Popular Fiction

POPULAR FICTION. Why do radical writers produce so much popular literature with “tough-guy” characters, murder-mystery plots, and action-adventure themes? One explanation stems from the Left’s long association with muckraking, the literature of exposure, and the tradition of literary naturalism. Typified by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), Jack London’s Martin Eden (1909), Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925) and Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929), many radical novels of the first decades of the twentieth century starkly reveal the injustices of society and show how laws are biased in favor of the rich. With the onset of the Great Depression, writers promoting a hard-boiled literary sensibility in some of their fiction moved onto center stage as a major component of proletarian and revolutionary literature. Radical critics hailed Mike Gold’s Jews without Money (1930), populated with many gangster characters, and James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan (1932), featuring an aspiring “tough-guy” protagonist. At the end of the decade, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), which incorporated features of both tough-guy slum stories and detective mysteries, achieved best-seller status. Yet there is an ironic dimension to the work of Farrell and Wright that should not be missed; both of their protagonists, Studs Lonigan and Bigger Thomas, take their images of the tough guy from the mass culture that glorifies gangsters. Such delusions heighten their antisocial individualism and undermine potential ties to a community of collective struggle, which is the only foundation for social transformation. Thus the Marxist use of tough-guy motifs is not a capitulation to mass-culture gimmicks but a gesture toward the dereification of such mystifications.

Equal in importance to this joining of a hard-boiled view of society as a ferocious jungle with the class-war politics of Great Depression-era radicals is an economic fact of life: thrillers and mysteries were a mainstay of pulp magazines that usually paid writers by the word. Some leftists began simply by selling action tales to the pulps, usually under pseudonyms, but soon progressed to producing novels that exploited features of the genre while offering an implicitly Marxist critique of the society.

The poet Kenneth Fearing (1902–1961) wrote regularly for the pulps in the 1930s under the name “Kirk Wolff.” After a moderately successful social novel of white-collar workers called The Hospital (1939), Fearing penned Dagger of the Mind (1941), a mystery thriller about a murder in a writers’ colony. Then he attempted a futuristic tale about an aborted revolution, Clark Gifford’s Body (1942), before his most successful mystery, The Big Clock (1946), which was turned into a 1948 film noir starring Ray Milland. Fearing’s last three novels—The Loneliest Girl in the World (1951), The Generous Heart (1954), and The Crozart Story (1960)—focus variously on the audio engineering industry, fund-raising, and public relations.

This blurring of popular forms that grew out of the experience with pulps with the radical social critique of more “serious” fiction is similar to the experiences of other pro-Communist writers. Meridel Le Sueur (1900–1996) contributed to pulp magazines to support herself in the 1930s as did the poet Tom McGrath (1916–1990).

On the other hand, there were writers whose primary work remained in the hard-boiled genres. Walter Snow (1905–1973), active in the Communist Party at various times in the 1920s and 1930s, wrote prolifically for pulp and mystery magazines while he reported for the Daily Worker and coedited the proletarian magazine Anvil in the early 1930s. After he turned against the Party in the McCarthy era, he published an anti-Communist suspense mystery called The Golden Nightmare (1952).

Jean Karsavina (1908–1989), a lifelong Communist, contributed regularly to the pulps even as she published two left-wing books for young people with International Publishers, Reunion in Poland (1945) and Tree by the Waters (1948). Later she translated Tolstoy and wrote opera librettos while she edited Soviet Review and Problems of Soviet Literature from 1958 to 1965, and Reprints from the Soviet Press from 1965 until her death. In 1974 she published a major novel of her childhood, White Eagle, Dark Skies, which received a prize from the Jewish Book Council.

Some of Karsavina’s unsigned pulp fiction for True Story magazine was written in collaboration with Hope Hale (1903-2004), a Communist Party member of that time who married Robert Gorham Davis, a New Masses critic under the pen name “Obed Brooks.” As Hope Hale Davis she later published The Dark Way to the Plaza (1968), a collection of stories she had written for magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Town and Country, and in 1994 she published Great Day Coming: A Memoir of the 1930s.

