Morning Edition, January 15, 2008 · The hard-boiled private detective was born on the pages of pulp magazines, amid beautiful dames, waiting to be saved.

Although the genre has acquired a trashy reputation, the language used to tie together the villains, heroic detectives and helpless "frails" (women) that characterize pulp fiction is worth relishing, Otto Penzler, a mystery publisher and owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, tells Renee Montagne.

"I think it was really the beginning of a different kind of writing. The kind of writing in the world of literature that everyone had been familiar with was Henry James with long sentences, long paragraphs. And then Ernest Hemingway came along and Dashiell Hammett came along and they started to write short, quick, clipped sentences that didn't require lots and lots of description. The pulps provided the perfect springboard for that literary tone".
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