Word: fictional
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...said he, that authors had "used just about every known device in mystery stories"; yet innocent new generations of readers were always coming up. "In common with the novel," generalized all-out Miss Sayers, "the detective story is likely to decline in the future. . . . I don't read fiction any more...
Caniff plotted his new characters as carefully as any fiction writer. "The guy, now, had to have a name that would stick," Caniff explained. "It had to be three syllables, Dead-eye-Dick, or John-Paul-Jones. . . . Steve-Canyon. Not a real name, or one you could turn into a dirty word. But a guy who'd have a girl in every port, and could do all the things that a youngster like Terry couldn't. Why, Terry couldn't even smoke. And with people in the Orient we couldn't use those casual, normal insults...
...Warner thought Wiese's first report too frivolous, asked for another. Wiese handed it in one morning, came back after lunch to find that he was the new editor. He shuddered at his heritage. Said he: "Burton had bought up enough high-priced Harold Bell Wright-type of fiction to last five years...
...Wiese was sure that "women were ready for more significant fiction than Gene Stratton Porter and articles more serious than the featherweight stuff they were getting." He even suggested to the board that McCall's sell Burton's stockpile of popular fiction to their bigger rivals, Ladies Home Journal and Woman's Home Companion. He wanted to start from scratch with new, "realistic" writers. For such heresies he was fired at least six times during the first year (he quit nearly as often), was always rehired after a few days or weeks because, he says, "there...
Three Magazines In One. Wiese made his first big splash in 1932, when he broke away from the hodge-podge makeup common to all ladies' magazines, came out with what is still called Three Magazines in One. Each section-News and Fiction, Homemaking, Style and Beauty-had its own cover, and ads appropriate to it inside. Then he went after the taboos that governed the sweetness & light fiction of women's magazines. He bought a story about adultery (Stone Blunts Scissors, by Sara Yarrow), in which the adulteress got the man. McCall's got 5,000 letters...