In the 1930s Karsavina was married for a while to another Communist pulp writer, William Lindsay Gresham (1909–1962), who was also a folk singer, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, and aficionado of carnival culture. In 1942 Gresham married then Communist poet and novelist Joy Davidman (1915–1960), and a few years later he achieved prominence with a gruesome thriller of carnival life, Nightmare Alley (1946), which was quickly made into a motion picture. That year, Gresham and Davidman underwent religious conversions, both renouncing Communism completely. In 1949, Gresham published a second novel, about a tuberculosis sanatorium, Limbo Tower. After a brief attraction to Christianity, he became an enthusiast of Dianetics and Zen Buddhism. Davidman, in contrast, became an admirer of British Christian intellectual C. S. Lewis, whom she would eventually marry.

Gresham continued to publish in popular magazines. Many of his sensational articles on carnival lore were collected in Monster Midway (1953), and he produced books on body-building as well as a mass-market biography, Houdini, the Man Who Walked Through Walls (1960). Suffering from throat cancer, contracted as a result of a liquid he swallowed as part of a fire-eating act he frequently performed, Gresham committed suicide at the Dixie Hotel in New York City, a hangout for carnival people.

A radical writer who evolved from action pulps to more traditional fiction is James Norman Schmidt (1912–1983). Schmidt was in Spain both as a journalist and as a soldier in the International Brigades. Moving to Chicago in 1939, he served as sports editor for the Midwest Daily Record and briefly joined the Communist Party. Following harassment by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Schmidt moved to Mexico, where he remained until 1965. Under the pen name “James Norman” he had published action thrillers such as Little Bosses (1934), Murder Chop Chop (1941), An Inch of Time (1942), and The Nightwalkers (1946). In the late 1940s his pulp magazine fiction featured a heroic protagonist returning to Spain to bring out prisoners of the fascists. In 1960 he published The Fell of Dark, a novel about the fall of Valencia in 1939, and he subsequently produced other novels as well as books about Mexican history and traveling in Mexico.

A Communist who switched from more canonical left-wing writing to action pulps out of financial need is Paul William Ryan (1906–1947). He began writing as “Mike Quin” for the Partisan, organ of the Hollywood chapter of the John Reed Clubs, and then as a columnist and roving reporter for the Western Worker, predecessor of the West coast Communist newspaper People’s World. Ryan was also active in the 1934 and 1936–1937 maritime strikes, and researched the history of the maritime as well as the cotton growing industries while employed by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration. He wrote frequently for the Waterfront Worker and the Dispatcher, publication of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.

In 1940 a collection of his poems, columns, and reportage was published by the People’s World as Dangerous Thoughts, followed by More Dangerous Thoughts (1941). From 1943 to 1945, he hosted a radio show, “CIO Reporter on the Air.” As “Robert Finnegan,” Ryan published three successful murder mysteries, The Lying Ladies (1946), The Bandaged Nude (1946), and, posthumously, Many a Monster (1948). All concern Dan Banion, an ex-soldier turned newspaper reporter who is frequently at odds with the police in his investigations. The novels skillfully depict the postwar atmosphere and were translated into French, in which language they have been reprinted and attracted a following among critics devoted to the school of “hard-boiled dicks.” Following Ryan’s death at age forty-one from cancer, a memorial volume, On the Drumhead: A Selection from the Writing of Mike Quin (1948), appeared, as well as his history of the West Coast maritime struggles of the 1930s, The Big Strike (1949).

A second contribution of Left writers to mystery, thriller, and adventure fiction comes from those whose primary commitment was always to this genre. While the Left press occasionally railed against the commercialism of such fiction, hard-boiled mysteries and thrillers were given legitimacy on the Left after the mid-1930s by the pro-Communist Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961). Another committed pro-Communist writer with origins in the same Black Mask magazine school as Hammett was William Rollins (1898–1950). His early books include two mystery novels, Midnight Treasure (1929) and, under the pen name “O’Connor Stacy,” Murder at Cypress Hall (1933). His major left-wing contribution, The Shadow Before (1934), takes features of the 1929 Gastonia textile strike and sets them in New England. A Spanish Civil War novel, The Wall of Men (1938), was hailed by Richard Wright in an 8 March 1938 New Masses review as “the beginning of a popular mass pulp fiction in America, a brand of which can be read with pleasure by workers, without the danger of their becoming duped or misled.” Rollins produced one more mystery novel, The Ring and the Lamp (1947), before his death at age fifty-two.

