Introduction

Bludgeoned by disasters from barely distinguishable news media and entertainment venues alike, contemporary audiences have normalized the aesthetics of abjection and catastrophe, but this phenomenon is not new. Fascination with mayhem has a long history in American popular culture. It was standard fare in the hero and weird menace pulps of the 1930s, of which Popular Publications' Operator #5 series serves as a prime example. Published between 1934 and 1939 under the house name Curtis Steele, the stories offered a monthly jolt of civilization-shaking cataclysm. The first twenty installments (April 1934-November 1935), novellas running 50,000-60,000 words each, were produced by pulp great Frederick C. Davis. Eventually, Davis found concocting a new world-threatening crisis each month tiresome, and authorship passed to Emile C. Tepperman, a productive writer about whom few biographical details are known. Tepperman penned the monumental Purple Invasion arc, spanning thirteen episodes (sometimes called the War and Peace of the pulps), before passing the torch to another prolific pulpster, Wayne Rogers, who continued cranking them out until the magazine folded in 1939. Altogether, Operator #5 ran for 48 issues, plus one unpublished novella. Although a clear assessment of how contemporaneous audiences read these magazines is difficult to establish, the stream of unrelenting calamity raises a puzzling question that remains relevant today: in a period beset by tremendous economic dislocation, crumbling democratic institutions, universal rearmament, the environmental degradation of the Dust Bowl years, the ills of unplanned urbanization, disease epidemics, and ambivalence towards threatening technological innovations, escape into a hyper-charged version of these nightmares seems absurd; while we expect escapist literature to offer vexation and disaster, it traditionally functions to quell anxiety through its framing devices.

Scholarship on the analytic detective story offers some insight into this framing process, and to some degree is applicable to Davis given the range of conventions shared by that genre and most of his series contributions. Quieting psychological unease in readers entails theatricalizing crises as manageable, an artificial and potentially hegemonic fantasy in which the reestablishment of dominant cultural values coincides with closure. Superficially, this appears to be the case in Davis's Operator #5 universe: an individual (the eponymous series hero whose salvation function is reflected in his name, Jimmy Christopher), possessed of vast esoteric knowledge and a set of handy skills (fencing, ju-jitsu, masterful disguise, etc.) more or less single-handedly overcomes a crisis that official institutions cannot resolve to unmask the villain, frequently of the least-likely-suspect type, and thereby restore the diegetic universe to its former, precarious stability – at least until next month's episode. To be sure, the consequences of failure far outstrip the country house mystery or even the disappointments arising from localized corruption in contemporaneous hard-boiled detective fiction (Jameson 9-10). And yet, because weird menace stories demanded rational explanations, their psychological effect appears to derive force from the Golden Age and hard-boiled closure strategies concurrent with the series' production. In Operator #5, however, this formal requirement is notably shifted to the footnote and newspaper headline, rather than dependent upon the detective's disclosures (or, in its hard-boiled twist, revelations from the criminal). For the casual reader, Davis inhabits an established generic structure whose appeal derives in part from its self-contained theater, but he tends to destabilize this structure by deploying paratexts – Gerard Genette's term for "an 'undefined zone' between the inside and the outside" of a text – which themselves evolve over his series run to compete with if not displace the detective's transcendental function (2).

As remarked, detective fiction of all stripes, as well as its pulp adventure cousins, resolves crises to reestablish normative standards, usually in line with dominant cultural values. Although hard-boiled, noir, thriller, and procedural versions of the genre frequently end in disappointment, even injustice, displaying the detective's or institution's ineffectual attempts to achieve fully satisfying closure, this failure still gestures towards conventional resolution in that we know what the outcome should be even if the villain escapes justice. In its classical mode, an individual transgressor, often a disguised traitor to a class-based value system, flouts community standards (Grella 98); the investigator unmasks and expels this individual to reinstitute the established hierarchy under the auspices of reason and order.¹ But even when norms are ostensibly reestablished, what really is restored are the narrative's initial conditions; individual deviance is neutralized, but the systemic propensities that encourage it are never seriously brought into vision; similar crises recur since the same inducements to criminality persist (Horsley, Noir 34). Institutional weaknesses in the form of baffled police inspectors, dependent upon unofficial outsiders enjoying a status far exceeding the legitimate scope of private citizens, or private justice exercised by the detective, rarely call the social bases of transgression into question. An act of language frequently suffices to compel belief, which in any case must suffice, given the unlikelihood that the evidence would stand the rigors of a trial (Hühn 452). Ultimately, conditions of discontent in an unequal, competitive society persist, so that hard-boiled and menace stories, like their Golden Age counterparts, tend in a similar formal direction, though lacking the same degree of self-congratulation in the denouement (Clarke 66).

