John Locke is a historian of the American pulp fiction magazines of the first half of the Twentieth Century. He has paid particular attention to the phenomenon of pulp fiction as a writers’ paradise in the boom years of the twenties, to its sudden downfall after the Crash of ’29 into a writers’ ghetto where writers were forced to pound out “speed art” on their typewriters at a penny a word in order to make a living. One of the central characters that evolved in the pulps is the hardboiled detective, in magazines like Black Mask and Dime Detective; the central character behind the scenes of the 1930s pulps is the hardboiled writer, a Manhattan denizen thriving on booze and cigarettes, using a typewriter like it was a machine gun, and slowly going nuts. Locke has explored the pulp writing phenomenon in three key works: Pulp Fictioneers (2004), Pulpwood Days: Volume 1: Editors You Want To Know (2007), and Pulpwood Days: Volume 2: Lives of the Pulp Writers (2013).

Locke’s Off-Trail Publications specializes in books which combine vintage pulp fiction reprints with related histories of the era, the authors and the magazines. Gang Pulp is a pioneering look at the violent gangster fiction that came into vogue during the last years of Prohibition. Single author gangster collections include: If She Only Had a Machine Gun , by Richard Credicott (2011); Queen of the Gangsters: Volume 1: Broadwalk Empire , by Margie Harris (2011); and The Gangland Sagas of Big Nose Serrano , by Anatole Feldman, introductions by Will Murray, Volumes 1-3 (2008-09). City of Numbered Men: The Best of Prison Stories (2010) explores the brief reign of hardboiled prison fiction, and includes a 14,000-word profile of Harold Hersey, the most colorful publisher of the pulp era.

Adventure fiction collections include two volumes from Africa explorer Charles Beadle: The City of Baal (2007), and The Land of Ophir (2012); the exquisite Amazon Stories, Volume 1 (2008) and Volume 2 (2009), by Arthur O. Friel; Outdoor Stories , by J. Allan Dunn (2011); and The Golden Anaconda , by Elmer Brown Mason (2009).

Weird detective collections include the popular Weird Detective Adventures of Wade Hammond , by Paul Chadwick, Volumes 1-4 (2006-09); Grottos of Chinatown , by Arthur J. Burks (2009); and The Magician Detective and Other Weird Mysteries , by Fulton Oursler (2010).