Among the most remarkable Jewish “tough-guy” writers on the Left was Ben Appel (1907–1977). He grew up in the gangster-ridden Hell’s Kitchen area on the West Side of Manhattan and started writing poetry and fiction for the little magazines in the late 1920s. During the 1930s and early 1940s he was a non-Party sympathizer of Communism, and afterwards remained a liberal, although he sometimes identified himself as “Utopian.” The major achievement of his early years was the “Brain Guy” trilogy, consisting of Brain Guy (1934), The Power House (1939), and The Dark Stain (1943). This narrative of almost 500,000 words traces the evolution of college-educated Bill Trent as he emerges in the Depression as a gang leader, strike-breaker, and, finally, a full-blown fascist who promotes white supremacy and seeks to foment a Harlem race riot.

Among Appel’s twenty-five works of action-oriented fiction are many others with explicit political themes. Runaround (1937) treats political corruption in New York, while: But Not Yet Slain (1948) concerns the Washington, D.C., bureaucracy following President Roosevelt’s death. Fortress in the Rice (1951) and Plunder (1952) are harsh critiques of the United States occupation of the Philippines, where Appel worked for US High Commissioner Paul V. McNutt in the mid-1940s. Labor novels include The Raw Edge (1958) and A Big Man, a Fast Man (1961), while gangster novels include Life and Death of a Tough Guy (1973) and Hell’s Kitchen (1977). The versatile Appel also published a classic documentary narrative, The People Talk (1940); a historical novel of two families before World War I, A Time of Fortune (1963); and numerous juveniles, travel books, and popular histories and biographies.

Vera Caspary (1899–1989) was a major popular writer of mysteries and romances whose actual political views were not known to her audience until she narrated a rather tame version of her 1930s Communist Party activities in her autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-Ups (1979). Earlier she had fictionalized some of her radical experiences in a novel, The Rosecrest Cell (1967). Her reputation, however, rests on being a skillful suspense writer who excelled at showing personalities under stress due to fear or as a consequence of a police investigation. For many, her career seemed to begin with Laura (1943), which features a police investigator who falls in love with a murder victim. In Bedelia (1945), The Murder in the Stork Club (1946), Stranger Than Truth (1947), Thelma (1952), False Face (1954), Evvie (1954), The Husband (1957), and many others, Caspary usually employs multiple points of view and often features a character dominated by one particular emotion.

In an earlier phase of her career, Caspary had produced novels with more explicit social themes. Her first, The White Girl (1929), is the story of a light-skinned southern African American woman who moves to Chicago, where she passes for white. Thicker Than Water (1932) is an “insider’s” narrative of the assimilation of a Jewish family as orthodoxy fades and materialism becomes dominant. The Dreamers (1975) traces the lives of three women from the late 1920s to the 1970s. Two of Caspary’s plays were written with talented Communist writers, Geraniums in My Window (1934) with Samuel Ornitz, and Laura (1947) with George Sklar. Among her many screenplays, I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1951) was written in collaboration with Communist screenwriter Abraham Polonsky. Laura also was made into a film.

James Benét (1914-2012), the son of poet William Rose Benét and the nephew of poet Stephen Vincent Benét, went to Spain in 1936, where he served in the International Brigades, rising to officer’s rank. Returning to New York, he was employed by the Soviet news agency TASS for the following seven years. Next he tried to earn a living writing thrillers such as A Private Killing (1949) and The Knife Behind You (1950) before accepting work as a copyeditor at the San Francisco Chronicle. Benét pleaded the Fifth Amendment when subpoenaed to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953, but the managing editor of the Chronicle resisted pressure from the Federal Bureau of Investigation to fire him.

