Sun 22 Aug 2010
Reviewed by Walker Martin: MICHELLE NOLAN – Ball Tales.
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Reference works / Biographies , Reviews[4] Comments
MICHELLE NOLAN – Ball Tales: A Study of Baseball, Basketball and Football Fiction of the 1930’s through 1960’s. McFarland, hardcover, February 2010.
Over the decades I have collected just about every pulp genre except for love pulps and sport pulps. I have several issues of each type, but every time I’d try to read a romance or sports story, the strict formula that these magazines followed would defeat me.
Most of the fiction was very upbeat with happy endings, even more formula-bound than the western pulps. At least I can read the other genres (western, SF, detective, adventure, etc), but not the love and sport pulps.
And this prejudice is not mine alone. I’ve come across a few collectors like Digges La Touche and Steve Lewis who occasionally buy a love pulp, but until I met Michelle Nolan and possibly Randy Vanderbeek, I never really met someone who was seriously collecting runs of sport and love magazines.
At PulpFest 2010 I had an opportunity to talk to Michelle and we briefly discussed her book, Love on the Racks, which mainly covers the romance comics with a few pages on the love pulps. But the main topic was her new book recently published by McFarland, Ball Tales. Copies are available on amazon.com for $35.00.
If you are at all interested in sports fiction, then you should buy this book. The book mainly discusses sport fiction in books and paperbacks. However pulps are referred to in several chapters, and this is of course of interest to pulp collectors. I counted around 20 cover illustrations of pulps showing a sports scene and many other photos of book covers.
The book is 279 pages long. Pulps are discussed in Chapter One, but the main subject is dime novels. Chapter Two is titled “The Great Pulp Sports Rally During the Depression” and covers sport fiction in many of the pulps like Argosy, Sport Story, and so on.
However the best chapter on the pulps (this chapter is a nice long 32 pages) is Chapter Five where Michelle covers sports in many sport and even some love titles. She then covers in Chapter Twelve the only example of female sports competition portrayed on a sports cover (Sport Story, 1st March 1939). This is a very interesting observation when you consider that there were over 1500 sport pulp magazine covers.
She also covers the fact that there have been very few sport pulp anthologies, only three that she lists. Think of it; we live in the Golden Age of Pulp Reprints, but no sport or love reprints from the pulps. (I quickly ordered the three anthologies from abebooks.com).
Finally there is a very valuable appendix: three pages listing the different sport pulp titles, publishers, and years published.
Fellow pulp readers and collectors, this is an excellent piece of original research and if you love sports fiction, or you collect pulps,then it should be in your library.
ADDENDA: Three anthologies taken entirely from the sports pulps are:
Baseball Round-Up, edited by Leo Margulies (Cupples & Leon, 1948).
All American Football Stories, edited by Leo Margulies (Cupples & Leon, 1949).
While the Crowd Cheers, edited by David C. Cooke (E. P. Dutton, 1953)
Michelle also calls The Argosy Book of Sports Stories edited by Rogers Terrill “wonderful,” but these came from the time when Argosy was a men’s adventure magazine, not a pulp. Buy the hardback (A. S. Barnes, 1953) because the paperback (Pennant P-61, 1954) cuts five stories.
August 22nd, 2010 at 5:44 pm
This sounds like an interesting book!
Some sports comic books are very interesting, especially Dick Cole from the 1940’s and the science fictional Strange Sports Stories from the 1960’s. Both should be much better known. Also liked the 30’s comic strip Wiley of West Point, and the long running Gil Thorp.
Sports movies are rarely studied by film historians.
This Tuesday 24th at 6 AM, TCM is showing “The Busher” (1919) about a minor league baseball player. This film has great charm.
August 22nd, 2010 at 5:54 pm
Sports have always featured a good deal in the mystery genre, though only a relatively small percentage deal directly with individual sports the way Dick Francis deals with horse racing or Douglas Rutherford with cars and motorcycles. Quite a few mystery writers either wrote sports fiction for the pulps or in some other area; William Campbell Gault’s books about race cars comes to mind, and the sports pulps were seen as just one more market for many writers, though like Walker I find them and the love genre even more formulaic than some of the others and have read fewer of the stories in general.
This sounds like a good place to discover more about both genres.
Horse racing has been a major focus since the days of Conan Doyle and Edgar Wallace, but golf, baseball, boxing, tennis, and even poker have contributed no few stories in the genre, and a handful of series have had sports related backgrounds while at least since Sherlock Holmes sports often figure in the heroes background.
Holmes boxed as an amateur, Bulldog Drummond played rugby and was an avid golfer, Herbert Adams Roger Bennion was always on the golf course and had amateur standing, Percival Wilde’s Bill Parmalee was a professional card player as was Hake Talbot’s Rogan Kinkade, Brock Callahan and Travis McGee both played pro football, Sid Halley is a former jockey, Pat Cake’s Dion Quince was a secret agent whose adventures revolved around photographing major sports events, there has also been at least one former pro baseball player turned private eye. There are a few boxers, football players, and other sports professionals turned private eye too.
Somewhere there is a mystery with the background of just about every sport you can imagine.
Still, sports and romance pulps are probably the least interesting for most modern readers, though Robert E. Howard wrote some good stories about boxing and I suppose you could call Philip Wylie’s slick Crunch and Des stories about fishing and boating sports stories too.
Romance in general doesn’t seem to age well. Romance writers often have huge sales in their own time only to be virtually forgotten a generation later largely because the mores change so rapidly. No one reads Elinor Glyn, E. M. Hull, Fanny Hurst, or even Emile Loring much today while many other genre writers who were their contemporaries are still in print and well loved. The same seems to go for sports fiction.
When you consider that WWI flying pulps are still collected and avidly read you have to wonder if there was something inherent in the sports and romance genres and their readers that kept them from developing that nostalgic cachet of so many other genres.
August 22nd, 2010 at 6:26 pm
Mike Grost mentions sports comic books and Michelle Nolan discusses comics in a 25 page chapter titled, “Sports Fiction Strikes Out in the Comic Books”. She starts off the chapter by saying comic book publishers produced thousands of issues in every major genre and the only time they failed was with sports comics. “Indeed, these failed miserably”.
August 22nd, 2010 at 6:58 pm
Sports comics never did catch on unless you count the black and white hot rod comics. Quite a few publishers tried them and they indeed “failed miserably.” In the late sixties, early seventies DC tried a science fiction sports anthology series that went south fast.
Romance comics are still collected though, largely because some of the best artists in the comics worked in that genre including Jack Kirby, Alex Toth, Frank Frazetta, Wally Wood, and Gray Morrow.
My own theory is that television killed off any chance sports comics or even most sports fiction had to flourish. Once you could watch sports when you wanted to reading fictional stories about it didn’t have all that much appeal.