Dames of letters

Pulp fiction has always been a male-dominated genre, the realm of the tough-guy writer, from Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler to more modern, “neo-noir” practitioners like Walter Mosley or James Ellroy. In such a landscape -- of fistfights and gin joints, gats and gams and smoky neon midnights -- women exist primarily as temptresses, as dangerous and unreliable femmes fatales.

This is as fundamental to the genre as its edge of moral ambiguity. As a result, perhaps, only a few women have ever cracked the pulp canon, among them Patricia Highsmith, whose Ripley books showcase a new kind of sociopath, and Leigh Brackett, who, with the publication of the 1944 L.A. noir novel “No Good From a Corpse,” wrote her way into a 35-year screenwriting career (“The Big Sleep,” co-written with William Faulkner; “The Empire Strikes Back”).

Of course, when it comes to pulp, appearances can be deceiving. That’s the idea behind “Femmes Fatales: Women Write Pulp,” a new series from New York’s Feminist Press that seeks to highlight the long-neglected contributions of female writers to the form.

“During the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s,” notes Livia Tenzer, the Press’ editorial director, “women wrote not only romance, but science fiction, hard-boiled detective stories and other styles of pulp, which you wouldn’t expect.” Launched last fall with three titles -- Dorothy B. Hughes’ “In a Lonely Place,” Faith Baldwin’s “Skyscraper” and Valerie Taylor’s “The Girls in 3-B” -- “Femmes Fatales” is first and foremost a literary reclamation project, bringing lost pulp classics back into the cultural dialogue.

And while there is certainly underground, subversive writing still going on today -- on the Web and in graphic novels -- none of it is really like the pulp of old, Tenzer says. “Pulp was commercial, so today’s ‘alternative,’ ‘indie’ fiction and film has a different ethos and a narrower audience,” she says. “Meanwhile, today’s mass-market fiction and film has lost the edginess, the stylishness, the campiness that can be found in pulp.... That’s why people collect the old stuff.”

Hughes, in particular, has had a legendary half-life; although only one of her other books is in print, she was a successful screenwriter and an influence on contemporary female mystery writers like Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky. (“In a Lonely Place” was made into a 1950 Humphrey Bogart film.) Baldwin too was a prolific novelist, cranking out more than 80 books in a 60-year career.

Still, even in the shadowy world of pulp, such writers remain highly marginalized, and none more so than Taylor, whose “Girls in 3-B” is an example of lesbian pulp, a subgenre popular in the 1950s and 1960s among male readers looking for titillation and lesbians hungry for community, wherever it might be found.

“I think these books reveal things about women’s lives that are very different from the high literature of the period,” says Feminist Press publisher Jean Casella. “There’s a long history of women embedding subversive elements in their writing, and in many ways, that’s what we’re seeing here.”

The notion of pulp as a subversive medium is hardly a new one; in fact, it’s as old as the genre itself. Pulp writers, after all, often tested the bounds of propriety, taking on subjects like incest, infidelity and drug addiction that more conventional authors couldn’t touch.

To a large extent, that’s because of the disposable nature of pulp writing, which, for much of its history, was marketed in cheap paperbacks with lurid covers, the kinds of books that got read once, quickly, then tossed away.

“In the 1940s and 1950s,” Tenzer explains, “pulp really operated below the radar of cultural censors, so it could deal with a lot of taboo subjects that mainstream literature could not.”

Yet as true as this is for pulp in general, it’s doubly so for female writers, who were invisible even within a throwaway form. “Because of that,” Casella suggests, “you have women writing about lesbian relationships, interracial relationships or strong female characters who refuse to be defined by men.”

“The Girls in 3-B” is a perfect illustration, a novel in which three small-town girls arrive in 1950s Chicago to find an unanticipated freedom, albeit one fraught with perils of its own.

“ ‘The Girls in 3-B,’ ” Tenzer says, “is really three pulps in one. It’s a romance and a beatnik pulp, as well as the lesbian story at its core.” In a certain sense, it’s also a critique of traditional lifestyles, since the lesbian character, Barby, emerges in the most stable situation when all is said and done.

“What makes ‘The Girls in 3-B’ notable,” argues Lisa Walker, an associate professor of English at the University of Southern Maine who wrote the novel’s afterword, “is that, given the experience of its three main characters, heterosexuality ends up the least desirable choice. In that sense, it’s a book with a happy ending, which is almost unheard of in 1950s lesbian pulp.”