Another action-oriented writer with Communist sympathies for much of his career is Sam Ross (b. Samuel Rosen, 1912-1998). He grew up in Chicago, majoring in journalism at Northwestern University, where he was also an outstanding swimmer. In the mid-1930s he was in New York City, where he worked as a sportswriter for the Daily Worker. He was briefly in the Communist Party but did not resume membership when he returned to Chicago to work for the Federal Writers’ Project. Nevertheless, he became part of the circle of pro-Communist writers there and would identify with the Party into the early 1950s.

At the time of World War II, Ross served in the merchant marine. Upon his return he published a best-selling thriller, He Ran All the Way Home (1947). This is a gripping tale of a murderer holding a family hostage that Ross adapted for a film version starring John Garfield. He next book was Someday Boy (1948), about growing up in the tough West Side of Chicago, and The Sidewalks Are Free (1950), an outstanding autobiographical novel of a young boy in a Jewish immigrant family. This book was reissued under the title Melov’s Legacy in 1977.

During the 1950s Ross contributed episodes to television shows such as Naked City, Ben Casey, Rawhide, and Mannix. In the same years he produced a long series of sometimes racy action adventures, many appearing in mass market paperback: Port Unknown (1951), This, Too, Is Love (1953), You Belong to Me (1955), The Tight Corner (1956), The Hustlers (1956), Ready for the Tiger (1964), Hang-Up (1968), The Fortune Machine (1970), The Golden Box (1971), and Solomon’s Palace (1973). In 1979 Ross returned to the subject of his youth, this time re-creating experiences of his twenties, in Windy City.

Robert Carse (1902–1971), who spent seven years as a professional seaman in the US merchant marine, was for forty years a prolific writer of tales of adventures at sea and nonfiction books about ships, as well as juvenile novels and historical works. During the late 1930s he was friendly to the Communist Party and was active in the League of American Writers as a teacher in its New York Writers School and member of its Exiled Writers Committee. One of his popular adventure novels, Drums of Empire (1959), treats a renegade white man who joins the Haitian Revolution on the side of Toussaint L’Ouverture.

Other adventure novels by Carse include Horizon (1927), Siren Song (1930), Pacific (1932), Heart’s Desire (1934), Deep Six (1946), From the Sea to the Jungle (1951), The Beckoning Waters (1953), and Great Circle (1956). Carse received a combat bar with star citation for convoy duty to the Soviet Union during World War II, and drew upon his experiences for a highly praised nonfiction work, A Cold Corner of Hell: The Story of the Murmansk Convoys, 1941–1945 (1969).

The pro-Communist writer who was most consistently involved in the suspense genre, and who may have had the greatest success in the field, was Leonard S. Zinberg (1911–1968). “Len” Zinberg started to use the pseudonym “Ed Lacy” for all his novels and “Steve April” for short stories during the Cold War era. He was born in upstate New York and lived in Manhattan after he was ten. In the early 1930s, he traveled around the United States and worked at odd jobs before he started appearing in mass market and Communist publications such as New Masses under the name “Len Zinberg.” In 1940 he published Walk Hard—Talk Loud, about an African American boxer in love with a black Communist activist. This was produced as a play in 1944 by the American Negro Theater Company in Harlem, with a script by Abram Hill, an African American veteran of the Federal Theater Project. During World War II, Zinberg served as a correspondent for Yank magazine and won a Twentieth Century Fox Film Literary Fellowship award for an unpublished manuscript. Afterwards, Zinberg was active in the Communist-led Committee for the Arts, Sciences and Professions, which supported Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party campaign, and he published two more novels as Zinberg, including a radical one about the 1930s Left called Hold with the Hares (1948). With the publication of the paperback crime novel The Woman Aroused in 1951, Zinberg was reborn under the name Ed Lacy to protect himself from blacklisting and harassment. Never again, during the next two decades, did he refer to his earlier career or novels in autobiographical statements or in book jacket information. This double identity was not even known to most of his left-wing friends from the literary workshops and discussion groups hosted by editors of the Communist journal Masses and Mainstream that he attended throughout the 1950s. Zinberg was married to an African American writer, Esther, who was employed as a secretary by the Yiddish Communist newspaper Freiheit, and the decision of this interracial couple to adopt was another reason to guard his professional name from linkage to his political past.

