Our book today is a lurid little treat: Cheap Thrills, a short, pithy, and heavily illustrated history of the pulps by the irrepressible Ron Goulart and subtitled The Amazing! Thrilling! Astonishing! History of Pulp Fiction.

It was originally written back in 1972, as Goulart tartly observes: “At the time I was researching Cheap Thrills there was no Internet and computers were found only in sci-fi movies. I did much of my research by actually reading pulp magazines.” Goulart started his research early enough to catch the last dying embers of the pulp world, and he started collecting these fragile old things in the decades before that became a very, very expensive thing to do. And he was a premium Old School hack himself, the kind who tried never to write a free sentence, a late sentence, or a boring sentence – and largely succeeded. His novel Shaggy Planet is still cracklingly hilarious to read, and the cheesy Flash Gordon novels he wrote in the 1970s are still enormous fun.

And ‘fun’ is the key word in Cheap Thrills. Yes, this is a deceptively well-researched volume, one of the original groundbreaking studies of the whole pulp phenomenon, but it also bubbles along like the ‘then what happened’ adventure stories that were Goulart’s speciality (and of course the speciality of the pulps themselves). About the founder of this squirrelly little cult, for instance, he writes: “Nobody liked Frank A. Munsey. When he died, in 1925, his eulogists said things like, ‘Frank Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer and the manner of an undertaker’” – and then very wisely continues: “But eras and movements, like people, can’t pick their fathers and so a history of the pulp magazines has to begin with the ruthless and unlikable Munsey.”

He takes his readers through the whole of that colorful history, from Munsey’s primitive original attempts in Argosy and dozens of similar venues to all the other big figures from the pulps world – the artists, the writers, and most of all the idea-men, the scruffy, hustling entrepreneurs and con artists who kept trying to make a quick fortune off the young century’s magazine boom. And of course these figures included Hugo Gernsback, the man who actually invented the term “science fiction” and whose abysmal luck elicits Goulart’s sympathy – and his zingers:

Hugo Gernsback was at it again. But, like many other inventors, he never had much luck with his own inventions. The ’30s were filled with the sound of one Gernsback science fiction magazine after another falling over.

Goulart’s book is lavishly illustrated with great pulp covers from the brief decades of the craze, covers featuring the mind-boggling cast of characters those over-worked and over-liquored hack writers dreamt up. There’s the Spider, and Nick Carter, and Captain Future, and of course there are the giants of the genre: Tarzan, Doc Savage, Flash Gordon, the Shadow, and a teeming posse of cowboys.

But the real treat of Cheap Thrills is neither its delightful narration nor its addictive pictures – it’s the final portion of the book, in which Goulart has the stroke of genius to reprint the typewritten correspondences he had with various writers and editors from the pulp era. While in the process of answering as many of Goulart’s questions as they could, these men and women spin some priceless yarns about what it was like to create a legendary era. I return to Cheap Thrills all the time, but I confess: I re-read these grand old letters more often than I do the book’s text itself – and I smile at little confessions like the one Norman Daniels made to Goulart in 1969:

I wrote under so many names. I had to keep a file so I’d know who was who when I wrote the by-line. One issue with eight or ten stories was published under that many names – all of them mine.

Multiple by-lines! Ah, what a wonderful, vanished era!