On the one hand, we probably shouldn’t make too much of this; novels like “The Girls in 3-B,” after all, were written quickly for a mass market and any social agenda they may offer is, of necessity, secondary to the exigencies of plot. At the same time, many female pulp writers do seem to traffic in proto-feminist themes and conflicts, whether consciously or otherwise.

In Taylor’s case, that’s probably intentional, for she was, as Walker points out, a political activist who later campaigned for gay and lesbian rights.

By writing about a lesbian couple that stay together, she violated the standards of the genre, which dictated unhappy endings for those who ignored the mores of straight society. Similarly, the other novels in the series also play against expectation, offering strong female characters who make decisions for themselves.

“Skyscraper,” for instance -- originally published in 1931 as a serial in Cosmopolitan -- tells the story of Lynn Harding, a young office worker who, rather than give up her job for a man (a staple of 1930s romance fiction), decides instead that she wants both. “In a Lonely Place,” on the other hand, upends the conventions of noir by literally reinventing the figure of the femme fatale, who, in Hughes’ rendering, is less a fallen woman than one who brings about the fall of a psychopathic male.

“To be honest,” Tenzer admits, “we had some reservations about ‘In a Lonely Place’ because it’s told through the eyes of a male serial killer, a killer of women. But we decided to publish it because it’s really a critique of the genre, an exploration of a certain kind of misogyny in the aftermath of World War II.”

“Femmes Fatales” offers a window on another place and time, which is an important value of popular fiction from another era. It offers little details, daily dramas often overlooked by history books. In fact, both Tenzer and Casella say, the series occupies a middle ground between popular culture, literature and sociology, with each novel featuring a vintage cover and a scholarly afterword that provides a context for the work.

This has to do with the mission of the Feminist Press, founded in 1970 “to reconstruct,” as Casella puts it, “the history of American literature to include women” -- an endeavor that has restored to print hundreds of books by women writers. In that sense, “Femmes Fatales” represents a strategy for opening the focus, for seeing not just the pulp canon but that of women’s writing, through a wider lens.

Of course, any time you conflate literature and sociology, you run the risk of blurring the boundaries, of confusing what it is you’re trying to do. If this is a sociological project, to what extent does literary merit matter? Are we reading these books as windows on a bygone era or as authentic works of their own? It depends on whom you ask.

“The importance of these reissues is sociological and not literary,” says Robert Polito, who won a 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award for “Savage Art,” a biography of pulp writer Jim Thompson. “I think it’s a mistake to pretend that they’re as accomplished as Patricia Highsmith. They are not up to that level of work.”

For Dorothy Hughes’ daughter, Suzy Sarna, meanwhile, the question of sociology is entirely beside the point. “My mother,” she says, “was a very strong woman. But she had absolutely no use for the feminist stuff.” As for “In a Lonely Place,” Sarna recalls, the inspiration was wholly personal.

“We lived on the beach in Santa Monica, at the bottom of the California Incline. This was 1944, 1945, and my mother was working for the studios. She didn’t drive, so she took the bus home late at night. The bus would drop her at the top of the Incline and she’d walk down to the house. Every night, it was dark, foggy and scary, which is how she got the idea for the book.”

Even after the novel was published, Sarna says, Hughes could not get the story out of her head. “That book,” she says with a laugh, “scared her so much she was afraid to go outside to hang laundry when it was foggy or dark. It creeped her, for as long as we lived in that house.”

Sarna’s story illustrates the power of pulp fiction to to get under the skin. It also suggests that pulp can emerge from anywhere, that it’s a matter of sensibility as much as form. Already, Tenzer and Casella are expanding their definition of the genre; in addition to “The Blackbirder,” Hughes’ 1943 World War II espionage thriller, which comes out in June, coming Femmes Fatales titles include “Bunny Lake Is Missing,” an absurdist missing-person novel by Evelyn Piper, and Olive Higgins Prouty’s “Now, Voyager,” which became a movie starring Bette Davis in 1943.

Neither of the latter two novels is a pulp in the strictest sense -- both originally came out in hardcover -- but then, perhaps, that’s as it should be.

Pulp, after all, is about pushing limits, about revealing the edges of a culture we can’t quite see. Especially at a moment when society seems to be turning backward, this may help tell us who we are.

“Part of the historical value of the series,” Tenzer says, “is that it debunks myths about the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s and offers an alternative point of view. But the socially radical messages continue to resonate. And we need to listen to them even now.”