This formula has prompted critics to psychologize the anxiety-reducing function of detective fiction, a practice that has been extended to other popular media like the hero pulps. John Cawelti's pioneering work regarded adventure pulp escapism as tension-reducing in its gravitation towards order, writing that "the excitement and uncertainty are ultimately controlled and limited by the familiar world of the formulaic structure" (16); formal pre-understanding essentially blinds readers to content that might interfere significantly with pleasurable closure. His position is echoed by George Dove – formally, such fiction shuts down the close scrutiny of textual fissures (which might register as poor construction), leaving the audience "free to enjoy the playing of the game" (24), whose ultimate object "is the elimination of potential stress elements" (41). We obtain "security within a framework of familiar expectation" (51), which explains why during periods "of great crisis like war and economic disaster, people read detective novels in order to escape from rather than to participate in reality" (109). Dove's position, while supported by a theoretically-rigorous method, is not exactly original: Archer Jones implied as much in a 1938 article on the pulps (38-39); the chief difference is that he disparaged such escape as infantile, a sentiment echoed in more classist terms at about the same time by Margaret MacMullen (94, 98). Of course, the 1930s provided much to escape from, and Golden Age novels resolutely remain silent on the economic, social, and political disasters of the day (Horsley, Twentieth-Century 39). This point is precisely where the Operator #5 stories break with convention while nonetheless retaining the structural trappings of the wider genre. The thinly-resolved response to staggering destruction is grounded in Davis's frequent and sometimes annoyingly intrusive footnotes: interpolations gleaned from real sources, naming well-known public figures, historical incidents, familiar places and buildings, and repeatedly citing facts and figures to underline the dire nature of the threats crowding the "fictional" page to which they are appended. Though the few commentators on the series claim this marginal voice enhances verisimilitude, for me, these inescapable reminders of real-life conflict ground and amplify what pulp historian Don Hutchison terms the series' "scores of paranoid daymares" (78) with its "surreal social mirror of the collective phobias of its time" (79) – the degree of threat seems to exceed the capacities of the system to neutralize them. Contrary to the bourgeois investment in the individual extolled by the analytic detective, and, in mildly critical terms, by much of the hard-boiled canon, a fair proportion of these paratextual remarks point out the ubiquity of existential threats impacting American life in the 1930s, such as the alarming uses of scientific advances or political machinations involving amoral transnational agencies. The miraculous return to order in the final pages – announced from atop a pile of smoldering ruins – repeatedly takes the form of newspaper headlines declaring that all is well. Having raised an intolerable level of menace, the text takes an almost transparently hegemonic turn, a magical departure at odds with the so-called rational demands of the genre – the move signals critics to give these paratextual media functions careful attention.

Through the paratextual strategies, the constructionist dimension of the series comes into focus, illustrating how the representation of crisis is linked to institutions behind the hero. Close examination reveals him to possess limited agency despite his larger-than-life persona; indeed, his chief role is the "correlation" of unquestioned facts rather than the visionary framing of truth. The footnote displaces the hero and achieves conviction by founding claims upon the testimony of institutionally-bona fide experts or anonymous media sources. These are repeatedly fused with the fictional narrative to warrant the general arguments of in-text actors. Headlines, also treated as paratextual due to their boundary relation to the articles they designate, are even more elusive in that they are entirely decoupled from authorship. These textual interventions are not vehicles to convey information; rather, they consistently function psychologically to augment tension, and then, paradoxically, to resolve it. The scholarly footnote and the media pronouncement are themselves external to the text's generic conventions, but reflect a set of psychological strategies already socialized into readers. The traditional detective prerogative to establish truth whereby the mystery is solved, whether or not this truth becomes public knowledge, and thereby to offer audiences closure, shifts to a vaguer array of institutional and media-generated forces. This eclipse of the individual's role signals a more pervasive shift from theatricalization under the directorship of the rational hero to diagrammatic structures with more diffuse and concealed sources of power, thereby displaying the texts' hegemonic potential, though in a way that is arguably self-disclosing to the critical reader.

Readers, Authors, and Editors

The Davis contributions consist primarily of Yellow Peril stories, fascist or communist incursions, and domestic crises. Many stories are blatantly xenophobic; most reject internationalism, though isolationism is grudgingly repudiated as impractical in the face of worldwide rearmament. In the domestic crisis tales, the nation is beset by unscrupulous profiteers and duplicitous leaders, environmental collapse, economic dislocation, food insecurity, waning religious conviction, and, recurrently, the specter of home-grown fascism. The first novella, The Masked Invasion, establishes a range of recurring themes. But a close reading does not so much reveal nostalgia for traditional standards of conduct as ambivalence tinctured with irony. This tension emerges in the interstices of unstable pairings: the narcotic of hyper-consumerism versus the acknowledgment of capitalist exploitation, the efficacy of mass democracy versus the impositions of elite individuals (or threats of hypostatized villains), and the reliability of public-sphere information organs versus epistemological uncertainty arising from conspiracies that can only be pieced together by experts from subtle and far-flung clues. In each case, the first term proves inadequate to or, worse still, enabling of the second. Along these lines, in The Masked Invasion (and later tales, like The Melting Death or The Green Death Mists), capitalists are both untrustworthy and idolized, corrupt and inefficient. Government is decried but depended upon in crisis, fetishized consumption is paired with sentimental and idealized family life. Operator 5's paternalistic sympathy for victims, like Dust Bowl farmers in Legions of Starvation, is tempered by the belief everywhere in the series that Americans need not be pushed very far to revert to barbarism – riots, looting, and violence continually threaten to break out on vague pretexts and as a result of villainous disinformation campaigns.
           

Determining readers' responses to these calamities remains challenging. Few academic inquiries systematically investigate pulp readership, and contemporaneous reading studies are marred by restricted sample sizes and methodological incompatibility (Kaestle et al. 180). Depression-era popular culture research by University of Chicago scholars (e.g. the Motion Pictures and Youth series) was often openly biased. William Gray, a major figure in reader research, and co-author Ruth Munroe make no effort to conceal their disdain for the pulps (68, 84, 101), nor did studies with an ostensibly working-class focus (Rasche 12, 82-84); relatively sympathetic voices like librarianship scholars Douglas Waples and Leon Carnovsky hoped young readers would evince more interest in "better-quality" material (2-3). And though prominent pediatric psychologist William Healy downplayed the link between the pulps and delinquency, he thought such material a risky stimulant to unbalanced readers (305-306). The dearth of demographic data, both then and now, forces a critical reconstruction of audiences from the texts themselves and, when possible, clues in the original publications such as reader letters, advertising, and editorial commentary² – these difficulties have not discouraged researchers from claiming that hard-boiled, adventure, and menace pulps were consumed by young, white, working-class men, though David Earle candidly admits "a gap between the hoped for or constructed audience and the actual readership" ("Pulp" 199). We can say with more certainty that the business of pulp production had only tenuous links to working-class life. Few pulp authors had such class backgrounds – Fred Davis, the son of a doctor and grandson of a newspaper editor, attended Dartmouth and worked as a journalist and photographer before turning full-time to the pulps; his education and professional training were by no means unusual.
           