In the 1950s and 1960s Zinberg became distinguished among mystery writers for his use of African American characters as protagonists, including two series characters, Moore and Hayes. A third series character is Dave Wintino, featured in the Lead with Your Left (1957) and Double Trouble (1965). Wintino is Italian American and Jewish American and has a Black partner.

Radical politics are pervasive in the Lacy novels. Sin in Their Blood (1952), his second novel as Lacy, depicts a right-wing organization blackmailing African Americans who are trying to “pass,” and Go for the Body (1954) tells of the interracial marriage of a black boxer who lives in exile due to U.S. racism. Breathe No More, My Lady (1958) depicts a radical professor who was blacklisted, now boxing professionally for a living. Sleep in Thunder (1964) treats racism against Puerto Ricans, and The Napalm Bugle (1968) attacks the U.S. government. Zinberg also published hundreds of uncollected short stories in mystery, pulp, and popular magazines.

Robert M. Coates (1897–1973) was a novelist, short story writer, and art critic who became famous for his ability to depict horror in an ordinary setting, particularly in Wisteria Cottage: A Novel of Criminal Impulse (1948) and in his short stories. Although all mention of Coates’s politics is erased from extent biographical materials and the memoirs of his literary friends, Coates was associated with the Communist Left from the early 1930s into the early 1940s. A writer for the New Masses, Coates signed the call to the 1935 and 1941 American Writers Congresses and contributed to publications and committees of the League of American Writers. Coates was also one of five individuals who solicited names to defend the verdicts of the Moscow purge trials in 1938, and he was among the signers of the 1939 open letter denying that the Soviet Union was a dictatorship.

An expatriate in the 1920s, Coates obtained a job on the New Yorker at the end of the decade through his friend James Thurber. Over the years he contributed more than one hundred short stories and rose to become an editor. Many of these are collected in All the Year Round (1943), The Hour after Westerly (1957), Accident at the Inn and Other Stories (1957), and The Man Just Ahead of You (1964). His first novel, The Eater of Darkness (1929), is a Dada-influenced burlesque of mystery novels. In 1930 he published a social history of the early nineteenth century, The Outlaw Years, and in 1933 a novel about life in the 1920s, Yesterday’s Burdens. Other novels include The Bitter Season (1946) and The Farther Shore (1955).

Jim Thompson (1906–1977), today regarded as the dean of suspense writers, developed his literary sensibility in the 1930s, when he was much influenced by the revolutionary Left. A member first of the Industrial Workers of the World, he was recruited in the mid-1930s to the Communist Party (using the Party name “Robert Dillon”) in Oklahoma. The man who won him over to Communism, William Cunningham (1901–1967), was himself author of a successful gangster novel, Pretty Boy (1936).

Thompson served for a time as director of the Oklahoma Federal Writers’ Project while he started writing for pulp and mystery magazines. His first two novels, Now and on Earth (1942) and Heed the Thunder (1946), were intended to be radical literature, the first even carrying endorsements from leftists Richard Wright and Millen Brand. However, he was by then growing disaffected from the Party, although he continued to call himself a socialist and his later writings exhibit social criticisms that some scholars have characterized as anarchist. These include Nothing More than Murder (1949), The Killer Inside Me (1952), A Swell-Looking Babe (1954), A Hell of a Woman (1954), After Dark, My Sweet (1955), The Kill-Off (1957), The Grifters (1963), Pop. 1280 (1964), Ironside (1967), and King Blood (1973).

