Margie Harris

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Margie Harris (birth and death dates unknown) was a pulp writer from 1930 to 1939. She was one of the most popular authors in the short-lived gang pulp genre.[1] Even in an era of hardboiled crime fiction, her stories were unusually hard-edged and bitter. Her best work includes ingenious plotting, remorselessly violent characters, and colorful underworld argot. Most of her early stories appeared in the Harold Hersey-published pulp magazines Gangster Stories, , Prison Stories,[2] , and . When Hersey sold off his assets, Harris continued to appear in the successor to Gangster Stories, .

After the collapse of the gang pulps in 1934, Harris diversified into a variety of crime pulps, The Phantom Detective, , , , etc. When the gang genre was temporarily revived in the late 1930s in the pulps, and , Harris was a frequent contributor. Her published output includes fewer than a hundred known stories, low for a pulp writer, but many of them were novelettes or short novels.

Little is known of Harris' background. It is believed that "Margie Harris" is a pseudonym. The only biographical information comes from a jocular letter published in Gangster Stories. She claimed to have been a newspaper reporter; and many of her stories featured reporters and references to newspapers. From the cases she covered, she would have been in the Bay Area from approximately 1900-1915 and in Chicago from 1915-1930 (these ranges are very speculative). Criminals she knew in the Bay Area include Ed Morrell, the so-called Dungeon Man of San Quentin, and his neighbor in the solitary confinement cells, Jacob "Tiger Man" Oppenheimer.[3] In Chicago, she was acquainted with the big-time mobster Big Jim Colosimo. Given her background, a birthdate around 1880 is plausible, which would have made her about 50 when her fiction career began in 1930.[4]

Harris's last known whereabouts were in Texas. She appears to have lived in Texas during the entirety of her pulp-writing career. She wrote a number of true crime articles set in Houston and its vicinity for , which was published by the same company as .[5]

Selected stories[]

  • "Death's Trapeze" (first known published story), Gangster Stories, May 1930.
  • "Gyps That Pass in the Night," , October 1930.
  • "While Choppers Roared," , February 1931.
  • "Little Big Shot," Gangster Stories, May 1932.
  • "The She-Shamus," , January–February 1934.
  • "When Dead Eyes Speak," , March 1935.
  • "Crimson Harvest," , August 1938.
  • "Problem for a Ranger" (last known original story), , December 1939 (reprinted in the December 1944 issue).

References[]

  1. ^ Gang Pulp, Off-Trail Publications, 2008. ISBN 978-1-935031-00-0.
  2. ^ Locke, John; editor. City of Numbered Men: The Best of Prison Stories, Off-Trail Publications, 2010. ISBN 978-1-935031-11-6. Includes Harris' "Big House Boomerang," set in San Quentin's jute mills.
  3. ^ Sifakis, Carl. The Encyclopedia of American Prisons, Edward Morrell entry, Facts on File, Inc., 2003.
  4. ^ Margie Harris; David Bischoff and John Locke, eds. Queen of the Gangsters: Volume One: Broadwalk Empire, Off-Trail Publications, 2011. ISBN 978-1-935031-18-5.
  5. ^ For example, "I Killed the Man I Baptized," , September 1936.

External links[]

Retrieved from ""