Death Takes the Wheel, a Complete Novelet

Death Takes the Wheel is a novelet by G. Wayman Jones, working in the kind of pulp fiction tradition that the early twentieth century American magazine market produced in enormous volume. Jones was one of many pulp era writers whose work appeared in the various crime, mystery, adventure, and weird fiction magazines that filled the American newsstands across the period roughly 1920 through the late 1940s. The novelet format, longer than a short story but shorter than a full novel, was particularly popular in the pulp magazines, where it gave writers room to develop a more complete plot than the short story format allowed without committing to the much longer development that a full novel required.

The death takes the wheel premise hints at the kind of crime and adventure plot that pulp fiction reliably delivered. The dramatic title and the specific situation of death taking the wheel suggest a story involving driving, an automobile, possibly a chase or an accident or a murder involving a vehicle, with the kind of dramatic flair that pulp fiction was known for. The pulp magazine market had developed an enormous appetite for crime fiction across the 1920s and 1930s, with many of the writers who would later be recognized as major figures in American crime fiction getting their start in the pulp magazines before graduating to the more respectable mainstream publishing world.

G. Wayman Jones, as a pulp era writer, would have been working in the kind of commercial fiction market that paid by the word and that demanded the kind of brisk plotting and immediate hooks that the magazine format required. The pulp writers were professional craftsmen who understood their market and their audience, and the cumulative output of the pulp era represents one of the largest bodies of commercial fiction ever produced in American publishing. Many of the conventions that contemporary genre fiction continues to use were developed and refined in the pulp magazines, and the pulp era writers contributed substantially to the wider American genre fiction tradition.

The prose is brisk, the action moves, and the period assumptions of the early twentieth century American pulp fiction tradition are very much present in ways modern readers will need to navigate. The pulp era was a particular cultural moment with its own conventions about race, gender, and social class that have not aged well, and contemporary readers approaching pulp fiction need to be prepared for material that the original audience took for granted but that modern readers will recognize as problematic.

For scholars of pulp era American fiction, of the magazine market that shaped commercial publishing across the early twentieth century, or of the wider history of American genre fiction, pulp novelets like Death Takes the Wheel are useful primary sources from a particular moment in American publishing history.