Mercy Killings

For 94 years the dime novels, pulp magazines and comic books of Street & Smith have helped U.S. males while away billions of idle hours in bunkhouses, fo'c'sles, foxholes and subways. One generation escaped into a world of high adventure and happy endings in Nick Carter and Horatio Alger tales; another ate up Supersnipe and the Shadow comics. None of their pulp-paper characters was ever so hard-boiled as Street & Smith themselves; whenever a title slipped in public favor, they coldly shot it down. Last week Street & Smith staged a mass execution. In one volley, their last five comic books and their four surviving pulps (Detective Story, Western Story, Doc Savage, The Shadow) bit the dust.

New Directions. Said Street & Smith President Gerald H. Smith: "They weren't making any money. We just weren't interested in them any longer." Neither was the public. From a wartime high of 4,250,000, the circulation of the two groups had plummeted to 700,000 a month. Changing times and tastes were to blame, said S. & S.; radio, television and the newsstand competition of the 25-c- reprint books had shrunk the market.

That explanation might do for the pulps, but not for the comics. Some other comic-book publishers were thriving, and total sales were still 60 million copies a month. The fact was that Street & Smith had ridden off in another direction--into the women's field. There Street & Smith's Mademoiselle, Charm and Mademoiselle's Living were selling 1,272,000 an issue among them.

Big Guns. Founder Francis S. Street and Francis S. Smith never dreamed things would turn out that way when they took over the New York Weekly Dispatch in 1855. Editing their magazines and paperbacked books for men only, they bought the humor of Bill Nye and Josh Billings, the Buffalo Bill stories of Ned Buntline (Edward Zane Carroll Judson), the dime novels by Nick Carter (Colonel Frederick Van Rensselaer Dey), 1,000 stories about Frank Merriwell by Burt L. Standish (Gilbert Patten).

Branching out from the field of six-gun and college-gridiron thrillers, Street & Smith also launched such pulps as Top Notch and Ainslee's, made sales boom with the works of the firm's byliners, who included Theodore Dreiser, O. Henry, A. Conan Doyle and Bret Harte. Covers came from such artists as Norman Rockwell, James Montgomery Flagg and Howard Chandler Christy.

But Street & Smith was living in its lurid past--and losing money--when energetic Publisher Allen L. Grammer, a white-haired alumnus of Curtis Publishing Co., took over in 1938. Grammer soon set about converting the outfit from pulps to slicks. In two years he built Mademoiselle to 300,000 circulation, later added the other women's magazines. Today the only traces of a man's world around Street & Smith are Astounding Science Fiction and two slicks, Air Trails Pictorial and Pic Sports Quarterly. Grammer says they are thriving. But in case they should ever weaken, S. & S. would be, as usual, ready with its six-shooter.

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