Pulp

Pulp is the last completed novel by the American poet and writer Charles Bukowski. He began writing it in 1991, and it was published in 1994, shortly before his death.

The book follows Nick Belane, a private investigator in Los Angeles, through a set of cases that are as strange as they are ordinary: a search for a writer believed to be dead, and a woman who is convinced she is being followed by somebody who says he comes from another planet. Belane drinks, gambles and chases the money he is owed across the city, and the novel is a pulp fiction story that is also a comment on pulp fiction, taking the obsessions of the genre and pushing them into an exaggerated form. Bukowski ran into several problems while writing it and fell ill in the spring of 1993 with about three-quarters of the book finished; he dedicated the story to bad writing, having written his detective into corners he could not get him out of, and the tone throughout is violent, cynical and sardonic.

Bukowski spent most of his life in Los Angeles and wrote poetry and prose about the city and the people in it, and Pulp applies that voice to a detective story rather than to the autobiographical writing he is best known for.