Iain McIntyre - Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats

In memory of Graeme Flanagan

Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980

Edited by Iain McIntyre and Andrew Nette

All text copyright 2017 the individual authors

Further information may be found on the last page of this book

This edition PM Press 2017

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ISBN: 978-1-62963-438-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017942910

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Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.

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Through Beatnik Eyes

Consider the masses of stuff, quickly and cheaply written, drawn, edited, laid out, run off in printing houses, shipped, unpacked and lined up in shops and newsstands, alongside masses of stuff almost exactly the same, all of it taking part in a vast Darwinian competition to catch some punters eye, and remove a little spare change from said punters pocket. Some of it will be sold, maybe even in large numbers, but more often in modest numbers (which isnt too much of a problem since production costs are low) and dog-eared copies will end up in lunchrooms or barracks or dormitories, or wedged behind downpipes in factory toilets, or stacked in back sheds. Some may go straight to the dump, unread. Maybe it was put together in an atmosphere of high-minded artistic ambition, or it may have been regarded even by its own makers as junk. Regardless, the huge bulk of low-culture product will drop out of sight almost immediately. Live fast, die young, as the saying goes.

But there are some good-looking corpses. Over the past half century, maybe since the ascent of rock and roll, people have come to particularly value certain items recovered from the bogs of culture. Low-down, dirty, utterly disposable jukebox music from half a century ago is in much greater circulation and held in infinitely higher esteem now than it ever was then. Mid-20th-century book and magazine art, in its day often regarded as slightly shameful, even crypto-pornographic, is highly prized and traded, and continues to inform both contemporary high art and everyday design. B-grade film and various forms of extreme kitsch from the past continue to come to the notice of the alert retro hawks and are carefully fed back into the cultural mainstreams.

Low paperback fiction has seen one of the most successful rehabilitation jobs. Some material which in its day received little notice from cultural gatekeepers and commentators has steadily worked its way up the prestige ladder. Crime fiction of the early to mid 20th century is the obvious case, and since Quentin Tarantino borrowed the term pulp fiction everyone, even your high school English teacher, pretty well gets the principle that gems may come from trash. There are no prizes to be won by declaring now that last centurys pulpcrime, supernatural, science fiction, romance, cheesecake and fantasysometimes turns out to be amazingly awesome.

The pleasures of pulp are complex and contradictory. If you start digging you might find unexpected literary finesseplenty of people who later graduated to highor middle-brow respectability paid the bills back then by writing serviceable pulps. And there were plenty who never graduated, but whose work ranks high on modern literary criteria: balance, flow, economy, freshness of image and language. Natural writerly grace and all that stuff.

You might find earlier versions of the punk aestheticthe textual equivalent of harder, faster, louder, badder and crazier. Pulp regularly managed to be way more out there, because no one was paying all that much attention. There wasnt time to sand down the sharp edges. And that was trash lits natural default territory: out there.

Or you might find laid bare the mostly unspoken fears, desires, dreams and nightmares of the time. Doubly, trebly so when it comes to sex and sexuality. Pulp as cultural Freudian slip, loony bulletins from the collective id. Maybe not so loony.

Or you might say to hell with that and just go with the flow, enjoying pulp for its couldnt-give-that-much-of-a-shit attitude. Theres deep dark perverse mad, and then theres fun, bracing, energizing mad. Theres the sort of mad that the author or artist is complicit in, and theres the naive unselfconscious, weird, obsessive, maybe on-the-spectrum, medication-all-wrong mad, the kind the artist denies, disavows, or else seems to be entirely unaware of.

Anyway, lets agree, pulp is good. Or can be. And it seems so far to have proven inexhaustible. New titles and genres no one much knew about keep turning up. Old paperbacks are offered for sale on eBay. Hitherto unknown gems and minor treasures keep surfacing in hip reprints.

But that doesnt happen by accident. The word curator gets a lot of bogus circulation these days, often used to glorify some chancer who happens to glance at a bit of culture for longer than a nanosecond or happens to post a comment somewhere. It also connotes the bow-tie-wearing professional arts ponce, smugly appropriating the culture which until just last week they were way too good for. Once its cool, they want a piece. A big piece. In fact, they want to take it over.

Zip-Gun Angels (Original Novels, 1952)

The Beatniks (Dollar Book Company, 1962)

But the fakes are forever obliged to wait until the moment is right, when all the dogs are barking, when they can sense that theres a strategic advantage in getting on board. Theyre best at bestowing the mantle of respectability on nice, clean, fully appraised and certified, thoroughly rehabilitated, parlour-ready trash. Theyre never going to unearth anything new.

And to be fair, its not that easy to spot the diamonds in the rough. Most of us need a gentle eye-opening pointer now and then in order to see the value. And some of the time the value is really just a surfeit of pure, exemplary, transcendent crappiness. The Ed Wood Jr. factor. (Ed Wood, we shouldnt be surprised to learn, is to be found in this book with a piece of ageless ber-schlock, Devil Girls). It takes a lot of work and a lot of time spent combing through junk shops, flea markets or the stacks of public library stacks. Its gruelling. You can find yourself soon hating everything. Its called trash for a reason. More scarily, a kind of rapture of the deep can set in, and you start loving everything. Finding virtue