An old fashioned hard boiled detective story. Jack gets in over his head when he decides to go right to the source when he's writing in this new genre of crime novels.

If you are a fan of Matt Helm, Mike Hammer, Tiger Mann, and the like, pick up Paperback Jack and get a glimpse of an author writing tales set in this milieu. Jacob Heppleman had written stories and one serialized novel before he went off to war. When he came back, he found that the pulp magazines were going under while paperbacks with lurid covers were taking off. Jacob as Jack Holly managed a career as a writer by talking to various folks involved in shady occupations and creating characters and stories that readers would buy. But all good things come to an end when Congress decides to listen to bigots and psychiatrists. Jacob managed to change his writing style and focus to survive and thrive. An interesting visit to a time that almost feels familiar today. A quick historical read!

Jacob Heppleman is back on U.S. soil after fighting for Uncle Sam in Europe in the Second World War. Heppleman finds a different world, one that he needs to get a grip on, fast, if he’s going to survive. Before the war, Heppleman eked out a living as a hack writer, supplying stories to the pulp magazines, but now the pulps have been going out of business, with direct-to-paperback books taking their place.

Heppleman can’t scrape together enough dough to buy a pawnshop typewriter, so he steals one instead, but without the pulps, his paycheck before the war, who will he write for? The head of a new publishing company, Blue Devil Books, assures Jacob that there’s a hot market in the drugstore racks for tawdry crime novels – sold as much (or more) for their covers as for the stories – and that Jacob should be one of the primary in-house writers.

Jacob becomes the unlikely best-selling author who takes great pride in his authenticity – which comes from his befriending several underworld figures who, in turn, like being the source for the larger-than-life characters.

But when Hollywood takes an interest in the books, so does Congress and the moral guardians. Soon Heppleman is a target for politicians and the Mob and he’s going to have to do some fancy writing to create a neat ending for himself.

I loved everything about this book.

Author Loren D. Estleman really captures the mood and sense of the 1950’s detective fiction, making our protagonist both a writer of such potboilers and the subject of the same.

Heppleman is a reluctant central figure (I’m hesitant to say ‘reluctant hero’ because there’s no real heroics that go on here). He’s a writer who prefers to let his characters take the lead while he stays in the background, but he relishes doing his own investigative work so that he can use what he learns in his books – giving them an air of legitimacy.

Even reluctant, though, Heppelman is steadfast. He makes no excuses for what he writes and he holds his own in the morality hearings, which does make him a bit more heroic, but only a bit.

I found this to really feel like a hard-boiled detective mystery of the 50’s, but also a bit like an historical fiction novel. There’s a good bit of history and while the events here may be fictional, they have their roots in reality. I loved learning a few things about this era and Estleman makes a point, in his “Recommended Reading” at the end of the book, of recognizing some of the writers who navigated these kinds of events.

Late in the book, when Heppleman is older and attending conventions – now an icon as a writer of the ‘golden age’ – when asked why his books (and those of his contemporaries) are only just getting the respect that was denied them in the day, he delivers a speech that I consider the message of the entire novel. “The world caught up.” He tells the questioner:

Many of us were just back from the war. You can’t see cities being bombed, corpses piled in concentration camps, and dish out happy endings. We wrote about a world that had changed, and we pointed out where it took a wrong turn. For that we were called smut peddlers. Then along came political scandals, pointless wars, and men’s peckers on movie screens where Shirley Temple used to sing and dance. It took all that for everyone else to see what we saw. So now we’re serious artists who weren’t afraid to tell it like it was.

Maybe I’ll use some of this speech myself the next time someone asks why I’m suddenly interested in 1950’s noir fiction. I finally caught up to it.

Looking for a good book? Paperback Jack by Loren D. Estleman is a noir-like, hard-boiled novel of a writer of noir-like, hard-boiled novels in the post-WWII era.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

This review ran in the February 2023 issue of Historical Novels Review.

