The Place Where the Pulps Came From
In helping me assemble my list of post-pulp digests, Richard Moore openly speculated that 1 Appleton Street, Holyoke, Massachusett, listed so often as the “publisher’s address” of so many crime pulps and digests, must surely have been a mail drop to dodge bill collectors — or that Holyoke was the address of the distributor.
But sci-fi legend Robert Silverberg, who wrote crime fiction for several of these magazines back in the day, has another theory. He suggested to me that Holyoke wasn’t the distributor — they were simply the cheapest printer around, and dozens of magazines in the late 1950s — of all sorts — were printed there. Which would explain why so many of those magazines, already often poorly edited and laid out, have the look of having been printed by the lowest bidder — they were!
Among those digests that listed “1 Appleton Street, Holyoke, Mass” as their publisher’s address (there may be more) were:
- Crime and Justice Detective Story Magazine
- Double-Action Detective Stories
- Mammoth Detective
- Fast Action Detective
- Guilty Detective Story Magazine
- Homicide Detective Story Magazine
- Hunted Detective Story Magazine
- Killers Mystery Story Magazine
- Monthly Murders
- Mystery Stories
- Off Beat Detective Stories
- Pursuit Detective Story Magazine
- Saturn Web Magazine of Detective Stories
- Sure Fire Detective Stories
- Terror Detective Story Magazine
- Trapped Detective Story Magazine
Thanks to Richard Moore and Robert Silverberg for this page. Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
