How are ya, now? Today I thought I’d write a little about the pulps of Canada—not a subject Americans know about, which is a shame, since in several ways the Canadian pulp industry and the pulps themselves were the superior of the much better known American version. 1/27

Fortunately, the story of the Canadian pulps isn’t one of slavish imitation of an American model, but of national resistance to American cultural imperialism. For about 20 years the Canadian pulp industry gave readers a legitimately Canadian product & one of good quality. 2/27

(Most of the Canadian pulps were in French, because they were the product of Québécois authors and publishers. I’ve no wish to wade into the troubled waters of whether Québéc is Canadian or not, or how much, so I’m just going to call them “Canadian pulps” as shorthand.) 3/27

Most Canadian historians of para-literature describe the “golden age of the Canadian pulps” as lasting from 1940-1960, but the story of the pulps (“livres de poche,” “magazines,” “fascicules,” etc) has much fuzzier borders than that, and it can be pushed back to the 1920s. 4/27

We start, though, in 1930. Canada didn’t have many cheap magazines of its own at the time—American pulps and Canadian editions of American pulps (like the one below) were flooding the market. Canadian authors who wanted to triumph in genre fic mostly moved south to the US. 5/27

What Canada did have were general fiction magazines, like Le Roman Canadien. LRC published the usual spread of genres—romance (far and away the most popular genre with Canadian readers, as was the case in the American pulps), detective/mystery, Mountie, cowboy, etc. 6/27

Science fiction wasn’t really popular—Canadians weren’t writing much of it & as far as I can tell they weren’t reading it, either. But in 1930 & 1931, in the pages of LRC, Jean-Marc Lebel published a first for Canada: a series of linked sf stories about a two-fisted scientist. 7/

It was all *very* pulpy: high-tech torpedoes, German spies, dual identities, plucky girlfriend assuming a male identity & saving the day. And while the influence of American pulp writers and sf films of the time is obvious, it was still very Canadian, and thus very popular. 8/28

What followed was a stream of imitators in the pages of LRC & other Canadian general fiction magazines, and after a couple of years Canadian imitations of Flash Gordon and other American sf series heroes. (Ask me about Rex Baxter sometime!) By 1939 things were humming along. 9/

The start of World War Two brought about an end to the import of nonessential goods, including the American pulps. The Canadian publishers began reprinting American pulps but filling them with stories by Canadian authors, starting with the ever-popular true crime pulps. 10/28

Demand quickly outstripped supply, and the Canadian publishers began cranking out original Canadian pulps: LES CAUSES CÉLÈBRES DU GRAND CRIMINALISTE YVES GENDRON, DÉTECTIVE; LES AVENTURES DE SIMON LEGRIS; LES EXPLOITS CAPTIVANTS DE TEXAS BILL LE COW-BOY AUDACIEUX. 11/28

(Yves Gendron = Montreal Perry Mason, Simon Legris = Montreal Philip Marlowe, Texas Bill = cowboy hero with a dash of sf). Minor successes, all. The first major success was arguably the greatest hero of the Canadian and American: Pierre Daignault’s spy IXE-13. 12/28

Greatest? Greater than the Shadow, Doc Savage, etc? *Yes*. 960 issues from 1940-1967, a great cast of characters, both allies and rogues, a skillful use of the tropes & motifs of the spy genre, and simply written better than anything Lester Dent or Walter Gibson could manage. 13/

(Actually, Germany’s Perry Rhodan is probably the greatest hero of the pulps, but IXE-13 is a solid #2).