Most contributions to mystery, thriller, and action fiction by other leftists and one-time leftists are more episodic. Marjorie Fischer (1903–1961), a leading activist in and official of the League of American Writers from 1935 until the Hitler-Stalin Pact, published an anti-Nazi spy thriller in 1944 called Embarrassment of Riches. Haakon Chevalier (1901–1985), a Berkeley professor of French and translator of André Malraux, published a political mystery novel about the struggles of farm workers called For Us the Living (1949). The next year Chevalier fled to Europe in the face of accusations that he had approached Dr. Robert Oppenheimer for information about atomic energy on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Roy Huggins (1914-2002) considered himself a Marxist after graduating from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1939. Although he was not a Communist, he believed he was denied a graduate fellowship on those grounds; he subsequently joined the Party in 1940. Unhappy with the Party position on World War II, he soon quit, but when Party policy changed he decided to give it a second chance and rejoined in 1943. In 1946, Huggins published the hard-boiled mystery The Double Take, but he was also beginning a career as a screenwriter, and as a consequence he was transferred to the Hollywood Party branch. Soon after, he concluded he was no longer a Marxist and again resigned. That same year he published Too Late for Tears (1947), and then Lovely Lady, Pity Me (1949). In 1951, Huggins gave friendly testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, naming a large number of writers as Party members. In 1958 Huggins published 77 Sunset Strip, based partly on stories that appeared in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Lawrence Treat (b. Lawrence Goldstone, 1903-1998) is considered the “father” of the police procedural novel. He began publishing in the late 1930s and was active in the League of American Writers into the early 1940s. Since then he has published nearly twenty novels, usually featuring series characters Jub Freeman and Mitch Taylor.

Morton Wolson (b. ?), a veteran of the International Brigades, periodically wrote detective fiction of the hard-boiled school for Dime Detective, Detective Tales, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. In 1988 he published a book-length thriller, The Nightmare Blond.

Ken Crossen (1910-1981), prolific in both mystery and science fiction, was a teacher of classes in detective and adventure fiction at the New York Writers School of the League of American Writers in 1941. His novel Year of Consent (1954) attacks the witchhunt.

Guy Endore (1900–1970), best known for his horror classic Werewolf of Paris (1933) and his best-selling King of Paris (1956), was a Communist Party member from the mid-1930s into the early 1950s. He published two intellectual mysteries dealing with psychoanalysis and linguistics, Methinks the Lady (1945) and Detour at Night (1959).

Eliot Paul (1891–1958) was an expatriate writer in the 1920s associated with transition magazine, founded in Paris in 1927. Between 1931 and 1936 he lived on the Spanish island of Ibiza, and his book about his experiences, The Life and Death of a Spanish Town (1937), was a contribution to the antifascist literature of the Spanish Civil War. For the rest of the 1930s he showed some sympathy for activities led by the Communist Left. He visited Spain to show support for the Republican forces, collaborated with the League of American Writers, and wrote The Stars and Stripes Forever (1939), a strike novel that was militantly in favor of the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Around the same time, Paul launched a series of nine humorous action mysteries featuring series character Homer Evans, such as The Mysterious Mickey Finn (1939), Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre (1940), and Murder on the Left Bank (1951). Paul is also known for his stirring memoir, The Last Time I Saw Paris (1942).

Margaret Larkin (1900–1967) came from the West to New York City in the 1920s, where she began her writing career as a poet and folk singer. In 1926 she published the one-act drama El Cristo, and in 1929 she published articles in both the Nation and New Masses about the songs of Ella May Wiggins, the martyred balladeer of the Gastonia textile strikers. In 1931 she published Singing Cowboy: A Book of Western Songs, and soon after, when she started working for the Theater Union, she met the writer Albert Maltz, to whom she was married from 1937 to 1964. In 1952, while Maltz was blacklisted from Hollywood, the couple was in Mexico and Larkin was traveling on a Mexican Airlines plane when a bomb exploded in the baggage compartment. The pilot managed to land the plane safely and an investigation disclosed that a popular Mexican singer had insured the lives of seven passengers, arranging for the explosion so that he could collect. Larkin turned the events and the trial into a successful nonfiction murder drama called Seven Shares in a Gold Mine (1959).

Edwin Lanham (1904–1979) was another Paris expatriate who became radicalized in the 1930s. He was active in the League of American Writers and wrote a radical novel about tenant farmers’ union organizing, The Stricklands (1939). Among his many later novels were a plethora of mysteries and thrillers such as Slug It Slay (1946), Politics Is Murder (1947), One Murder Too Many (1952), Death of a Corinthian (1953), Death in the Wind (1955), Murder on My Street (1958), Double Jeopardy (1959), Passage to Danger (1962), No Hiding Place (1962), and Six Black Camels (1963).

