The best of the Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes: Billie.

redglove

Billie. Billie was created by Hope Loring and Isabel Ostrander (Timothy McCarty, Shadowers) and appeared in the film serial The Red Glove (1919) and in an unauthorized sequel, the German pulp Der Rote Handschuh #1-31 (1922-1923). Billie is a female cowboy active on the American frontier during the last decades of the 19th century. She fights the bandit the Vulture, the Lupin (gentleman thief) Gentleman Geoff, and a number of other bad men. Billie appears in stories with titles like “The Triumph of the Wild West Girls,” “The Catastrophe in the Black Forest,” and “The Electrical Hell.”

Yes, I include film serials in in Encyclopedia. And why not? They gave you female cowboys like Billie shooting it out (and punching it out) with the bad guys! Not many female cowboys in the pulps (or radio serials or print serials or novels)–off-hand, I can’t think of any. Shame that The Red Glove is a lost film–it’d be an interesting look at suffrage-era feminism as interpreted in the Western.

The unauthorized German pulp sequel is an interesting oddity; usually European pulp writers and publishers didn’t go in for unauthorized sequels to popular films and film serials, but rather would take the actor or actress of the film or film serial and, in what I’ve called the Celebrity Pulps, build the story around them. Of course, Marie Walcamp (who played Billie) was no longer a big star when Der Rote Handschuh was published, and it may be that the publishers of Der Rote Handschuh decided to capitalize on The Red Glove‘s popularity rather than Walcamp’s fading star. (The absurd popularity of Westerns in Germany is a subject that will have to wait for another entry). If so, it was a wise decision–they got thirty-one issues out it, much longer than many German pulps. 

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