Today in pulp.. . it's time to look back at a forgotten pulp genre: Crime Clowns! #MondayMood

"I didn't choose the crime clown life the crime clown life chose me."

We all know clowns are scary: they're also pretty indecent. Maybe it's their role in life - 'the rustic fool' - but frankly that's no excuse for the things they get up to!

And in the pulp magazines of the 1920s there's one thing clowns were notorious for: crime! They would pop a cap in your ass and not even blink.

Clownface was the perfect disguise for many would-be killers in the early pulps. For a while it seemed the most dangerous place you could ever be was in a circus.

But clowns also acted as an unusual version of 'the masked vigilante.' The Crimson Clown, invented by Zorro creator Johnston McCulley, was so popular he featured in 17 different stories in various Street & Smith publications.

Clown crime seemed to reach its peak in the late 1920s, although nobody is sure why. Clowns were battling other gangsters, running numbers, bootlegging - you name it and a clown was probably doing it.

However by the 1940s the crime clown had become something of a niche character - often a spurned lover turned kidnapper in a circus story. The crime clown joke was clearly wearing thin.

And by the 1960s the crime clown was pretty much out of business, replaced by his psychopathic sibling the Terror Clown!