The Fast brothers, Howard (1914-2003) and Julius (1919-2008) are both radicals who wrote a significant number of mysteries. Howard Fast is primarily a historical novelist and was associated with the Communist Party from 1943 to 1956. His first suspense novel, Fallen Angel (1951), was published under the pen name “Walter Ericson.” A second suspense novel, The Winston Affair, about a court martial, appeared in 1959, and thereafter Fast began issuing a series of entertaining adventure novels about women under the name E. V. Cunningham, including Sylvia (1960), Phyllis (1962), Alice (1963), Shirley (1964), Lydia (1965), Penelope (1965), Helen (1966), Margie (1966), Sally (1967), Samantha (1967), Cynthia (1967), and Millie (1973).

Under the same pen name, Fast launched a series of mysteries featuring a Japanese American police detective in Los Angeles, Masao Masuto, a Zen Buddhist and karate expert. These include The Case of the One-Penny Orange (1977), The Case of the Russian Diplomat (1978), The Case of the Poisoned Eclairs (1979), and The Case of the Kidnapped Angel (1982). Other thrillers include The Hunter and the Trap (1967), The Wabash Factor (1986), and many stories in the science fiction genre.

Julius Fast, an independent radical who, after military service from 1943 to 1946, identified with the literary milieu around the Communist Party, produced a steady stream of detective and crime novels for the next decade. His first, Watchful at Night (1945), was published when he was still a staff sergeant. Soon after came Bright Face of Danger (1946), Walk in Shadow (1947), A Model for Murder (1956), Street of Fear (1958), and after a hiatus, The League of Grey-Eyed Women (1969). Fast also published popularizations of scientific studies about weight loss, smoking, and sexuality, achieving best-seller status with his 1970 work Body Language.

Chester Himes (1909–1984), who was influenced by the Communist Party in the late 1930s and 1940s, attempted to launch his career with radical novels. Unable to sustain himself financially, from exile in Europe he began producing a series of novels about two Harlem detectives that includes The Real Cool Killers (1959), All Shot Up (1960), Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965), The Heat’s On (1966), Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), A Case of Rape (1980), and the posthumous Plan B (1994).

Edwin Rolfe (1909–1954) was a Communist Party member who served in Spain and published four books of poetry. In 1946 he coauthored a mystery novel called The Glass Room (1946).

William Ash (1917-2014), who was born in Texas but has lived in England since his military service in World War II, is an independent radical who has shown sympathy for Maoism and the Communist Party of Albania. An occasional contributor to Monthly Review, he is the author of Marxism and Moral Concepts (1964). His political adventure novels about Latin America include Ride a Paper Tiger (1968) and Take-Off (1969).

While pro-Communist politics have been the dominant trend among left-wing writers of thrillers, there are noteworthy contributions by writers attracted to other radical outlooks and by some left-wing liberals who were close to the organized Left at certain moments. Rex Stout, for example, was a founding editor of the radical New Masses in 1926, but resigned when he concluded that the Communists wielded too much influence. In the mid-1930s, Stout became active in the League of American Writers, but pulled out again for similar reasons in 1938. Although he was strongly anti-Communist after that time, he published a novel attacking the role of the Federal Bureau of Investigation during the McCarthy era, The Doorbell Rang (1965).

Bruno Fischer (1908-1992) was an editor of the Socialist Call, a member of the League of American Writers in the mid-1930s, and identified himself as a socialist throughout his life. He began his career as a pulp writer under the name “Russell Gray,” specializing in horror and then moving on to detective fiction. He published hundreds of short stories and, starting in 1939, several dozen novels.

Miriam Allen deFord (1888–1975) was a socialist who was a correspondent for the left-wing Federated Press from 1921 to 1956. She also worked as an editor on the Federal Writers’ Project and was a correspondent for Labor’s Daily in California. DeFord is most highly regarded for her contributions to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which number nearly thirty stories, many of which are collected in The Theme is Murder (1967) and Elsewhere, Elsewhere, Elsewhere (1971). She also wrote crime documentaries and numerous political pamphlets that came out under the imprint of Haldeman-Julius in Girard, Kansas.

