Pulp Fiction Audio Book Mysteries

The early pulp fiction magazines and books were created on cheap pulp paper as an inexpensive source of entertainment for people who wanted to escape from the daily rigors of life. People were trying to make the best of living through the depression and the inexpensive entertainment value of these magazines fit the bill perfectly. The intention of the editors was to have the customer pick up the latest copy of his favorite mystery magazine, read it on the bus or train, shove it in his pocket and either share it with friends and family or throw it away when he was done with it.

Although the genre had its roots in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome in the form of stories told with riddles, the first true mystery novel, "The Woman in White" written by Wilkie Collin, was published in 1860. His novel was the first of its kind to have several characters take turns narrating the story. This allowed for many different view points of the same incident create the mystery and keep the reader wondering where the story would go from there.

The 1920s gave rise to great mystery writers such as Edward Stratemeyer, who wrote the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery stories, (under the pen names Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene respectively). Agatha Christie, one of the great mystery writers, emerged in the 1920s and delighted audiences with many mysterious whodunits.

By the 1930s, the mystery, hard boiled crime detective, thriller and suspense fiction, was firmly entrenched as a popular genre and kept readers demanding more stories. The pulps were a fantastic outlet for great writers to churn out exciting, pulse pounding stories that kept you guessing to the very end. Writers such as Dashiell Hammett's, "The Maltese Falcon", Raymond Chandler's "Fair Well my Lovely" and L. Ron Hubbard's "Dead Men Kill," were prime examples of pulp fiction writers that developed a following fan base that continues to this day.

The 1940s was the great radio era where families gathered after dinner and enjoyed the live performances. The 1950s gave way to television and the pulps declined dramatically as people became fascinated with the visual stories that only TV could produce at that time. The pulps did however, give producers much of the material it needed and famous characters such as Ellery Queen and Perry Mason were pulp based characters that that came to life on the small screen.

Although the pulps virtually disappeared after the advent of TV, there is a revival of the Golden Age of Pulp Fiction in the form of e-books, audio books and reprinted novels. Revisiting these classic stories can give one an appreciation of the writers who could create mysterious characters, baffling situations that elude understanding and along the way you may just recognize some old friends.