Paperback Jack is a love letter to the paperback publishing industry that blossomed in all its tawdry glory after World War II. Jacob Heppleman comes home from the war with a grimmer and grittier knowledge of violence than he had when he wrote short stories for the pulp magazines. He finds that the magazines are dying, to be replaced by the new pocket sized paperback books that sell in drugstores for a quarter, and his name has been changed to Jack Holly. According to his Jewish agent, Heppleman is too Jewish for the times. As Jack Holly, he writes a book called The Fence, and seeking verisimilitude, scrapes an acquaintance with an actual fence. The book makes money and Jacob is threatened when it is sold to Hollywood and the fence wants a cut. Ironically, a worse danger comes from his own government when he is subpoenaed to testify before a Congressional committee investigating the paperback industry. This is the era in which the House Un-American Activities Committee has set its sights on everything from Communists to comic books and the “degenerate” influence of lurid paperback novels with even more lurid covers. They pry into the politics of those testifying before the committee but also into their personal and sexual lives, at a time when to be homosexual, or even thought to be, is to be shunned. The cover artist of The Fence is also caught in their net, accused of leading young men astray. Written in the (almost) unvarnished vernacular of the late forties and early fifties, Paperback Jack is both an affectionate portrait of the book and movie business and a cautionary tale for our times about the dangers of censorship, literary and otherwise. Thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking.

— Amanda Cockrell

Loren Estleman’s ‘Paperback Jack’ is a strange little book that manages to be both pedantic and intriguing at the same time, and, while its strangeness derives primarily from its seemingly out-of-left-field subject matter, the deeper message of the short novel rings true throughout, and readers grow to feel a fondness for the main character over the course of the story that sticks with them even after the tale has ended, and the message, unfortunately, is still rings as true today as it was during the 1950s time period of the story itself.

The majority of the novel sees readers follow returning WWII veteran Jake Heppleman as he seeks to reestablish himself as a writer in the mystery genre, and he comes back horrified to see that pulp, and the paperback industry that represents pulp fiction across the U.S., has taken the American reading public by storm. Before the war, there seemed to be a lot more ‘old fashioned’ mystery stories, where whodunnits and honorable detectives took centerstage in their literary magazines, which proliferated in the prewar years thanks to their cheapness during the Great Depression. But, Heppleman encounters a New York City changed both personality-wise and reading-style-wise, as the predominant form of popular entertainment at the time are the lowly pulp magazines and the new emerging technology known as television. Many think that television will come and go, but the pulps will be here to stay—they’re extremely cheap to mass produce, they can easily fit in coat and jean pockets for transportation purposes, and they feature sordid tales of mayhem, sex, and madness, the tales chockful of the violence and sexual freedoms that Americans post-WWII craved more than ever.

As Jake struggles to come to terms with this new kind of literary landscape, he meets and falls in love with Ellen, another hopeful writer in a creative writing course, and the story really takes off from there. Readers follow Jake’s escapades as he finds a new publisher, Blue Devil, run by a wealthy British man who is more interested in money than anything (including treating his authors with respect), and the two frequently butt heads, with Jake oftentimes telling the publisher that he needs to stop embellishing uber-racialized details on non-white characters or selling the rights to his stories without his consent. Concurrently, Jake befriends an artist, known as Scarpetti, who paints the extravagant and bombastic covers that help make the Blue Devil paperbacks fly off the shelves of soda fountains across the U.S., and readers soon discover that the artist is gay, something that was akin to a death knell in the U.S. of the late 1940s and 1950s. The novel then evolves into a character study for a good portion of pages, as we spend a significant chunk in the middle of the book watching Jake and Ellen’s relationship blossom right alongside Jake’s burgeoning friendship with this quirky artist who fully embraces who he is (in private, at least, and in public as much as was allowed back in the late 1940s).