The authorial and editorial production process likewise offers relatively few documentary sources helping to explain why certain themes predominated. Determining Fred Davis's motives, beyond his economic interest, is difficult since biographical data about him are limited. In a 1922 Writer's Digest article, the twenty-year-old Davis reveals himself to be more concerned with the minutiae of formal composition than broader social issues ("Lesson" 14). Two decades later in "Why Did She Shoot Him?" and "Synopses without Sorrow," these preoccupations persist. His analytic treatment of criminal motives implies that their social dimensions are incidental rather than consciously deployed, and his dismissal of the insanity motive to resolve mysteries reflects continuity with the classic detective tradition, in which individual responsibility instead of extraneous (social) factors determines guilt. For Davis, whatever ideological dimensions we might wish to attribute to outcomes remains a plotting concern: "Once the murderer is revealed as irrational, the whole story ceases to make sense. The plain truth is that the use of the insanity motive is a confession on the writer's part that he has cooked up such a bizarre concoction he can't account for it by any reasonable means" ("Why" 17). These scattered essays and a few homages to Davis disappoint our finding clear-cut authorial convictions underpinning his portrayal of Operator 5. Even in respect to the text, Davis's creative role in the framing process is hard to determine conclusively given editorial prerogatives. Davis states that "the basic idea of the Operator 5 series…was given to me by Harry Steeger, the publisher [of Popular], and Rogers Terrill, the editor" (Carr, Pulp 60), but pulp author Wyatt Blassingame, originally slated to write the series, apparently did not take the job because he had concocted less calamitous plots. Thus, Blassingame left the project and Davis stepped in.

With the exception of John Locke's anthologies on pulp writers and editors, and the scattered memoirs of authors like Hugh Cave, Frank Gruber, and H. Bedford-Jones, the conditions of pulp text production remain a generally unexplored process involving writing and editorial regimes preoccupied with quick sales and bottom lines – the heterogeneous mass of consumers were measured in millions per month, but the inner workings of readers' buying habits are lost in the larger scope of the sales figures. The claim, maintained by more than one astute pulp historian (Murray 149; Hulse 339), that Operator #5 came to an end when World War II made its subject matter indistinguishable from the newspapers, is disputable: magazines were cancelled because of poor sales, whatever the cause. That leaves us with the textual focus, to which I now turn. I argue that the gap between fiction and media are anything but obvious within the series, at least for the Davis component. This textual indeterminacy, which the scholarship on footnotes tends to view as inducing self-consciousness among readers, ends up paralleling the wider social impacts of institutional indeterminacy, especially in respect to mass media.

Footnotes
           
For most readers, footnotes in fiction are understood to evoke their nonfictional scholarly uses: they "give legitimacy" and build claims of "authority" and affinity in respect to the critical field they evoke (Maloney 15; see also Genette 325). Shari Benstock, in a groundbreaking essay on these relatively rare literary appendages, demonstrates how footnotes are "engaged in dialogue with [the text], and often [perform] an interpretative and critical act on it" (204), though one, she maintains, that remains confined to the closed textual universe. Benstock contends that literary footnotes are less "critical" than "creative" inasmuch as they "direct themselves toward the fiction and never toward an external construct, even when they cite 'real' works outside the particular fiction" (205) – the key distinction is the bracketing of the "real," which apparently encloses the note within the fictional universe, despite its potentially diverse and complex functions. In the context of detective fiction, Benstock's position, which she establishes vis-à-vis canonical authors like Sterne and Joyce, seems relevant to Golden Age analytic detective fiction, including their ironic use by writers like Edmund Crispin. This self-referential limit is harder to maintain in respect to Davis.
          
Malcah Effron, the only scholar to give sustained attention to footnotes in popular fictional genres, argues that contrary to a postmodern tendency to textual self-consciousness, the Golden Age detective story footnote enhances the Barthesian "reality effect" (199-200), thereby aiming to distract readers from the convention-heavy artificiality of the genre. Their inclusion, though infrequent, occurs in Anthony Berkeley, Ellery Queen, Edmund Crispin, Clayton Rawson, Anthony Boucher, and John Dickson Carr. The exceptional figure is S.S. Van Dine (Willard Wright), whose Philo Vance novels are conspicuously note-heavy: 261 instances over ten books (1926-1936). Despite Van Dine's and Davis's different generic orientations, both authors' notes collectively fall into three types, though in varying proportions: artificial paratexts, semi-artificial paratexts, and factual explanations. Artificial paratexts, a term used in the scholarship, pertain to characters and relationships bound to the fictional world of the novel, including digressions on behavioral and physical traits and references to earlier books. Semi-artificial paratexts, a term I have coined to clarify a specific type of relation, invoke real historical personages and factual events, but bring them into meaningful cause-and-effect relationships with fictional characters. This type constructs a purposive bridge into the readers' universe that functions to obscure boundaries between fiction and reality. In contrast to this interactive mode, purely factual notes cite real individuals, places, events as background, useful exposition that is not bound inextricably to plot and character. A fourth type, absent from the Vance stories, is the ideological note which consciously legitimizes characters' positions with factual or purportedly factual evidence to sway reader perceptions. The first three types, shared by Van Dine and Davis, occur in significantly different proportions. Van Dine's tally consists of 61% artificial, 5% semi-artificial, and 33% factual notes; of the 41 real-life persons he references, social scientists, natural scientists, and artists account for 75% (most intended to enhance Vance's insufferably elitist personality); military leaders and politicians, which comprise the bulk in Davis, are distinctly absent. These differences point towards a different authoritative ground beneath each series, culminating in the investment we have in the hero as a definitive window into truth.
           
