| Vintage Pulp | Jan 14 2022 |
I've been working on some fresh runway poses. I call this one: sociopathicool.
Above: a cover for Australian author Neville Jackson's, aka Gerald Glaskin's 1965 novel No End to the Way. What you see here is a 1967 edition from the British publisher Corgi. This is a significant book, one of the first novels with gay themes to be widely available in Australia. It wasn't legal to mail into the country, so Corgi, the legend goes, flew it in aboard chartered planes to skirt the law.
Plotwise what you get here is a drama about Ray and Cor, two men who meet in a bar and form a relationship that becomes committed, and seems aimed toward permanence—which is exactly when their most serious challenge arises in the form of a bitter ex-lover. This ex is determined to ruin what Ray and Cor have built, up to and including slander, career damage, and more.
We were quite interested in the cover art because Corgi was a mainstream publisher, and with this bright yellow effort they gave this controversial book the full court press. The push, the art, and the quality of the story worked—it was reprinted at least twice, and in fact was Jackson's/Glaskin's best selling book. He was an eclectic and fairly prolific writer, so maybe we'll run across him again later. There's a good bio here. Now we're going to work on that pose.
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 16 2021 |
Hi, this is Elke calling from Down Under. Can I speak to my agent? There's been a trademark infringement.
As usual the Aussie publishing company Horwitz has used a film star on one of its book covers—this time German goddess Elke Sommer on the front of 1959's Terror Comes Creeping. She was a favorite of theirs—we've seen her on four covers, including this one, and we've speculated that they're all unlicensed, for reasons discussed here.
This one stars Carter Brown's, aka Alan G. Yates's franchise sleuth Danny Boyd, who's hired by a woman named Martha Hazelton who thinks her father is killing off his children—with her next in line—in order to avoid losing his dead wife's inheritance. The father, when confronted by Boyd, says that insanity runs in the family and his daughter is paranoid and probably nuts. It certainly seems that way when Boyd meets his client's loopy, danger obsessed little sister, but of course matters soon begin to look far more complicated than they seemed at first.
On one level it's amazing Carter Brown sold something like 120,000,000 books, because his work is not special. But on the other hand it's fast, sometimes funny, and hits the right notes for detective novels. So maybe his success isn't so strange after all. We'll probably read another, because we have a few.
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 23 2021 |
What it lacks in maturity it makes up for in exuberance.
Above you see a cover of the Australian magazine Man Junior, which hit newsstands Down Under this month in 1963. An offshoot of Man magazine, it came from K.G. Murray Publishing, along with Adam, Pocket Man, Eves from Adam, Cavalcade, Man's Epic, et al. The Murray empire, run by Kenneth G. Murray, came into being in 1936, and the company's various imprints lasted until 1978—though the entire catalog was bought by Consolidated Press in the early 1970s. We've seen nothing from K.G. Murray that we don't love, so we'll keep adding to our stocks indefinitely. Or until the Pulp Intl. girlfriends finally revolt, which should take a few more years. Speaking of which, it's been a few years since our last Man Junior, but its positives and negatives are still intimately familiar to us. On the plus side, the fiction and true life tales are exotic and often good, and on the negative side the humor doesn't usually hold up, though the color cartoons are aesthetically beautiful.
Of all the stories, the one that screamed loudest to be read was, “The Hair-Raisers,” by Neville Dasey, which comes with an illustration of a bearded woman. It's an absurd, legitimately funny story about a con man who accidentally invents a hair growing tonic, which he then unintentionally splashes on his date's face. By the next morning she has a beard, which proves the tonic works, but the con man lost the magic liquid when he stilled it, and he ends up losing the formula to create it. But everyone ends up happy—the con man earns a contract that pays him regardless of whether he can recreate the formula, and his date ends up marrying the owner of the hair restoration company. We weren't clear on whether the formula wore off, or she had to shave regularly. Either way, the story is meant to be silly and it certainly achieves that goal. Twenty-eight panels below, and more from Man Junior here, here, and here.