The story then somewhat awkwardly stumbles into the final act, where Jake, Scarpetti, and many other writers and publishers are called to Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. to testify in front of Estleman’s fictionalized version of the real-life House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials Congressional Committee, which was itself a spinoff of the House Un-American Activities Congressional Committee, a byproduct of the noxious McCarthyism of the early 1950s. We watch as Jake fights back against morally bankrupt Congressmen and -women who seek to censor his books and other paperbacks of the day, as they claim the stories are ‘corrupting America’s morals’ and ‘ruining our youth.’ The book then ends on both an uplifting and bitter note, as we flashforward to the 1970s at a mystery writers’ conference, and we learn that, while Jake and many of the pulp writers beat the censorship goals of the Congressional committee, there were toxic byproducts of the events that occurred, and Scarpetti was outed by the committee and subsequently blackballed for the rest of his life, disappearing into the blackness of yesteryear for Jake and Ellen.

Overall, this was a quick read, and it kept me wrapped up for most of the events that unravel as the novel goes on—there’s just enough action to keep the thin plot going, and the deeper, more philosophical parts of the novel, such as the last chunk of action in Washington, D.C. in front of Congress, is clearly trying to comment on the hypocrisy and fatalism of the kind of censorship that occurred in real life in the late 1940s and 1950s, and Estleman tries to tie a throughline from then to the current moment, where we have people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz somehow trying to be the moral core of America. While he’s never ‘roll your eyes’ heavy-handed with the messaging, Estleman struggles to explicitly tie it into the main plot of the novel other than at the margins, and even then it seems to be a bit tenuous. And, I can’t remember the last time I’ve read a book about pulp authors themselves, so getting into the world took a little bit of an adjustment, along with the small amount of strangeness in regard to focusing on the literal writing of pulp novels rather than the pulp genre itself.

But, that doesn’t mean this novel isn’t worth your time—even if the way the message is portrayed leans a little bit into knock-you-over-your-head territory, it’s incredibly important in today’s world, and it wouldn’t hurt the current book banners to read this and understand the kind of hypocrisy that they’re repeating today. Estleman also writes with a style that harkens back to the best of the pulp era, and his dialogue is razor sharp—I stopped what I was reading several times and looked up and thought to myself how authentic and real his characters sounded and acted, and I was delighted to be reading something like this pseudo-pulp novel in the early years of the 2020s, almost 80 years after Pulp’s Golden Age.

‘Paperback Jack’ is a great piece of work that, while a little in-your-face with its main purpose, still captivates readers by mixing a blend of smaller plotlines with relevant moral messaging, and the lesson than Estleman seeks to impart to his readers is just as relevant today as it was back in the main time period of the novel. Whether that is a good thing or not is yours to decipher (you would think America would realize that trying to censor art is not a great way to go about its affairs, but this is also the same country who elected Donald Trump for some godforsaken reason), but, at the end of the day, this is a quick little read that entertains throughout, and who doesn’t want to read some zippy dialogue and action from late 1940s New York City and its pulp writing scene?

Thanks to NetGalley, Forge Books, and Loren D. Estleman for the digital ARC of ‘Paperback Jack’ in exchange for an honest review.

Paperback Jack by Loren D. Estleman is a historical fiction with some light thriller elements based around the birth of paperback book sales.

Post-World War II, author Jacob Heppleman homes home to a changed world where the pulp magazine he previously wrote for are on their way out, being replaced by original paperback novels. Scorned by critics, they seem to sell pretty well, or so Jacob is told by the owner of Blue Devil Books. Said owner suggests Jacob change his pen name to "Jack Holly" and write crime novels. During his research, Jacob crosses paths with some unsavory characters, and finds himself targeted by both Congress and the Mob.

This book turned out to be a lot more than I was expecting! I was engaged the whole time and it was very compulsively readable. I found all of the characters very likeable, and I cared about what was going to happen to them throughout the course of this book, especially a queer side character.

I think this book is being a little mis-promoted, as I initially requested this one as a historical or noir thriller, but it's really more historical fiction with some very light thriller elements.

There are a handful of slurs in this book. Some might argue "a product of its time" but I feel like the author could have just omitted them completely.

CW: firearms, slurs

Published by Forge Books on November 15, 2022

Paperback Jack is a tribute to the writers who published their original creations in paperback (as opposed to writers whose books appeared in hardcover before they were republished in paperback) when paperbacks were first being widely distributed. As Loren D. Estleman tells the story, pulp fiction magazines that were popular before the war gave way to paperback originals in the post-war years. Many pulp writers made the transition to paperbacks because that’s where the money was. New writers also seized the opportunity of mass readership that paperbacks made available.