IXE-13 has the usual spies (Nazis, Soviets, Vietnamese, Chinese, Cuban) but also has mad scientists w/death rays and Nazi moon bases and various Bond-like adversaries. 14/

There’s also “Taya, Queen of the Chinese Communists,” who could have been a Dragon Lady stereotype but become at least two-dimensional, and who likes & admires & desires IXE-13, who reciprocates. Taya is what I’ve called a Loving Enemy, a type you don’t get much of any more. 15/

IXE-13 was an immediate hit, and with him the floodgates opened. The Canadian audience got pulps about private eyes, lawyers, Mounties, spies, master thieves, cowboys, “lover-boy” detectives, masked superheroes, cops, reporters, scientist inventors, and killer vigilantes. 16/28

A number of these pulps—many more than in the US—were about women: AC-12, top spy for the government; Colette, hard-boiled private eye & counter-intelligence spy; Lise aka Agent Z; Lulu, “the Researcher of Love,” enthusiastically enjoying her youth w/whatever boy comes along. 17

There was even a four-issue pulp, Les Aventures Extraordinaires des Deux Cagoulards, presenting the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Cagoule  Cagoulards as heroes. The US equivalent would be a serious & unironic Proud Boys pulp about the PBs fighting Soviet spies & Canadian Comsymps. 18/

What’s most intriguing to me about the Canadian pulps is the genre-mixing they engaged in. Didn’t matter if you were a courtroom reporter, a female counterintelligence agent, a cowboy, or a Mountie--you ended up in plots outside of your genre, fighting non-genre villains. 19/28

And the villains—ah, the villains! W/rare exceptions, pulp villains are always more interesting than the heroes they fight—more creative, more colorful, w/more meat on the bone (as it were). True for Doc Savage (ugh) & the Shadow, and emphatically true in the Canadian pulps. 20/

Some of the more interesting & creative villains of the Canadian pulps: Communist mad scientist “the Microbe Maker,” who spy Zed-29 fights alongside “the Tarzan of Korea;” the Beast with a Human Face; assassin fembots; The Silent Death; The Empire of Crime; The 18-Inch Men. 21/

The Mephisto of Crime. A wax museum murderer (years before Vincent Price’s HOUSE OF WAX). The Vampire of Formosa. Femme fatale cha-cha dancers. Lust-crazed Martian invaders. The Satellite of Flesh. The Planet of Satan. Zombies & werewolves & Fantômas himself. 22/

The Pied Piper of Crime (& her trained rats). Satania. X the Mysterious. A medium possessed by a ghost who seeks vengeance for her murder. Female circus acrobats. The Invisible Woman. Hooded African-Canadian crime lords. The Union of Criminals. Death Cab #6. 23/28

Thievery, Inc. The Wizards of Hell. Femme fatale belly dancers. The Faceless Men. Bio-engineered giant mosquitos. The Mummy Millionaire. Hugo Scarface. The Automatic Professor (an android crimelord). Female Soviet supersoldiers. Invisible Chinese spies. Sodom on Canvas. 24/28

Gun molls. White slavers. The Panther Woman. A woman possessed by Satan himself. Mother Morphine. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. A murderous Santa Claus. Inuit witches. The Band of the Hippopotamus. Fu Manchu. The Grandson of Frankenstein. And no less than King Kong himself. 25/28

But despite this glorious mélange of villains, the stories managed to be intensely Canadian: Canadian characters, Canadian concerns, Canadian settings. The writers may have started out imitating the US pulps, but they quickly made the livres de poche their own thing. 26/29

A series of murders of gay men in Montreal in 1953 & 1954 prompted an issue of LES EXPLOITS POLICIERS DU DOMINO NOIR in which the superhero Black Mask goes after a serial murderer of gays. The gays are sympathetically portrayed, too, something the USian pulps would never do. 27

Canadian pulps had a good twenty-year run, but like the USian pulps they succumbed to competition from paperbacks, tv & movies. IXE-13 lasted longest, to 1967 (1971 film). Still: twenty years of staunch resistance against USian cultural imperialism is no small thing, eh? 28/29

For those interested in learning more—and I left out a *lot*-- there’s this: https://offscreen.com/view/ixe_13  and François Hébert’s masterful two-volume set, LA LITTÉRATURE POPULAIRE EN FASCICULE AU QUÉBÉC ( https://leseditionsgid.com/auteurs/auteur-hebert-francois.html). 29/29