chaotic American century. Irish-American pulp stories often lack explicitly Irish cultural or historical references and instead focus on describing Irishness as a more generic Americanness. Similarly, the Irish-American character moved further from ethnic stereotype to become a generic masculine ideal. In several ways, the pulp magazines chronicle the formation of an assimilated Irish identity in the USA.

Keywords::

• pulp magazines
• pulps
• Irish-America
• stereotype
• masculinity
• assimilation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Dime novels and story papers (sometimes called “penny dreadfuls”) were serialised publication formats popular in the nineteenth century that largely died out by the early twentieth century. They were very inexpensive and featured what was generally considered crude writing about sensational or lurid subjects.

^2.Mulford, “Fight at Buckskin,” 261.

^3. Ibid., 263–5.

^4. Ibid., 267.

^5. Ibid.

^6. Max Brand was the most popular pen name of Frederick Schiller Faust. “Horizon of Danger” was originally published under another pen name: Peter Henry Morland. This serial was later collected and published as a novel, The Rescue of Broken Arrow, in 1948 under another pen name: Evan Evans.

^7.Evans, Rescue of Broken Arrow, 3.

^8. Ibid., 7.

^9. See Dowd, Construction of Irish Identity, which considers this motif in relation to characters such as Huckleberry Finn, Theron Ware, and McTeague.

^10.Evans, Rescue of Broken Arrow, 70.

^11. Ibid., 243.

^12.Daly, Snarl of the Beast, 1.

^13. Ibid., 75, 84.

^14.Hutchison, “The G-Man Years,” 9.

^15. Ibid., 10.

^16. Ibid.

^17. Ibid., 8.

^18. Ibid., 10.

^19. The Green Ghost, created by Johnston McCulley, appeared in Thrilling Detective. He is an Irish cop who loses his badge and dons a green hood and gloves to continue to fight crime. The Black Bat, the cape- and cowl-wearing alter ego of a wealthy Irish-American bachelor, was created by G. Wayan Jones in Black Book Detective and was one of the major inspirations for DC Comics' Batman.

^20.Rousseau, Super-Detective Jim Anthony, ii.

^21. Ibid., 145.

^22. Ibid.

^23. Ibid., 5, 108.

^24. Ibid., 145.

^25. Ibid., 14.

^26. Ibid., 24, 57.