Estleman cites his sources for the history of paperback publishing in a Recommended Reading section at the end of the novel. He also gives a shout out to writers like David Goodis, John D. MacDonald, Harlan Ellison, Donald Hamilton, and Leigh Brackett, important and gifted writers who primarily published their original novels and story collections in paperback. He left Philip K. Dick off the list, but I’ll forgive him. Dozens and dozens of outstanding writers wrote paperback originals during the post-war years.

History lessons aside, Paperback Jack is a work of fiction. Before the Second World War, Jacob Heppleman wrote stories when he wasn't working in his day job. He sold a few, then wrote a crime novel that was serialized over five issues of a pulp magazine. The novel caught the attention of an agent who persauded Heppleman to retain his services.

Heppleman is drafted before his agent can sell his novel. He comes home to an America that has abandoned the pulp market. Preferring the life of a writer to a job that made him listen to a boss, Heppleman tries to buy a slick portable typewriter from a pawnshop owner. When Heppleman attempts to negotiate a better price, the shop owner insults his war service. That night, Heppleman gets drunk, tosses a brick through the shop window, and steals the typewriter.

Heppleman writes a war novel and tracks down his old agent, who tells him that the public has had enough of war. Paperback crime novels with lurid covers (as well as westerns with lurid covers and comic books with lurid covers) are the new rage. Heppleman is skeptical until he learns that while he was overseas, the agent sold his crime novel to a paperback publisher for a hefty sum.

The publisher is focused on brand identity rather than literary quality. Heppleman has reservations about writing books that will be marketed with lurid covers, but he needs to make a living so he signs a book contract. He pitches a novel about a reformed fence. To gather accurate background information, Heppleman gains an introduction to an actual fence who expects a share of the profits (including movie royalties) if the book does well.

The publisher changes Heppleman’s name to Jack Holly, has the company’s best artist paint a lurid cover, and Heppleman is on a reluctant road to success. The plot takes Heppleman through his writing career, a courtship and marriage, a friendship with a gay cover artist, testimony before a congressional committee that puts on a show at the expense of comic books and paperbacks with lurid covers, and a conflict with the fence. The novel’s ending flashes forward to give Heppleman a chance to be grateful for an industry that allowed him to make a living.

Estleman always writes with economy and purpose. As his publisher says of Heppleman, Estleman is incapable of writing a bad sentence. He’s the kind of prolific writer whose books would have been published as paperback originals in the 1950s, although his work began in the 1980s and Paperback Jack is currently published in hardcover. I wouldn’t call the cover of Paperback Jack lurid (it’s missing blood and a dead body while the busty blonde only bares her shoulders), but it does suggest a tame version of a cover from the golden age of paperback originals.

Heppleman struggles to maintain his independence and decency while respecting the practical advice of his wife, who understands that raising a child requires at least a modest income. Heppleman, his wife, and the artist are all likable characters. The story is entertaining, but its true value lies in Estleman’s reminder that the post-war explosion of paperback originals made an important contribution to the history of American literature.

RECOMMENDED

3.5 stars

This is something different for Loren Estleman, the amazingly prolific author of a Detroit mystery series, many Westerns and a bunch of standalones. This book is sometimes mistakenly labeled a mystery or thriller when what it really is is a noir homage to the era of paperback pulp fiction.

The story is of a returning WWII vet turned author who struggles, then meets success, then gets caught up in some 50s national legislative morality challenges.

As always with Estleman, each character is well-drawn and unpredictable. His prose is gritty and the setting is a bit grim, as befits the time and the noir genre. The book is in several different sections with a much later ending sort of explaining how things turned out. The ending is a bit bizarre but the story itself has many twists and turns. Thanks to the publisher and to Net Galley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Paperback Jack is advertised as a noir thriller, but instead reads like a period piece/memoir.

