A Mere 72 Years Ago Today

Yellowed Perils editor William Lampkin has a good piece up today about the end of the pulp-magazine era, which had provided such a boost to early 20th-century American crime fiction. As he observes,

There’s no single date for when the pulps actually died, but April 8, 1949, was certainly the date that their eventual demise became official.

As I wrote in “The Day the Pulps Died,” that was the date that Street & Smith Publications announced that it was canceling its line of pulp magazines, as well as its comic books.

Before the end of the year, the last issues of The Shadow, Doc Savage, Detective Story, and Western Story had been published. And the pulp era would gradually fade away as pulp magazine after pulp magazines ceased publication or morphed into digests during the 1950s.

You’ll find Lampkin’s complete post here.