Our first impression might be that ratiocination versus adventure is the key. Hard-boiled pulp detective stories, which Davis is closer to in feeling than their Golden Age counterparts, are virtually devoid of footnotes; their very appearance in hero pulps, in fact, raises an eyebrow, given the taboo against anything that slows narrative momentum. They are not entirely absent, though. The use of content notes was pioneered by Walter Gibson, writing as Maxwell Grant, in the January 1934 issue of The Shadow (1931-1949). But by the end of 1940, only nine such notes had appeared, and only one of the nine refers to a real person, Wilhelm Specht, author of a 1937 treatise in German on the identification of blood stains. Lester Dent's Doc Savage series (1933-1949), is also note-free until 1939 – over the next four years, Dent cited a smattering of historical or scientific data. Paul Chadwick and G.T. Fleming-Roberts, two contributors to the Secret Agent X series (1934-1939), employed them more regularly, though almost entirely as artificial paratexts to extol the hero's prowess. The only pulp competitor, at least in terms of volume, to either Van Dine's or Davis's note counts is Kendall Crossen's Green Lama series in the relatively short-lived Munsey pulp Double Detective. Crossen's fourteen novels, published between 1940 and 1943, contain 365 notes, of which about 15% offer scientific, medical, or historical explanations linked to events in the text. The remaining 85% is divided equally between artificial paratexts describing the hero's paranormal powers or previous adventures and explanatory notes on Buddhism. Finally, Norvell Page's The Spider (1933-1943) deserves mention given its potential influence on Davis. Page’s first notes appear in The Serpent of Destruction, April 1934, two of which cite articles from the New York World-Telegram, a Munsey-owned paper that Page worked for until the beginning of 1934. Referring to real events and persons four months before the story appeared on newsstands, such connections help establish continuity between the reader's world and that of the hero. Over the next few issues, a handful of similar notes support technical or scientific claims in the story, but never approach the scale of Davis's use. The first Operator #5 issue appeared in April 1934 without notes; in May 1934, three references are made to persons and events from earlier issues, formally resembling notes in The Shadow. The third episode, June 1934, contains the first explanatory note that merges external and internal worlds, supplying scientific details and citing real people. The explanatory footnote quoting well-known newspaper sources may reflect the direct influence of Page on Davis, given the time frame, or, since both were Popular pulps, it could suggest the editorial intervention of Steeger or Terrill. In any case, Davis took the idea to a new level within six months.

Davis's conscious interpenetration of media and fiction finds support in a 1973 letter to pulp historian Nick Carr in which Davis claims his novellas' crises to be derived directly from news reports (Pulp 57-58); Will Murray maintains that "it is possible to deduce which newspaper articles, current or historical events inspired a given story" (130; see also Hutchison [85-86]). The sociopolitical content of the Davis novellas, probably the most overt of any long-running 1930s pulp, is obviously bolstered by the steady stream of statistics, newspaper extracts, historical excurses, and biographical data on public figures. The twenty Davis-authored stories contain 185 footnotes, of which 12% are artificial and 4% complete fabrications. A full 72% of the notes contain factual content referring to real-life events, people, and texts or scientific or sociological information necessary to understanding plot development. Sometimes abstruse, they include digressions on frequency distorters, narcotic nomenclature, the Doppler Effect, the chemistry of ozone, and an explanation of heterodyne wavelengths – a total, by my count, of 26 different technical headings. The remaining 10% of the notes are divided equally between semi-artificial footnotes in which fictional characters interact with historical ones, and, unique to Davis, ideological digressions which consist of factual evidential material deployed to support the hero's perspective on sociopolitical events. They are also difficult to ignore: in 22 instances, footnotes exceed one page in length, and in one eight-page sequence from March of the Flame Marauders, four footnotes comprise almost 2,000 words of text. Overall, Davis cites 78 real books, journals, and newspapers, some of which are technical in nature. The three most discussed topics, in descending order, are American and foreign armed forces, rearmament, and scientific inventions, usually with a military application. Of the 94 historical personages named in Davis's footnotes, 48 are either military leaders or political figures. Another 22 are natural scientists, and the balance, in descending order, consist of industrialists, authors and journalists, miscellaneous public figures, spies, civil servants, bankers, social scientists, and lawyers. As such, the notes' academic flavor and current events references place significant demands on the working-class boys supposedly comprising the audience.

In respect to conventions and formulaic plot structures, the notes function to dilute the genre's formal capacity for containment as well as the hero's determinative control over investigative boundaries; they constitute a framing device, in this case implemented less by the hero as by anonymous institutions subtending his world. To explore this problem, the focus here will be on examples that fuse in-text action with historical events and personages (semi-artificial) and that incorporate support for argumentative processes (ideological). Several semi-artificial notes gravitate around set themes; they infuse real events with sinister meanings to enhance the narrative's disaster focus. Even though a lacuna emerges, either in the narrator's diction or the merely correlative nature of events, a blurring effect between diegetic and non-diegetic universes results. For instance, in The Red Invader, the crash of the Lituanica and deaths of its pilots Stepanos Darius and Stasys Girénas, an event that had occurred seventeen months before the story appeared on newsstands, is attributed to Nazi's shooting down the aircraft. This claim, generally refuted today but discussed seriously at the time in the press, is referred to in the text as a "rumor," and the note qualifies the statement with phrases like "it was said," "according to the story," and "it was thought." Yet, the details isolate dates, geography, and the names of those involved, lending it a factual patina that fuses with the more dubious and undisputed detail that "there were bullet holes in the corpses which surgeons had tried to cover up" (Steele 195). Invasion of the Dark Legions, which involves bioweapon attacks on the United States, forges a connection between germ warfare and the 1934 polio outbreak in southern California (Steele 6), suggesting such epidemics to be engineered by foreign powers. Legions of Starvation cites a real but alarmist report by economist Robert Doane on food insecurity to amplify this theme in the novella (Steele 171-72). And the Exchange Equalization Account of 1932 instituted by Neville Chamberlain is given a long, un-pulp-like note that argues the act's underlying purpose to be economic warfare on the United States, a claim that is embroidered to become a complex ploy by Germany to alleviate its war debt (Steele, Red 92-93). Such notes serve as gateways to more overtly ideological notes, which deal with themes from energy to isolationist foreign policy, but whose chief concern over several novellas is rearmament.