Pulp fiction writer Jacob returns stateside after WWII and finds the pulps dead. What is a writer to do to make a living? He turns to creating lurid paperback fiction as his meal ticket. But instead of writing pure hokum, like most of his colleagues, Jacob enters the seedy underworld himself in search of realism. With predictable results…

Paperback Jack might be in part a memoir. The author may be too young to have returned after WWII, but he is a veteran mystery/western writer from the 1970s. However, this book meanders around and never really gets in its groove. It is definitely not paced as a thriller. It isn’t really a memoir either. While the writing style was good, I kept expecting something to happen. It never did. It’s probably best for historical fiction fans. 3 stars.

Thanks to Forge Books and NetGalley for a digital review copy of the book.

This book sounds objectively fun, but I’m no longer interested in the book. Could work better for others

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced digital copy of this book in exchange for a review.

The throngs of GIs returning from WWII are not all successful in returning to the jobs they had previously. One such soldier is Jacob Heppleman, a decorated soldier who spent his pre-war time writing for pulp magazines. But those are no longer popular, and war stories are a dime a dozen, so Jake has to find something else he can do. He tries to learn how to really write professionally through a course taught by a man who describes soldiers as "guys who were not smart enough to avoid the draft", earning him a punch in the nose from Jake. But at least he meets a nice girl............

His pre-war agent guides him to the new paperback book industry, actually tricks him into it by selling one of his pre-war books for publication against Jake's wishes. But when he meets the publisher of Blue Devil books, he decides to write for them. But he wants to write realistically, which sometimes means he gets mixed up with some, uh, unsavory people.

There are Congressional hearings into whether paperbacks are the root of the evil of wild teenagers and a crime wave. And he has gotten on the bad side of some of those previously-mentioned unsavory people!1

In the end, of course, paperback books WERE the wave of the future and Jake, after all is said and done, is a master at the genre.

In 1946, Jacob Heppleman returns from the war ready to resume his career as a pulp magazine writer. However, his agent tells him that the pulp magazine industry is dead and now writing paperbacks is the way to go. Jack isn’t interested in writing paperback novels that will be on racks in the drugstore but they are selling like crazy. He reluctantly begins to work for Blue Devil Publishing writing spicy pulp novels. Along the way he becomes involved with a cover artist with a shady past, the mob and a scary pawnbroker.

As his success grows and Hollywood becomes interested, Jack comes under fire from politicians who want to censure his writing and the whole pulp fiction industry that the government says is corrupting the morals of the country.

I am a sucker for noir, private eyes and writers of hardboiled crime novels so when I saw the cover of this book and read the description, I knew I had to read it. Paperback Jack is billed as a historical thriller but I didn’t find it to be a thriller in the usual sense. It is more historical fiction about the publishing world of pulp friction and the artists who did the covers of these books. This is the first book written by Lored D. Estleman that I have read and I will be reading more of his books.

Paperback Jack will be published on November 15th. Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for the advanced reading copy.

#PaperbackJack #NetGalley

Really interesting novel about one writer's struggle to pivot from writing magazine articles to writing pulp paperbacks in the wake of WWII. While these paperbacks with their lurid, risqué covers are low-brow fare for the masses, "Jack Holly" takes pride in being a professional and meeting with the underbelly of the criminal world to lend verité to his work. I've read other works by Loren Estleman and while this is different, it is just as well-written and engaging.

Loren Estleman is a gift to readers. His characters are fully formed human beings, and his knowledge of history for both time and place, inform is stories. Paperback Jack is as much about publishing in post World War II America as it is about Jacob Heppleman aka Jack Holly. The pace is slow but savor it.

Paperback Jack by Loren Estleman starts with the beginning of paperback books. Jack, just back from the war, writes books published by Blue Devil Books. He researches his stories by meeting real life crooks, thieves and fences. His books are very successful. if you’ve read any of the pulps or the old paperbacks with their lurid covers, this will be an enjoyable book, and if you haven’t, start now. It’s fascinating to read of Jack’s self doubt about the kind of stories he writes. Not Surprising, when you think authors of these books seemed to churn them out one after the other. For the money. Great read, for the story, the history, the flavor of a past time.