AustraliaK.G. Murray Publishing Co.Man JuniorJack WaughPhil BelbinHumphNeville DaseyKenneth G. Murraymagazine artliterature
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 12 2021 |
What happens next could be great or terrible, depending on how well you distinguish subtle shades of color.
Since we just saw Cleo Moore why not bring her right back? Here she is on the front of Carter Brown's Slaughter in Satin, 1954, from the Australian publisher Horwitz. We've long documented this publisher's usage of minor celebrities on its covers, and pondered whether it was copyright infringement. What caught our eye about this example, besides Moore, was the typesetting. Notice how the “s” in the title disappears into Moore's red jammies, so at first glance it reads as, “Laughter in Satin,” which is almost an opposite outcome from slaughter, like the difference between being lain or slain. Probably when the book was first printed the two shades of red stood out from each other more. Or maybe this visual trick was intentional. Or maybe it was a miscalculation that couldn't be repaired. We'll never know. See the other Moore here, and see the celeb Horwitz covers by clicking here and scrolling.
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 7 2021 |
The search for alien life is over. Just look in the back.
Adam magazine's cover illustrations usually deal with criminals, ranchers, wild animals, runaway vehicles and the like, so what is this unusual thing on the front of this issue published this month in 1968? It's a shlunk, and it comes from Tod Kennedy's science fiction story, “To Catch a Shlunk,” about a bloodsucking alien—named for the sound it makes—that terrorizes a hunter. In form this alien is like a squid, but with four thick tentacles. “It moved with a glutinous rhythm [and had] a band of flickering lights around its domed head that blinked off and on like radar stations seeking contact. With one quick motion its body shot upward and the four legs distended like chewing gum.”
That's pretty scary. As the hunter watches in silent horror, the creature, which seems part organic and part machine, grabs a wallaby, crushes it, and sucks its insides out. Needless to say, the hunter flees at the first opportunity, and thinks he's dodged this creature, but misses the part where it jumps in the back of his truck and rides home with him. Whoops. From that point Kennedy's tale deals with the hunter's defeat of the creature, which is accomplished via unlikely means. In the end, “To Catch a Shlunk” is merely a ripe concept that goes rotten due to poor execution.
But Adam on the whole is as rich as always, filled as it is with more fiction, fun cartoons, exotic factual stories, and great illustrations. Primary artist Jack Waugh even signed a couple of his pieces, which later, during the 1970s, he mostly stopped doing. Will we ever stop buying these? Well, since we've bought more than one hundred, it seems not. They are, however, becoming more difficult to obtain without buying issues we already have, though most vendors are understanding about separating issues from a group. Still though, it may be time to find another magazine to obsess over. We have a few candidates. Meanwhile, thirty-plus scans below.
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 26 2021 |
Smut you can carry with you everywhere you go.
You can always count on us for rare Aussie goodness. Today: the cover and many interior scans from Man magazine, the pocket edition, published this month in 1970.
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 15 2021 |
Drug enforcement agents and heroin dealers settle their issues Outback.
We just shared a 1950 issue of Adam last week, but since it was too fragile for us to scan it all here's a second one, more completely documented. This hit Aussie newsstands this month in 1975 and you see the bright colors and dynamic art that was its trademark in those years. The cover illustrates Alex Tait's tale, “The Raw Deal,” which has to do with two undercover agents setting up a sale of pure heroin in order to take down a drug ring. The two agents, male and female, are posing as a couple, and as happens in fiction, the posing turns into reality. Interestingly, they have little choice because the villains have installed a two-way mirror in the agents' quarters and are keeping watch. So it's either get busy or blow their cover. The helicopter on the cover is the cavalry coming to the rescue right when it looks like the two agents will be executed. Adam's illustrations, at least from the early 1960s onward, were never generic. They were always tailor-made for a story in the magazine. Since most of the writers were relatively inexperienced, we can only imagine how thrilling it must have been for them to see their work represented this way. We have twenty-eight scans below for your enjoyment.
| Vintage Pulp | Oct 10 2021 |
Abandon all boats ye who enter here.
