Eclipse Books strips buyer motivations bare.
We just talked about Bruno Fischer's The Lustful Ape, but we're circling back to it to highlight this cover from Eclipse Books because it's an example of a brief trend in crime and adventure paperbacks of nude models on covers. We shared a few French examples seven years ago, and we have more we may compile into post later. Obviously, the classic painted GGA covers sold sex too, but subtle like. Here Eclipse has stripped away the fig leaf of artfulness—along with everything else. Still, it's a nice bit of erotic photography.
He definitely isn't one of the great apes.
Bruno Fischer's 1950 novel The Lustful Ape has a strange title, which comes from an even stranger character, Ape Jones, so nicknamed not only because of his appearance, but due to his behavior. The protagonist, though, is a detective named Dirk Hart, whose amoral estranged wife is murdered. Explicit photos of a high society woman point to the killing being revenge for blackmail, but subplots abound as Dirk tries to solve the crime. He lives with a sister who's mixed up with the local crime lord's top henchman, has a best friend who knew his dead wife far better than he ever admitted, employs a secretary who's in love with him, and is hired by a client who commits suicide under suspicious circumstances. It's all in a day's existence for a mid-century private eye. Fischer weaves the threads together adequately and makes a readable mystery of it all, surprisingly punctuated by an extended sequence of cruel and somewhat sexualized torture. The episode makes sense, in terms of the narrative, but you don't usually come across stuff so uncompromising in tales from 1950. Our edition is from 1958 for Red Seal Books.
Never leave a blonde on hold.
This is one tasty photo cover. It was was made for Bruno Fischer's A Bela Assassina, which is a Portuguese translation of The Lady Kills, put out in 1951 by the Brazilian publisher Edições de Ouro, and is number five in its series Seleção Criminal. We've little doubt the cover star is a known actress, by the way, but we can't place her. Feel free to clue us in. It took us a while to figure out where this came from, but we finally traced it to a Facebook page dedicated to Brazilian vintage paperbacks. There's some nice stuff over there calling your name, so it's certainly worth a look. You can also see another Bruno Fischer book from Brazil here.
Oh, there you are. Can you stop screwing around and take out the garbage like I asked? Above, cover art by Barye Phillips for Bruno Fischer’s mystery The Flesh Was Cold, originally The Angels Fell. Fischer, who also wrote as Russell Gray and Harrison Storm, published this under its initial title in 1950, with Signet’s paperback edition hitting shelves in 1951.
For better or worse, in sickness and health, women in pulp don’t have a heck of a lot of choice about it. Pulp is a place where the men are decisive and the women are as light as feathers. We’ve gotten together a collection of paperback covers featuring women being spirited away to places unknown, usually unconscious, by men and things that are less than men. You have art from Harry Schaare, Saul Levine, Harry Barton, Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan, and others.
Non-stop to Brazil. Above is a Brazilian cover for German-born author Bruno Fischer’s Os Túmulos Não Falam, which would translate as something like “Graves Don’t Speak”. However, Fischer never wrote a book with that name, so this is one of those occasions where the original title was scrapped, which means we can’t tell you which English language release this corresponds to. We do know it’s a Ben Helm mystery, and that it involves a hypothetical perfect murder. It also involves perfect cover art, though sadly it goes uncredited. Fischer was a popular author, thus he deserves a more detailed treatment, which we’ll give him a little ways down the line.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1931—Nevada Approves Gambling
In the U.S., the state of Nevada passes a resolution allowing for legalized gambling. Unregulated gambling had been commonplace in the early Nevada mining towns, but was outlawed in 1909 as part of a nationwide anti-gaming crusade. The leading proponents of re-legalization expected that gambling would be a short term fix until the state's economic base widened to include less cyclical industries. However, gaming proved over time to be one of the least cyclical industries ever conceived. 1941—Tuskegee Airmen Take Flight
During World War II, the 99th Pursuit Squadron, aka the Tuskegee Airmen, is activated. The group is the first all-black unit of the Army Air Corp, and serves with distinction in Africa, Italy, Germany and other areas. In March 2007 the surviving airmen and the widows of those who had died received Congressional Gold Medals for their service. 1906—First Airplane Flight in Europe
Romanian designer Traian Vuia flies twelve meters outside Paris in a self-propelled airplane, taking off without the aid of tractors or cables, and thus becomes the first person to fly a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft. Because his craft was not a glider, and did not need to be pulled, catapulted or otherwise assisted, it is considered by some historians to be the first true airplane. 1965—Leonov Walks in Space
Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov leaves his spacecraft the Voskhod 2 for twelve minutes. At the end of that time Leonov's spacesuit had inflated in the vacuum of space to the point where he could not re-enter Voskhod's airlock. He opened a valve to allow some of the suit's pressure to bleed off, was barely able to get back inside the capsule, and in so doing became the first person to complete a spacewalk. 1966—Missing Nuke Found
Off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean, the deep submergence vehicle Alvin locates a missing American hydrogen bomb. The 1.45-megaton nuke had been lost by the U.S. Air Force during a midair accident over Palomares, Spain. It was found resting in nearly three-thousand feet of water and was raised intact on 7 April.
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