Situating the ideological commitments expressed over the course of Davis's books is complicated by the pull exerted by ambivalent if not contradictory positions between notes and text. March of the Flame Marauders details the crisis of dwindling oil reserves brought about, we are led to believe, by mismanagement and illegal drilling. The industry's disintegration will in turn cripple America's military readiness and eventually precipitate social collapse. Subsequently, foreign sabotage is revealed to be behind much of the crisis, the effects of which could have been averted by implementing an uncooperative scientist's novel extraction process (essentially a technological solution redirecting attention away from exploitive industry practices). But the footnotes, many of them long and statistics-heavy, convincingly warrant the charge of reckless exploitation, which in turn contradicts the narrative's attribution of responsibility. The mismanagement claim is compounded by details, again in footnotes, of foreign sales of American oil to political enemies and the unscrupulous interventions of oil lobbyists to oppose tariffs at the behest of huge energy conglomerates (Steele, Flame 42-43), suggesting an old-boy network of tycoons and government officials lying at the root of America's energy ills.

The most pressing confluence of narrative development, footnotes, and ideology concerns rearmament, topical given the global political instability in 1934 and 1935. In the fourth novella, The Melting Death, the narrator's disdain for armament manufacturers is expressed in an attack on French munitions maker Eugene Schneider (Steele 65-66), symptomatic of a larger critique of international finance capitalism that threads through the Davis books. Other footnotes, in Invasion of the Dark Legions (28), March of the Flame Marauders (54-56), and Invasion of the Yellow Warlords (75-76), insert real-world reporting into the text to support Operator 5's position on the munitions industry: strong critiques of industry leaders' amorality, anxiety-inducing statistical data from real sources concerning the strength of other nations' militaries, and anti-foreign/isolationist sentiments against the export of raw materials to strengthen the war machines of nations perceived as antagonists. The general effect of numerical tables, following Lugo-Ocando's work on this subject, is "a sense of legitimacy and objectivity" arising from "the assumption that the collection and analysis of data and statistics is grounded in the scientific method, society's model of objectivity and neutrality" (52).

The most sustained meshing of footnotes and ideological argument emerges in League of War Monsters. The opening chapters expose a cabal whose ultimate aim is to dissolve national boundaries through precipitating conflicts that draw in all major nations. Through terrorism and bribery, conflicts are ignited that fuel pre-existing rivalries and draw others in via treaty commitments. The United States becomes involved when the Capitol is blown up; the blame is placed on Balkaria, a central European nation. Having achieved these basic aims and no longer requiring the group's support (a body which had styled itself the Secret League of Nations), the leader manages to kill all but one of its members. The survivor, an American World War I veteran named Hunt, eventually collaborates with Operator 5 after the "truth" is explained to him in the most overtly political speech of the Davis series. The villain, identified late in the novella as an American millionaire and stock manipulator, is revealed to be secretly connected to armament makers; he remains unnamed until his unmasking, suggesting that his identity is less important than his tactics – to exploit the (misguided) humanitarian motives of his lieutenants thereby weakening resistance to his actual plan. By fomenting crisis, he reaps immense profits in the form of gold which will facilitate his aim of world domination.

The novella incorporates some of the same semi-artificial paratext strategies found elsewhere, such as statistical information from the 1934 League of Nations Armament Year Book (Steele, League 31), passages from speeches by British Vice Premier Stanley Baldwin (League 70) and Swiss politician Rudolph Minger (League 122) concerning arms budgets, and citation of energy and metal policy in France by Albert Lebrun (League 8-9), all in "support" of the narrative. The narrator also openly condemns, in footnotes, the practices of Pierre DuPont (League 52), Basil Zaharoff (League 76), and Gustav Krupp (League 79), along with unsourced condemnatory remarks about the Vickers-Armstrong conglomerate (League 77). The upshot of these shady business deals is a scathing note, citing at length an article by Rear Admiral Montagu William Warcop Peter Consett about the acquisition of deadly weapons by enemies of countries in which the weapons are manufactured – all for the enrichment of an unscrupulous mogul elite (League 78). The disturbing consequences of tolerating these real-world cabals are substantiated by other notes citing chemists like H.S. Booth and George Cady on the proliferation of poison gas development and remarks on the future of chemical warfare by General Amos. A. Fries (League 49-50).

Occasionally, references to official reports, tabulated charts, and living people recognizable to any competent newspaper reader of the time are juxtaposed with unsourced statements that assume the weight of evidence, given their position in the book. Such footnoted claims include the rationale for shifting naval resources to the West Coast based upon perceived Japanese threats (League 10) and vague accusations against a shadowy clique of industrialists intent on dissolving national borders (League 67). The semi-artificial and in some cases dubious ideological paratexts prepare the ground for Operator 5's lecture to Hunt, the purpose of which is to bring him around to a correct understanding of the carnage of World War I, namely, that the major players in munitions manufacture profit from the indiscriminate sale of arms. In this version of events, capitalist exploiters and their government lackeys, not capitalism or democratic government as a system, are to blame. To claims that both France and Germany tacitly avoided bombing sites absolutely necessary to the production of munitions (and therefore, he claims, the means by which war could continue) in order to protect the capitalist conglomerates producing the weapons, a footnote is somewhat lamely added: "Operator 5 has here stated only accepted facts" (League 106). The argument posed by the book, that the dissolving of national boundaries will curtail future conflict, is revealed to be naïve – these boundaries have already been dissolved by industrial players, evidenced by the admissions of British General Herbert A. Lawrence in his post-military capacity as advisor to Vickers-Armstrong in a citation lacking much context, and the more fanciful claim that the assassinations of Ernst Röhm and Kurt von Schleicher occurred because they had diverted some of the arms from these international deals into private military stockpiles (League 106-07). The fictional development of a position in the text, supported by in-text events, merely parallels the real-world events offered in the footnotes.