This issue of Adam magazine published this month in 1950 was in delicate condition, so we were able to scan only a small selection of pages. The cover illustrates the story, “Swamp Bait,” by Leslie T. White, which deals with a sailor who manages to get his schooner trapped in a South Carolina swamp and is offered help by a ragtag stranger who turns out to be an escaped murderer planning to steal the boat and sail it to Brazil. Swamps have hungry gators, venomous snakes, toxic plants, and deep quicksand, but it's the humans you really need to be careful of. That's true anywhere, though, we guess. The protagonist has about twelve hours to think of a solution or he's fish food.
This is a very early Adam—in fact it may the earliest one we've bought. Hang on a sec. Yep, it's the earliest one, and because of the time period its focus is almost solely on fact and fiction. The cartoons and models had yet to dominate. There are exactly two photos of women, and four cartoons. However, the stories are of consistently better quality than during later decades. We'd love to pretend this magazine has value, but we doubt we could sell it in the condition it's in. Still, it's a nice addition to the collection, which is well beyond a hundred issues now. That means we'll share more Adam soon.
AustraliaAdam MagazineLeslie T. WhiteJaye FitzpatrickMarion LyndeMarian Cowleyliteraturemagazine art
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 25 2021 |
Upfield's franchise character is never quite fleshed out.
Bony and the White Savage, for which you see a Pan Books cover above, has as its central character a half aborigine detective named Napoleon Bonaparte—Bony for short. The idea of this person made us think immediately of Ed Lacy's creation Toussaint Marcus Moore, considered to be the first African American detective in literature. But Upfield may have been first to create a black detective of any nationality—that is if we accept being half black ethnically as being fully black culturally. It's certainly that way in the U.S., as we've talked about before. Upfield created his Bony character and first published him way back in 1929, almost thirty years before Lacy, and the above installment of what was a long running series of Bony novels is from 1964 and sees the hero on the trail of a rapist and overall hellion who's holed up somewhere in the wild crags of the southwestern Australian coast.
Good premise, but in short, our hopes that this book would be something akin to Ed Lacy were misplaced. The way it's written, Bony being half aborigine is wasted—which is to say it impacts nothing and nobody mentions it. That approach might be commendable from a purely fictional perspective, but is it realistic? We've lived outside the U.S. for a long time, so we understand—trust us, we understand—that compared to the rest of the world Americans tend to overdo things. Like, everything. So Upfield would definitely be more subtle than Ed Lacy, who made the color of his Toussaint character central, but Upfield veers pretty far in the other direction, presenting a colorblind outback we know for a fact doesn't exist today. Was it colorblind back then? We doubt it, but Australian aborigines have recessive genes for blonde hair and blue eyes, so Bony might have fit in physically a lot better than we imagine.
But let's set that aside, because this is fiction, and a writer can do anything he or she wants. At least that's what we think. They're required to pull it off, though. Purely in terms of the plot, we had pretty high expectations here and they went unmet. Despite the exotic setting, interesting set-up, the unusual hero, and the fearsome antagonist, Bony and the White Savage isn't special. And we were really looking forward to reading an entire series of Down Under adventures, with all its local quirks and idiosyncrasies. But you know us by now. We're tenacious. This particular book, which was the only one available to us, is number twenty-six in the Bonaparte series. We're going to try again. We suspect that the qualities we anticipated are in the first book, The Barrakee Mystery, in which this Bony person must be more fully fleshed out. So we'll read that. If we can find it.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 17 2021 |
Every day and overtime on Sundays.
Above: an Australian promo poster for The Flesh Is Weak, the 1957 John Derek/Milly Vitale vehicle we discussed earlier this month. Shorter version: Derek tricks Vitale into hauling her flesh out to the street to work at the oldest profession. There's no Australian release date for it, but it probably didn't play Down Under until 1958. Read more and see the amazing French promo here.
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