Eliot Asinof (1919-2008) began as a professional baseball player but started writing after World War II. Some of his books feature explicitly political themes, such as People versus Blutcher: Black Men and White Law in Beford-Stuyvesant (1970) and Craig and Joan: Two Lives for Peace (1971). Asinof’s mysteries and action novels, often with a sports theme, include Man on Spikes (1955), The Bedfellow (1968), The Name of the Game Is Murder (1968), and The Fox Is Crazy, Too (1976).

August Derleth (1904–1971) contributed to the Left journals Anvil and New Writers and was a member of the League of American Writers in the late 1930s. Among his many mystery novels are a series featuring Judge Peck that includes Murder Stalks the Wakeley Family (1934), The Seven Who Waited (1943), and Death by Design (1953).

Several unusual novels of Bernard Wolfe (1915–1985), who was a Trotskyist in the 1930s, are action thrillers. In Deep (1957) is especially noteworthy for its political themes. His last novel, Logan’s Gone (1974), is an action mystery set in the radical political and countercultural milieu of southern California.

Anthony Boucher (1911–1968), a Catholic and liberal Democrat, taught mystery writing at the Communist-led California Labor School in the 1940s. Boucher was a prolific editor and critic, and a selection of his fiction writings appeared in 1983 as Exeunt Murderers: The Best Mystery Stories of Anthony Boucher.

Since the rise of the New Left with its counterculture and the development of new social movements in the 1970s, the mystery and thriller genres have remained attractive to literary radicals. Examples of such writing in recent years include Roger Simon’s The Big Fix (1973), about a 1960s activist turned private eye; Gordon DeMarco’s October Heat (1979), a murder mystery set at the time of the 1934 longshore strike; John Shannon’s Broken Codes (1986), a thriller about the Central Intelligence Agency; Katherine V. Forrest’s The Beverly Malibu (1989), which features a lesbian detective trying to solve the murder of a man who had been a “friendly witness” during the investigation of Hollywood; and Walter Mosley’s A Red Death (1991), about his African American series character, Easy Rawlins, and a Jewish Communist union organizer in Los Angeles during the witch-hunt years.

By the twenty-first century, “Popular Fiction" as written from the Left had become almost a fugitive realized best in disguise. Arguably, only literary veterans Walter Mosely and the science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson continued with considerable success to fit comfortably the category of Left and Popular. Contemporary political fiction, however, continued to include novels dealing with contemporary issues, particularly intersectional inequalities and climate change. In the absence of a vibrant and growing labor movement, few authors worked in what was formerly termed “proletarian” literature. Activist and Left topics provided motivation for at least a handful of writers. John Lethem (b. 1964) produced several successful science fiction and detective novels and ultimately won both a MacArthur fellowship as a best-selling and innovative writer. His Dissident Gardens (2013) follows the history of the US left, from the1930s to Occupy Wall Street, inspired in part by his own bohemian upbringing. A singular work by Sri Lankan American Sunil Yapa, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (2016) features a protagonist involved in the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.

Such successes in mainstream publishing have proved to be relatively rare. A handful of small publishers, notably Hardball Press, have sought to present a world of literature out of the world of the working class, and a vivid example of radical labor would surely be The Canyon (2018) by Ben Kostival. More generally, the younger radical writers tended to turn their talents away from novels and more toward the electronic media. Perhaps the booming field of “Afrofuturism,” described by the New York Times as “worlds and futures where the African diaspora and sci-fi intersect,” offered the most intriguing new development, if more likely realized in graphic novels than otherwise.

Folsom, Franklin. Days of Anger, Days of Hope: A Memoir of the League of American Writers, 1937–1942. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1994.

Lewis, Jon E., ed. Red Handed: From the Anarchists to the Hard-Boiled. London: Allison and Busby, 1989.

Madden, David, ed. Tough Guy Writers of the Thirties. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968.

Wald, Alan M. Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics. London: Verso, 1994.