Action Pulp!

February 7, 2026

By Adam Messer

Kevin Beckett is a pulp fiction writer who loves crime, horror and fantasy stories. Regarding his story, Shade, Skin, Heart, he describes it as “each corpse rising, saying a line of dialogue until we comprehend the fate, is a nice display of grotesque, horrific imagery.”

Please introduce yourself.

My name is Kevin Beckett. I live in Winnipeg, Canada. A city that is sometimes colder than the planet Mars. Over the decades, I have been a DJ, a radio host and a music promoter. As the years have gone on, I have turned more and more to writing to age gracefully. 

What genres do you write and why?

Crime, Horror, Fantasy, both the kind that is cozy and the kind that is Sword & Sorcery and some rollicking pulpy adventure. 

What is your earliest memory of reading?

While I know there’s an issue of Spider-Man fighting Electro, which I loved as a toddler and was reduced to tears when my mother explained that they were fictional, the first fiction I read was the Hardy Boys novel The Secret of the Caves. I started reading it because of the interior illustrations that felt like a comic, and I forced myself to read the text, developing a love for prose as well as art. 

My family took notice, and soon I had an entire shelf of the blue-bound adventures of Frank and Joe, plus one brown book, The Junior Investigator’s Handbook, where I learned contemporary criminal slang, like the fact that a grenade is called an Italian Pineapple. 

When did you know you wanted to write? How did it happen?

My family repeatedly tells me I should become a writer, so I kept staring off into space, which could lead to my becoming a midlist author in my adult life. 

Clearly, they had no idea what the 21st century would hold for writers, but I still stare off into space.  

What’s one of your favourite scenes in one of your books?

My story “Shade, Skin, Heart” has the main character visit Hades and encounter the shade of Achilles, and learns his fate is to be killed over and over again by those the Greek hero slew in life, and over and over again, feeling all the wounds his invulnerable skin would deflect before. Just each corpse rising, saying a line of dialogue until we comprehend the fate, is a nice display of grotesque, horrific imagery perfectly timed and delivered by me, as far as I am concerned. 

What makes a good character? A bad one?

A good character is one you want to spend time with. The obvious traits are likability or wish-fulfillment, but even self-recognition, or just a mixture of repulsion and fascination. Richard Stark’s Parker is an amoral criminal who steals, tortures and kills. Still, Donald Westlake, writing as Stark, convincingly portrays a universe not defined by good and evil but by professionalism and sloppiness. It is Stark trying to be professional in a universe filled with sloppy amateurs that allows us to follow him on his journey to find the next big score, no matter who dies on the way at his hands. 

A bad character serves only to move the plot along without anything resembling a real person. We can all think of characters in stories who are sticks in the mud, to slow down the story, or the entire plot would be resolved if characters had more than two brain cells, or, worst, the main character who is perfect… perfect cardboard, that is. 

What moves the story for you?

Mystery. The desire to find answers to something we do not understand. Vivid characters one encounters in passing. The attempts to see the pattern that connects the characters and stories, and what that could mean to the reader. 

What is your favourite book and why?

Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny. It pulls a neat trick of being disorienting at first until you realize the chronology of the chapters, and balances the mythic with a wry, laconic, hardboiled humour. The god of death and pronouncements about the folly of human nature receive sarcastic retorts about playing the Fascist Banjo. The lingering jealousies, insecurities and rivalries that are almost banal when presented within human colonists pretending to be the Hindu pantheon become an epic clash of deities. There might be deeper or better works out there, but none have shown me how to be structurally challenging, to say something about human nature and myth, and still have badass sword fights and snappy Chandlerian dialogue. 

What do you want to say to your audience?

That I am just getting started. 

What advice do you have for new writers?

Pack in the ideas, you never know if what you write is your last. Don’t worry about waiting for the perfect fit. Pour in your passions. My most recent publication, “A Song for the Dead” in the Necro Sapiens anthology, mixes criminals, black magic, Swinging London of the 60s, Underground Filmmaking, and Psychedelic Folk Music. I would not have written the story if I could not figure out ways to put in those last three concepts that I love.  

Do you have anything else you would like to add?

My historical swashbuckler, “Death from the Steppe,” featuring a devil-masked vigilante fighting Russian Cossacks in 1840s California, is available to read for free at CliffHanger Magazine.

If you were intrigued by my description of the Olympian afterlife described above in my favourite scenes I’ve written, then check out “Shade, Skin, Heart” at Swords & Sorcery magazine. Both are free for you to read, and I hope you enjoy them. 

Website: https://linktr.ee/kevinbeckett

Subscribe to our newsletter for updates and more!