![]() ![]() The Twenties (1924–1933) 1940 editionĭuring the Twenties, the “X” found its first purchase within the crime and occult fiction genres. So it would seem that we have Hodgson - a proto-Lovecraftian spelunker of forbidden dimensions - to thank for introducing the “X” into adventure-fiction titles. I’ve come across just two pre-1924 adventures featuring a free-standing “X”: William Hope Hodgson’s Dream of X (1912), which is an abridged version of his 1912 proto-sf novel The Night Land, and Edgar Wallace’s 1917 crime caper Kate Plus Ten, the title of which was sometimes rendered Kate Plus X. ![]() ![]() The following field notes - let’s call this effort “pulp-fiction meme epidemiology” - take us from the cultural era known as the Twenties (1924–1933) through the cultural era known as the Sixties (1964–1973). ![]() Since age 12 or so, I’ve collected 20th-century paperback adventure novels whose titles include a free-standing letter “X.” It wasn’t until recently, however, when I decided to organize my collection chronologically on the bookshelf, that I realized I’d stumbled upon a meme that communicated itself, virally, from one pulp genre to another for several decades. A version of this essay was published at HILOBROW in 2010. ![]()
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