Headlines

The disillusionments of a defeated Philip Marlowe or Lew Archer are not reflected in most of their hard-boiled pulp predecessors – perhaps the existential gloom of their closing quasi-theodidact flavored reveries on justice recommend such narratives to scholars who might scorn crowd-pleasing resolutions as trite. Davis wrote several pulp series in the 1930s (Secrets, Inc., Keyhole Kerry, Bill Brent, Moon Man, Ravenwood) which conform to such popularized notions of justice: the punishment of criminal transgressors who have purposively victimized others, and whose apprehension, unmasking, and punishment are depicted as retributively satisfying. Indirectly, the Operator #5 series contests such comforts, not in individual psychological terms, but in respect to the social disproportion between the defeated villain and the irreparable destruction wreaked upon society. Under the circumstances, the restoration of norms delivered through headlines are suspect, but this wariness is evident in the text itself, given that media institutions are repeatedly denounced in the series as untrustworthy, circulation-obsessed, susceptible to corrupt editorial practices, or blatantly fraudulent. To amplify this ambiguity, the footnotes are frequently sourced from news media – a total of thirty-four named newspaper dispatches, including eight from the Associated Press and five from the New York Times. The fissure between reliable source information and the ideological demands of framing suggest a tension within the manifest rhetorical closure strategy.
           
Closure in detective fiction – both the analytic and hard-boiled types – is typically premised on knowledge (Dove 10), usually of a certain teleological type (Keller and Klein 52-55), even when this knowledge does not lead to the effective suppression of criminality or punishment of wrongdoers. The Davis series, while occasionally identifying the villain early on, frequently emulates the detective genre by delaying the unmasking to generate suspense. This "solution" effect conventionally highlights the detective's capacity to reframe solutions which simultaneously demolish official institutional efforts at explanation. In contrast, the bracketing of crisis in Operator #5 as a prerequisite to its management evades the protagonist's agency (unlike the analytic detective who often reclassifies seemingly innocuous events as criminal); much more is deferred to anonymous forces situated within science, media, and other institutions that function in an information loop and whose assertions are self-legitimated in footnotes. The medium (newsprint) that serves to announce disaster is the same medium which sets the world aright. Operator 5 does maintain the detective's capacity to perceive threats beneath the surface of normal American life, but their viability depends upon pre-existing, uncontested "facts" that exceed Operator 5's determinative capabilities. In League of War Monsters, he unearths "a gigantic, diabolical plan" (25); despite its vagueness, he tells a navy admiral "I have gathered this information through independent work [analyzing publicly-available media], and not even my chief knows about it" (18). Similarly, in Invasion of the Dark Legions, he confidently tells the President: "We know…that for more than a decade the United States has been the target of a vast international intrigue. While the world imagined itself at peace, the plans of our enemies have developed" (Steele 27).

Dangerous mass movements are cobbled together from heterogeneous sources, as in The Green Death Mists: "something has been happening among the yellow races of the world, blending even into other peoples…It is as though a ferment has suddenly begun working in the souls of these peoples. Bit by bit, vague information has reached me which indicates that some tremendous organized force is bending these races together under one secret leadership" (Steele 27). Time and again conviction requires correlating far-flung media reports which neither he nor his bosses doubt as reliable registers of fact. In Legions of Starvation Operator 5 tells Director Z-7 that a revolutionary political party, the New Populists, have been organizing "so secretly, so carefully, that we cannot even dream the full extent of their operations!" (Steele 35). Subsequently, he is called upon to substantiate this claim: "From his pocket, Jimmy Christopher drew an envelope from which he removed closely packed newspaper clippings," a common practice in the series (Starvation 77).

Newsprint, and its capacity to impact public perceptions of events, has not always enjoyed the same degree of uncritical acceptance depicted in the novellas. David Papke, in Framing the Criminal, recounts how antebellum newspaper crime reporting "was rich in critical perspective," but that by the late nineteenth century, such journalism "lost a conscious, energetic concern with crime's political meanings and consequences" (xvi-xvii), and presumably its capacity to generate faith in those meanings as a function of appearing in print. Despite this shift, the journalistic presentation of crime, in tandem with contemporaneous detective and crime fiction, "helped shape Americans' understanding of and reaction to crime" (Papke 99) – their overlap was facilitated by the fact that much early detective fiction appeared in newspaper columns side-by-side with factual reporting in the late nineteenth century (Panek 179). This blurring or conflation of functions continues to resonate in sociological assessments of popular culture (Clear ix; Phillips and Strobl 307) and finds correlation in contemporary media studies (Lugo-Ocando 37) as well as the sociological claims of cultural criminology in which popular culture itself is potentially read as a criminological text (Rafter 55; Ferrell et al. 158; Welsh et al. 458; Young 86).

By the late nineteenth century, however, concerns over the negative impact of newspapers were also being voiced by censorious reactionaries like Anthony Comstock. More academically-restrained, twentieth-century commentators refrained from directly blaming newspapers as incitements to violence but suggested that they were contributory (Brasol 166-67). Against the backdrop of shrill magazine editorials, attempts at more methodologically self-conscious assessments slowly emerged. In her pioneering 1910 study "The Influence of Newspaper Presentations Upon the Growth of Crime and Other Anti-Social Activity," Francis Fenton admits gauging the influence of media reports on criminality to be difficult and that positivist methods like counting the numbers of articles or inches of column space may not reflect actual behavior – or that they remain indeterminate given the lack of systematic crime records at the time. Her circumspection did not stop writers from decrying the inflammatory effects of newspaper sensationalism. Edward Ross, writing in the same year as Fenton, stated that journalistic decline should not only be laid at the feet of the papers' capitalist backers but also attributed to the vulgar demands of consumers: newspapers were forced to "cater to the common millions…To interest errand-boy and factory-girl and raw immigrant, it had to become spicy, amusing, emotional, and chromatic" (303). The shifting locus of responsibility comes full circle in Joseph Holmes's 1929 study where he concludes that readers emulate what they read, somewhat along the lines of supposed advertising influence (56).

