....Yesterday we wrote of the low opinions the eminent J.R.R. Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis held for the “vulgar” creations of Walt Disney. As a counterpoint to their disdain for popular entertainment, we might turn—as writer Steven Graydanus does in Disney's defense—to their contemporary, the Catholic apologist and prolific essayist, journalist, poet, and writer of detective novels and short stories, G.K. Chesterton.
But we aren't talking Disney here, but hard-boiled pulp fiction, a genre I think Chesterton would have liked. Chesterton’s work “was entirely popular in nature,” notes Graydanus. He was “a great defender of popular and even ‘vulgar’ culture." Take his essay “A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls,” which begins:
One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary life is undervalued is the example of popular literature, the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar. The boy's novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like saying that modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically--it is the actual centre of a million flaming imaginations.Sentiments like these inspired admirers of Chesterton like Marshall McLuhan and Jorge Luis Borges to take seriously the mass entertainments of their respective cultures.
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http://www.openculture.com/2018/05/pulp-covers-for-classic-detective-novels-by-dashiell-hammett-arthur-conan-doyle-agatha-christie-raymond-chandler.html