From the Dark Side
Pulp Master Criminals
Since we’re talking about the “Moon Man,” Frederick C. Davis’ flashy “Robin Hood in glass” I thought it might be interesting to see how he fits into the broader category of master criminals in the early pulps.
This information is taken Robert Sampson’s wonderful series called, Yesterday’s Faces (Popular Press, six volumes, 1983-1993) The Moon Man stories take place in the 1930’s and, generally, Sampson is referring to stories before 1930 but let’s see what he has to say about master criminals anyway.
“Although the master criminal was a popular fellow, he was a relatively rare figure in the magazines. Through the ‘Teens [1910’s] and ‘Twenties [1920’s] far more column space was spent on the slippery feats of confidence men and criminal adventurers, safe crackers, thieves, strong-arm thugs, blackmailers, card cheats, and pick pockets….Readers relished criminal adventure, particularly when it was circumscribed by those delicate conventions of fiction dictating that criminals prey on the greedy, the dishonest, and the rich. And only those.”
So we can see that Davis’ “Moon Man” character was part of an older and well-established sub-genre.
Sampson spends many pages giving readers an in-depth look at some of the more popular examples, such as Richard Ravenswood and his gang of “Red Ravens” seen in Detective Story Magazine from 1915-1917. The Red Raven stories were written by Scott Campbell, who was actually Frederick C. Davis writing under a pseudonym.
The pages of Detective Story Magazine were filled with Dime novel, English-style mystery and American crook stories. The crook stories were very popular and brought forth a glittering array of criminals who eagerly varied blackmail with robbery and kidnapping. Rarely did they commit murder, however, for deadly violence was not permissible for heroes in those earlier stories. And we certainly see this in the Moon Man tales as well. Master thief he might be but the “Moon Man” does not murder, even if he is accused of it least once.
According to Sampson, the characters of this “wicked brotherhood” of heroic criminals are beyond counting and many remain interesting today. A few have even left permanent marks on crime fiction as they “peer out impishly from the pages of today’s mystery magazines, their names forgotten, their contributions long assimilated by the literature.”
The “Moon Man” did not leave an indelible mark on the genre. But Davis’s writing did. He wrote as part of a popular tradition extending back to the Dime Novel era. He certainly knew what he was doing!
As an interesting aside, Davis revisited the name of “Ravenswood,” in “Ravenwood, Stepson of Mystery” in 1936. These five stories were published in the pulp magazine, Secret Agent “X”. However, the two characters are quite different. The earlier Ravenswood was a gentleman master criminal. The latter Ravenwood, an occult detective. While reading “Ravenwood, Stepson of Mystery” I definitely got an older pulp vibe at times. Still, it was a fun series of stories and another character who’s fallen into the public domain. I have some thought about writing a new “Ravenwood” story as well and might the first to revisit this character as a new pulp writer.
This is the Rocketeer signing off for today.