for stories, set in the almost-here-and-now or examining the same problems in the far future, with aliens and robots and what-have-you substituting for waterboarding and North Korea and Hispanics. And this is one editor who thinks these very human problems are more important than how your spaceship can avoid meteors at light speeds.
Politicians can predict the future, usually with great flourish and very little intelligence, but only science fiction can show it to you, can lay it out and examine all the consequences.
That’s why we remain the most important form of fiction in the entire realm of literature.
What’s in a Name?
So here’s the situation. Street and Smith, the giant pulp chain, also owns a radio show back in 1929, a mystery anthology show with no continuing characters except the announcer—and the announcer happens to be the one of the most popular characters on the air, a mysterious figure known only as the Shadow.
So someone at Street and Smith decides, just to make sure no one swipes the character, maybe they should put him in a one-shot pulp magazine, so they can prove that he’s copyrighted and that they own him.
They hire Walter Gibson, a guy who splits his time between being a magician and a pulpster, and pay him $500 to come up with a novel, which he does in a few weeks’ time. No one thinks much will come of it, and Gibson writes it as “Maxwell Grant,” possibly so it won’t be associated with his real name when he’s applying for magic gigs. Street and Smith accepts the manuscript, assigns the cover art, prints it, and that, they think, is that.
But the magazine sells out in near-record time, so they decide to make The Shadow a monthly, and Gibson is hired at $500 a novel to start churning them out. This is not bad pay in 1930, because the average American is making about $1,200 a year—and about 25% of the average Americans can’t find work.
So “Maxwell Grant” starts grinding out a Shadow novel a month, and Street and Smith publishes it—and suddenly more than a million people are buying each issue, and The Shadow is the hottest property they’ve got.
They can’t believe their luck, so they do nothing for a couple of years, and then they decide to go monthly, since the magazine is still selling like hotcakes. They approach Gibson, tell him how much they love him and that they’re all one big happy family, and ask if he can turn out two Shadow novels a month. He says yes. Fine, they say; we’re in business. Just a minute, says Gibson; you’re selling millions of copies, you’re making money hand over fist, and surely you can afford to give me a raise to $750 a manuscript.
Suddenly they don’t love him quite so much, and maybe he’s not really related to their big happy family after all. We’re paying $500, they say; take it or leave it.
If you don’t give me $750, says Gibson, I’m walking—and I’ll take my millions of readers with me.
Street and Smith laughs. (You didn’t know heartless corporations could laugh? Now you do.) You can leave, they say—but your audience is staying right here. Next month there will be a new Maxwell Grant and who will know the difference?
It takes Gibson about three seconds to realize that Street and Smith are holding all the cards, and he gives in and keeps writing $500 Shadow novels.
And the gentlemen running Street and Smith decide that they have lucked onto a pretty good policy. It is time to develop another “hero pulp”—which is to say, a pulp magazine with a continuing character—and after speaking with pulpster Lester Dent they hit upon Doc Savage. Only this time it isn’t the author who decides to use a pseudonym; it is Street and Smith, who insist upon it, and henceforth all 180+ Doc Savage novels are be written by “Kenneth Robeson,” just as the 300+ Shadow novels are written by Maxwell Grant.
And rival publishers are not slow to notice just what Street and Smith is doing to combat inflation (for which read: avoiding paying a fair price to writers). Henceforth, although most of the Spider novels are written by Norvell Page, every one appears under the byline of “Grant Stockbridge.”
“Kenneth Robeson” is so popular as the author of Doc Savage that he also writes The Avenger series of pulps. The only author of a continuing hero pulp character who doesn’t have to put up with this is Edmond Hamilton, who is writing Captain Future novels for Better Publications, and the only reason why he doesn’t have to put up with it is because he is the only science fiction writer working for Better, and no one else there knows how to write this Buck Rogers crap.
Well, the last hero pulp died in the late 1940s, and that was the end of the practice for more than 30 years.
Now move the clock ahead, and wander over to the romance field, where a young woman named Janet Dailey began writing for Harlequin when she was 31 years old, and by the time she was 37 she had sold a truly phenomenal total of 110 million books for them. They loved her, and they thought she loved them…
…and then Silhouette (which is now owned by Harlequin, but was its greatest rival back then) bought Janet and her millions of readers away.
And Harlequin swore this would never happen to them again, that they might lose a writer from time to time, but never the writer’s millions of book-buying fans…and finally someone (or maybe someone’s grandfather) remembered the hero pulps—and suddenly, if you were a Harlequin writer, you were not allowed to use your real name. If you wanted to sell them, you had to use a pseudonym.
Now, the world and the law had changed a little over the years, and Harlequin (and Silhouette, too, after Harlequin bought it) had to concede this much: only the author who first created the pseudonym could use it. If an author left, there wouldn’t be a new author writing under that name the next week…but the flip side was that the author couldn’t take the pseudonym with her when she left.
That was the situation when my daughter, Laura—an award-winning fantasy writer these days—first broke into print as a romance writer. There was a settlement somewhere in the late 1990s and Harlequin reluctantly allowed authors to be themselves again.
But good ideas never die, they just hibernate from time to time. I would imagine publishers will be using this particular one to protect themselves and shaft writers at least once more during my lifetime.
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