The most comprehensive newspaper project of the period, the 1937 study Newspapers and the News, was enhanced by the incorporation of qualitative assessments and content analysis. It also offered the innovation of placing newspapers on a spectrum running from socialization to sensationalism, a method based on classifying and hierarchizing headlines. The researchers justified their approach in four ways: the affective influence headlines exert over the public, their attention-grabbing capacity, their general correspondence to article contents, and their indexical function for efficiently comparing a large volume of newspapers (Kingsbury et al. 9). In line with contemporaneous reading and media studies, though, the authors maintain that "the great bulk of the newspaper reading public reacts emotionally rather than intellectually, and has not progressed much in socialization beyond the point of sympathetic thrills to sob stories and smashups" (Kingsbury et al. 17), a belief concretized and given force in the arrangement of their categorical hierarchy. The scale is topped by business news, passes through political and civil reporting, and bottoms out in increasingly emotional and sordid material. The Operator #5 tendency to deploy headlines highlighting international affairs, citizenship, finance, and science, paradoxically places them in the socialization range, despite undeniably being embedded in vicarious pulp sensationalism. Again, like their contemporaries, Kingsbury and her coauthors fret over the capacity of the press to impact public opinion, which for inexplicable reasons they never seriously link to its broader profit-making function.

Like the footnotes, Davis's newspaper headlines exert a distinct influence on how problems are construed and resolved; in this respect, they run parallel to the analytic detective's framing function. Because these paratexts sometimes pull in opposing directions, the mechanisms behind their truth-generating capacities attract notice. By both inducing and curbing emotive responses, their use opens a fissure in the text. Stephen Knight, writing in the context of detective fiction, remarks that fissures, used in Pierre Macherey's sense, "are not so much large-scale omissions of material, but moments where the text shows itself unable to gloss over tensions inherent in…the material that is presented" (14). As such, they "reveal the areas of central anxiety, the space where the ideology works at its hardest to assert that all is normal" (5). To be sure, elisions are symptomatic of narrative generally, but in this context, they offer a legitimation strategy to endorse specific institutional figures and methods that are themselves thematized (Srebnick 18). In The Melting Death, news of a disarmament conference, understood as naïvely simplistic by readers who have witnessed the behind-the-scenes machinations of industrial leaders, universally inspires hope in the diegetic world. But media reporting of political speeches in Invasion of the Dark Legions results in riots, as does the food rationing plan to avert famine in Legions of Starvation. The centrality of media is displayed most directly in the deployment of newspaper headlines, 179 embedded headlines in all, and particularly as recurring blocks of dispiriting scareheads. Explanatory text supporting these headlines eventually disappears by the ninth installment, Legions of Starvation, shifting from headline-article combinations with specific reference to events and persons with an expository function (twenty-one instances) to stand-alone or grouped headlines without articles. The latter do not move plot or explain the hero's motives; rather, they deepen the urgency of crisis while employing a conventional shorthand to announce if not define that crisis. When situated at the end of novellas, however, they signify closure, quickly resolving colossal problems with almost comic abruptness. For both determinative and resolution functions, the locus of speech, and its ideological commitments, occupies a shadowy space of institutional power. The nonfictional veneer around media pronouncements, similar to the footnotes, becomes a tool divorced from any specific speaker, but legible to readers as evoking real-world practices.
           
Other pulp authors incorporated newspaper articles as plot-moving devices, and the use of isolated headlines was not unknown. But overall, the pages of Dime Detective, Thrilling Detective, and Detective Fiction Weekly offer few examples, and Black Mask authors (or its editors) seem to have eschewed the practice entirely. The only parallel case is Davis's own Moon Man series appearing from 1933 to 1937 in Ten Detective Aces, with nine headline/article combinations and twenty-eight stand-alone headlines, most of which are concentrated in 1934. However, in Davis's other series during this time frame, they are absent. As for the hero pulps, newspapers as narrative devices are virtually absent from The Shadow, only appearing twice in forty-eight installments during 1934 and 1935, infrequent in Secret Agent X, but somewhat better represented in Crossen's Green Lama, which contains seventeen newspaper articles over the course of the fourteen stories. In the same month as the first Operator #5 story appeared, Page used stand-alone headlines in The Spider, and he continued to do so occasionally.

The idiosyncratic nature of headlines in Operator #5 is illustrated by changes over the course of the series. In The Masked Invasion, fourteen newspaper headlines are distributed at regular intervals in the tale, eight of which are followed by articles (by far the most). Headlines include information-bearing notices like "Mystery Cars Carrying Masked Men Whisk Through City During Darkness" (Masked 48) and "U.S. Troops Ordered into Principal Cities! Navy Guarding Shores! President Calls Reserves" (148) to the inflammatory "White House Bombed at Moment President's Address Begins! Narrowly Escapes Death in Blast!" (Masked 116), for which an article follows. The content is weighted towards information – "Pacific Coast Fears Renewed Bombardments," "Disarmament Conference Called for Tomorrow Noon," or "Senator Cottron Cries Need of New Beliefs." The Green Death Mists is the first novella in which blocks of angst-provoking headlines are grouped without comment or development; this text also employs the "resolution" function of the headline which comes more fully into play in in the next book Legions of Starvation, in which articles are entirely replaced with blocks:

Presidential Proclamation Closes Stock Exchanges!
Trading in Foodstuffs Declared Prohibited!
Nationalization of Food Supplies Under Way!
Drastic War-Time Regulations in Effect! (Starvation 87)

or

Terrific Explosion Rocks Baltimore!
Warehouse Wrecked in Blast!
Vast Secret Stores of Food Destroyed!
Scores Killed, Hundreds Injured!
Thousands Flee City in Terror! (Starvation 147)

Subsequently, government calls for calm, including addresses by the President, are sandwiched between such panicked exclamations (Starvation 148-49). The first block reduces drastic liberty-restricting proclamations to statements of accomplished fact. The second is panic-inducing. Formally, the same mechanism announces the restoration of normalcy. At the end of the novella, this block appears:

Vast Supplies Available to the People!
Shortage Is Ended!
Revolutionist Organization Destroyed!
Insect Plague Under Control!
Multitudes Returning to Cities as Food Supplies Are Replenished!
Danger Removed – Food for All! (Starvation 229)

Unlike the detective’s explanation in the denouement, resolution proceeds by institutional fiat.

