C-Quester 2 • CQ2

They invariably deal with an act of mayhem (a murder or kidnapping) which brings together a range of familiar characters: the tough-talking detective, the dewy-eyed moll, the shady villain. There may be twists and turns along the way, but nearly every story ends with the crime solved and order restored. The pulps inherently reject the drama of emotional exploration on behalf of bristling action.

They were blatantly voyeuristic, but their treatment of violence was stylized enough that readers never had to feel guilty about rubbernecking. It was just a story.

During the genre’s heyday, in the ’20s and ’30s, pulps sold up to a million copies per issue, and there were dozens of magazines on the racks. The paper shortages incurred by the Second World War put a major dent in pulp production. But the final culprit was the post-war economic boom. Americans no longer needed 10-cent distractions. Increasingly, they turned to new forms: comic books, paperback novels, or television.

But we never abandoned our allegience to pulp conventions. The format just changed. TV has most clearly assumed the mantle of pulp: Increasingly, its primetime lineup seems lifted directly from the pulps. “Law & Order,” “CSI,” and their wildly successful spinoffs and imitators all follow the same pulp formula: a dead body is discovered and a maverick investigator – a crime scene specialist, a coroner, a prosecutor, a psychic – must work around the prevailing authorities to solve the murder.

Or consider the odd case of “Dexter.” For those who have not seen the hit Showtime drama, it stars a socially awkward bloodstain pattern analyst who solves crimes by day and commits his own vigilante murders by night. “Dexter” is an unholy fusion of both the pulp detective and the villain. He commits crimes, yes, but always in the interest of punishing evildoers. Think of him as Sam Spade, reborn as a serial killer with a heart of gold.

All these shows offer the same emotional dividend as the pulps: a thrilling temporary immersion in the world of iniquity, followed by a satisfying resolution. We get the thrill of a corpse without any real remorse; the good guys still always win.

That’s all fine and well when we’re just talking about TV shows. But what happens when our media coverage, which purports to present us a picture of reality, instead indulges in the tropes of pulp?

The answer is apparent from any local news broadcast, which show us a fallen world recognizable from the pulps, full of sin and spectacular murders. Rather than confronting viewers or readers with complex issues of policy, media outlets rubberneck at extreme weather events and celebrity scandals. Rather than offer up a fresh picture of our world, pulp news serves merely as a confirmation of what we already knew.

If anything, modern news coverage has outstripped the pulps. At the time they were published, after all, the pulps were considered déclassé for their representations of mayhem and sexual titillation. By today’s standards, they seem positively chaste. That’s what happens when Paris Hilton is your national moll.

. . .

The influence of pulp fiction has even overtaken the White House. Consider the case of former President Bill Clinton and his famously frisky intern, Monica Lewinsky. For more a year, the story of their Oval Office dalliance dominated the headlines and consumed the nation’s imagination. Why?

Because it was a story we already knew – a classic pulp fiction. Clinton was the corrupt bigwig who thought himself above the law. Lewinsky was the naive moll. Cast in the role of the crusading detective was the independent counsel, Kenneth Starr. And cast in the role of eager readers were we, the American people. Such was our lust for the story that we happily disregarded the fact that the affair had nothing to do with the governance of our country.

Or consider the attacks of September 11, 2001. Pulp fiction had nothing to do with these events, obviously. But the national response to 9/11 revealed our devotion to the archetypes of pulp. President George W. Bush, playing the pulp hero, stood atop the rubble and vowed revenge against the evildoers. And Americans overwhelmingly supported his wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. (The latter’s links to the 9/11 terrorists were dubious, but political hawks had a picture-perfect pulp villain in Saddam Hussein, right down to the sinister mustache.)

Americans even went so far as to assume that Iraqis and Afghanis would share our world view. We were the good guys, come to liberate them from rogues in their midst. And so it came as a rude shock to all of us – our soldiers most tragically – when the natives refused to regard our invasions as heroic, and launched insurgencies against us. If anything, the atrocities at Abu Ghraib and Haditha have cast American might in a more troubling light: our soldiers seem less like noble crusaders and more like, well, the bad guys.

This is the prevailing danger, of course, in applying the tropes of pulp fiction to the real world. The ultimate allure of the pulps resided in their ability to distract readers from the moral complexities and disappointments of the real world. They offered a thrilling ride, a happy ending, a false cure.

Our leaders are still peddling us pulp fictions today, but we needn’t buy them. We can choose instead to confront the complex crises that imperil our nation and species. But this will depend on our ability to reject, once and for all, the seductive myths of pulp.

Steve Almond is a fiction writer and essayist who lives in Arlington. His new essay collection is “(Not that You Asked).” He can be reached at sbalmond@earthlink.net.