Pulp Fiction, 1950 · page 96 of 132
15 Story Detective, April 1950 — page 96: what you’re looking at
What you’re looking at
# Page Analysis This is the opening page of a hardboiled crime story titled "Death—in the Bag" by Walter Snow. The page features a dramatic illustration showing a scene with figures near a car and what appears to be law enforcement, depicting the moment the subtitle references: "Trigger-happy Mike Jackson got fowled up the only time he sided with the law." The prose begins establishing the protagonist—a criminal named "Trigger" Mike Jackson—waking with a hangover, surrounded by details of his disreputable circumstances (drug use, cheap whiskey, poverty). The story promises a crime narrative involving a getaway and apparent police involvement.
📄 Transcribed text from this page (OCR, searchable)
Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.
DEATH—IN THE BAG Trigger-happy Mike Jackson sot fowled up the only time he sided with the law. ‘*He jumped in the getaway car just as his partner got —* as asety =} By WALTER SNOW HERE was a crisp, frosty tang to the air when “Trigger” Mike Jack- son awoke. Instinctively he took a deep breath. It eased the dull, throbbing pain in his head, purged the sickly sweetish odor of reefers and the fumes of rotgut whiskey, Gone even was the mustiness of the fuzzy, moth-eaten blankets he had dragged out of a trunk last night. 96 Hunching up on one elbow, he stared through a fly-specked window at a gnarled apple tree outside. Momentarily, he was saddened to realize that, with three quarters of the branches dead, the yield probably had been less than a dozen knobby winesaps. No longer the firm, juicy fruit that made lips smack. Of course the tree hadn’t been pruned in five Gomichbooks (F@