Here at the PorPor Books Blog, we like to take a break from reading and reviewing books on science fiction, fantasy, and horror, and instead profile books, fiction and nonfiction, from other genres and publication lines.
For January 2025, we're going to focus on those paperbacks of yore: Gold Medal Books. According to the Wiki entry, in 1950, "Roscoe Kent Fawcett wanted to establish a line of Fawcett paperbacks....Fawcett announced Gold Medal Books, their line of paperback originals." The Gold Medal line quickly became sales leaders, as they were marketed at the same retail outlets as were Fawcett's magazines.
According to Bookscans, in 1955 Fawcett began issuing its paperbacks under its Crest label. The line continued to publish titles in varied genres, such as romance, spy thrillers, melodramas, Vaguely Sleazy, science fiction, crime / detective, and historical dramas.
Growing up as a paperback collector, I never paid all that much attention to the Gold Medal Books lineup. I considered Gold Medal books to be rather old-fashioned and obsolete. My attitude towards the imprint changed a bit in 1987 when I read 'The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction,' edited by Ed Gorman.
In his Introduction, Gorman looks fondly back to his youth when he first bought a Gold Medal book:
I still remember buying it. I could hardly forget. It packed the same charge on anxiety as purchasing one's first teenage beer.
The woman behind the counter of the place....peered down at me and said, "Pretty racy stuff, isn't it ?"
Outside, shut of the woman, I got my first good glimpse of it then in the new spring sunshine.
The cover, designed by the masterful Michael Hooks, depicted one of his wild but forlorn red-heads submissive at the feet of a hood with a .45 in his hand....The title was in yellow, as was the medallion in the upper right hand that would virtually change my life.
Gold Medal book number 663 was DEATH TAKES THE BUS by Lionel White.
That was my first Gold Medal book.
I can't say that after reading Gorman's introduction I went out and snapped up every Gold Medal or Fawcett Crest paperback I could find, but when I did see these on the shelves of the used bookstores, and the titles lodged them in the detective / noir / private eye and sci-fi genres, well, I was a little more likely to buy them.
One thing I learned rather quickly was that Gorman, in his nostalgia, was avoiding a rather blunt truth: many of the Gold Medal titles, regardless of the genre, weren't very good........
Having accumulated a small library of Gold Medal books over the years, I thought that I'd start off 2025 by reviewing a bunch of them. Few Gold Medal titles are over 200 pp. in length, so it wasn't that hard of a journey in terms of sitting down and finishing six or seven of them.
It's well worth noting that the ability to compose a novel of short length, however commonplace it may have been 60-70 years ago, is a dying attribute. The 'Cormoran Strike' detective novels by J. K. Rowling (using the pen name 'Robert Galbraith') are over 900 pages (some over 1,000 pages) in length. I can't imagine reading a detective novel that requires 900 pages.
Anyways, with the asking prices for Gold Medal and Fawcett Crest books increasing with each passing year, hopefully these reviews will inform any decisions by my blog audience to invest in these titles.