Sometimes, we learn damaging news is willfully suppressed by powerful individuals (Steele, League 4). But even within these patterns of silence and noise, Operator 5 discerns the work of propagandists, who in League of War Monsters, hijack a respected newspaper's masthead to dispense misinformation (League 97). The methods by which he uncovers this fraud, however, are not disclosed and presumably unavailable to anyone less astute than he. Despite these misgivings, all is set right with a block of five headlines announcing the return to normal (League 215), a pattern that continues in many of the later books. That the denizens of the diegetic universe are incapable of making clear distinctions between truthful information, emotional appeal, and manipulative propaganda (reminiscent of Fenton, Holmes, Kingsbury and her co-authors, and the shriller invective found in numerous magazine editorials) is presumed, but the method remains the same no matter who operates the presses. In Blood Reign of the Dictator, deliberate distortion is standard practice for the nascent fascist movement that successfully invades American politics, but the same modus operandi characterizes the communication outlets, both radio and newsprint, of the resistance movement. The Secret Sentinel, the resistance sheet, blares slogans in scareheads indistinguishable from its adversaries. Ironically, in the block of headlines at the novella’s close, the newspapers themselves declaim "Censorship Ended!," "Free Speech Returns!," "Newspapers and Broadcasting Stations Unfettered!," and "Propaganda Ends!" (Blood 223), as if the criteria for judging the veracity of these statements rested with the very authority which had earlier been contested.

Conclusion

The use of footnotes, a scholarly apparatus conventionally employed to substantiate textual claims, complicates the in-text construction of social threats and culpability in Operator #5. Speaking from an indeterminate zone, neither entirely inside nor outside the text, in a voice backed by reference to media organs and expert opinion, the notes do more than lend verisimilitude to Davis's fictional universe. This paratextual locus of speech conveys conviction because of its scholarly associations for readers, an appeal paralleled, though in popular terms, in Davis's deployment of headlines. These narrative tactics denote a shift away from the epistemological strategies commonly encountered in detective fiction and hero-adventure pulps whereby the protagonist frames the crisis as a function of esoteric knowledge or the active assembly of clues at crime scenes. The key idea is this: the theatricalization of crisis within manageable parameters is not achieved through the independent agency of the hero, nor, as in the Philo Vance novels, do the notes aggrandize his position whereby his analytic genius produces definitive explanations; the announcement and severity of tangible threats as well as their dissolution is achieved at least partially through the paratextual means of notes and headlines. The footnotes mirror the collection of unquestioned media facts correlated from various sources by the hero; but given their associations and marginal position, they operate below a threshold of self-aware criticism. Diegetic and non-diegetic universes converge at this boundary, a departure from the purportedly self-referential if not ironic function of footnotes in postmodern literature. The headline serves an even more blatant indexical and synecdochal function which eventually dispenses with accompanying articles to make its impact on audiences (operating along the lines of the Kingsbury study, whose analysis involves headlines divorced from content).

Whether contemporary readers had some inkling of this hegemonic relation underlying their reading experiences is impossible to determine conclusively, but we note that high-socialization subject matter occupying the top range of the Kingsbury study hierarchy employ the same psychological tactics as their sensational counterparts, suggesting the more important aspect to be the media's capacity to command attention and generate affect than any specific type of content. Pulp historian Nick Carr, writing in the 1970s about the pulps of his youth, remarks that Operator #5 held a special place for him, not because of any specific formal quality of the text, but due to the hero's patriotism and willing self-sacrifice (America's 4), which also suggests that the anxiety-inducing spectacle that formed our initial question, was subsumed by an appeal to some transcendent ideal. But, a critical assessment demonstrates how such formal features, whether as scholarly gloss (the footnote) or attention-grabbing spectacle (headline), are used to support and lend coherence to narratives that have real correlates outside the fictional universe. And, as in Carr's comments, these narratives, argued and situated within institutionally-recognized forms, are central to hegemonic influence. The conflation of world events and entertainment, present but increasingly visible in Papke's and Panek's assessment of changing newspaper norms, has a long history in fiction as well. And this history frequently entails the deliberate generation of anxiety that allows the self-same institutions to promote a solution. Operator #5 is exceptional, perhaps even idiosyncratic, but illuminates a moment in this longer trajectory which deserves the closer attention of pulp scholars specifically and students of popular culture and media studies generally.

Notes

1. This position has increasingly been challenged as typifying a canon of critical favorites. For counter-examples, see Clare Clarke, Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock; Maurizio Ascari, A Counter-History of Crime Fiction; Michael Cook, Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story; Lee Panek, Before Sherlock Holmes; and Heather Worthington, The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction.

2. See David Earle’s "Pulp Magazines and the Popular Press" (202) and Re-Covering Modernism (9, 77), Erin Smith’s Hard-Boiled: Working Class Readers and Pulp Magazines generally and "How the Other Half Read" (205-06), and Don Hutchison’s The Great Pulp Heroes (78). The Circulating American Magazines website offers information about Popular Publication distribution in the 1930s; for contemporaneous remarks on the pulp market, see Hersey (4-5), Duffield (26), and Jones (35-36).

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