Dec/Jan 2008
Criminal Odes
The tumultuous decades between the wars saw the birth and development of a new genre—pulp fiction—that sought in the gritty seams of american life a fresh moral code, one that made sense for hard times and harder people.
John Banville
Let us see whether we can conjure up the representative readers, male and female, of pulp fiction. He is in his early forties and works as a traveling salesman—when he can get work, that is, for these are the Depression years. He wears a boxy blue suit, big black shoes with half-inch rims, a dubious tie the knot of which has not been fully undone in a long time, and a dusty brown fedora. He was born in Kansas but has moved many times. For now, he is settled in Biloxi, Mississippi, living in a frame house near the beach with a pizza waitress he met on the road somewhere outside Jackson on his way down here in the 1927 Studebaker that he bought years ago from a farmer in Stillwater, Oklahoma, who had gone bust. He has a job selling Fuller brushes door-to-door, and business is bad. He drinks too much cheap rye,
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