Sixteen years ago at the blog: I'm not wasting time reading old paperbacks; I'm conducting serious research into Cold War political attitudes

Friday, May 7, 2010 Things I've learned -- 60s pulp edition One of the pleasures of popular art is the glimpse it provides into the attitudes of the times. Sometimes this pleasure comes from the naivete of earlier times. More often, though, the experience is just the opposite -- you discover that the attitudes of previous generations were complex, surprisingly modern and often at odds with the conventional view of the era.I recently read a couple of pulp novels from the Sixties that fell into the second category. One was The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep by Lawrence Block (discussed here). The other was The Ambushers, the sixth book in the Matt Helm series by Donald Hamilton.Matt Helm was a counter espionage agent specializing in wet work, closer to a John LeCarre hero than to James Bond. The books were well reviewed (Anthony Boucher, writing, I believe, in the New York Times, said "Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Dashiell Hammett; and his stories…