Pulp: Food Of The Gods

Pulp writing gets a bad rap.

You don’t hear much about it these days unless somebody’s using the word “pulp” as a polite way to say “your story sucks.” But I have a different stance. The pulp novels and collections of old may be long gone, but the spirit is alive and well—and, dare I say, it’s even evolved.

You see, the whole point of pulp was to entertain the masses. Fast. Cheap. Wild. If you could crack the code as a writer, there was good money to be made. And I’m not talking about royalties from some fantasy boxed set trilogy with a dragon on the cover. I mean this week’s rent paid by this week’s story.

Think about that. When was the last time you got paid $650 for a story you wrote yesterday, knowing full well you’d sell another one or two by Friday? During the golden age of pulp, that wasn’t just possible—it was expected. Some of those writers churned out millions of words. Were they always great? Hell no. Were they read? Oh yes. Widely. Eagerly. And repeatedly.

Dare I say, most people rattle on about “literary merit” like it’s something you buy from a university bookstore. But I’ll take the rawness of Mickey Spillane over another dinner party meditation on ennui and misplaced desire in a New York loft.

Pulp was honest. It was lurid, exaggerated, totally over the top—and it knew it. It wasn’t trying to impress a single soul. It was trying to make your knuckles go white on the bus ride home. Writers like that didn’t suffer over every semicolon—they had deadlines to hit, bills to pay, and enough cigarettes in the ashtray to start a small fire.

And guess what: it’s all still happening right under your very nose.

The spirit of pulp is in the indie author grinding out serialized Kindle thrillers at 3am. I could come up with a long list of these people, I’ve read a fair few and I have to tell you, sitting in the garden with a chicken and beetroot sandwich on a sunny day with a side order of Andrew Lowe’s Jake Sawyer series than the latest from Kazuo Ishiguro. There’s a time and a place for Ishiguro, but sitting around, chilling in the sun is not the place.

I’m not big on fanfic writers in any way, shape or form but those guys have millions of readers and not a scrap of approval from the literary establishment. It’s in newsletters, zines, podcasts, YouTube monologues, and late-night Substack screeds. The methods changed. The mission didn’t.

Some of us still believe in story over status. In showing up every day and writing like your dinner depends on it—because sometimes, it does. I was brought up on this stuff. There was pulp everywhere in our house when I was a kid. Mickey Spillane seemed to be a favourite because hey, what’s not to love about Mike Hammer?

It’s an odd thing to try and justify but let’s take Michael Crichton, surely one of the last great pulp writers. He wrote Jurassic Park. Take that to the bank. And you can’t tell me Peter Benchley’s Jaws isn’t pulp either. You sit down with it, you read it as fast as possible and tell everybody you meet about it because it threw a match in your fireplace.

People have moved to the TV for their pulp now. Lost. 24. Walking Dead. Supernatural... the seasons go on forever because we can’t get enough of them.

Most people don’t reach for a tattered paperback to escape anymore—they reach for YouTube, TikTok, Netflix, podcasts, a thousand browser tabs of noise. But the need hasn’t changed. In the post-war years here in Britain, people lived through rationing, economic collapse, bomb sites, and streets that still smelled of smoke and fear. Money was tighter than tight. The future was uncertain. And stories—Eagle, Hammer double-bills, Commando comics, Pan paperbacks —became a lifeline. As one historian put it: “people desperately wanted to escape the realities of their own lives.” Sound familiar? It should. When the price of milk is enough to make you weep and the news cycle feels like it’s been written by Kafka, that hunger for escape is still alive and well. It just wears different clothes now—scrollable, streamable, pixel-lit. But the need? That’s eternal. That’s why pulp matters.

That’s the real job of pulp: not to be clever—but to rescue people, if only for twenty minutes at a time.

And why? Because deep down, we still want to be told a damn good story. That’s the core of it. Not some experimental literary riddle wrapped in metaphor, dipped in ennui, and served with a side of footnotes. We want characters who want things. We want trouble. We want a ticking clock. We want someone to stand up, face the monster, and punch it in the teeth.

Pulp understood that. Still does.

Pulp writing isn’t just about what sells, it’s about what sticks. You think people remember long-winded Booker winners where nothing happens until page 312? No. They remember the story where the private eye got double-crossed, the plane crashed in the jungle, the zombie ate the priest, and the cowboy made it just in time.

Oceanic Flight 815 anybody?

And if you want a real-world example of pulp at its most unstoppable, look no further than John Creasey—a man who wrote over 600 novels under at least 28 pseudonyms. That’s not a typo. Six hundred. He wrote detective stories, spy thrillers, westerns, romances—you name it. Some days he wrote two books at once, flipping between typewriters like a mad scientist. Literary gatekeepers might choke on their noodles, but Creasey had something most writers would kill for: a readership. A loyal, hungry, couldn’t-get-enough-of-it readership. He didn’t wait for inspiration. He didn’t tweet about writer’s block. He just wrote. And wrote. And wrote. If you’re curious, check out his series about The Toff. Dated for sure but also a masterclass in getting the words where they belong.

Pulp doesn’t pretend. It doesn’t apologise. It delivers. Fast. Dirty. Loud. It might not win awards, but it wins eyeballs, and that’s the currency most writers forget they’re supposed to be trading in. I’m not saying every story should be a shootout in a strip club at midnight. I’m saying you should at least ask yourself this:

Would anybody keep reading this if I didn’t make them?

That’s the pulp test.

Because let’s be honest—writing should be fun. It should feel like driving too fast with the windows down and Back in Black rumbling through the speakers. Pulp doesn’t drag itself through the mud of self-importance. It lights the mud on fire and jumps over it on a motorcycle. If that’s not worth celebrating, I don’t know what is.

So yeah, I love pulp. I’m thinking about nailing my colours to its mast. I write it fast. I write it like it matters. Because it does. I don’t write as often as I should to call myself a pulp writer but it’s in here somewhere. It used to pay bills and I think it still can.

It makes people miss their train stop. It gets passed from one hand to another with a grin and a "you’ve got to read this."–and if that’s not real writing, then what the hell are we all doing here?

Forget the ivory tower. Grab a typewriter. Light a match. Start a fire.

No semicolons were agonised over in the making of this post.