| Vintage Pulp | Sep 8 2020 |
Say it! Say it louder, you swine! With onion soup you should drink only a basic vin blanc or possibly an aligoté!
It's a cliché, but one we've noticed to be true, that the French tend to be polemical in their opinions about artistic matters. Movies, literature, painting, architecture, all of these things are either magnificent or total shit. Which leads to some interesting discussions. The big chasm between us and one of our French friends happens to do with food and drink—typically Champagne versus cava, or rillettes versus paté. So for us, this cover for Coup de main reminded us of those discussions. Just for the record, E.E., here on our website where you can't argue—we think cava and paté are just dandy no matter what you say.
Coup de main is number fifty-five in Éditions du Grand Damier's Espionnage series, published in 1958, and written by Jacques Dubessy under the pseudonym Slim Harrisson. That's a name you see a lot in vintage French fiction because it was credited with nearly one hundred novels, and we assume few if any of them are total shit. In this particular book Harrisson's franchise hero Sam Morgan's adventures carry him from FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. to Tangier, Lisbon, and beyond. The cover art here is by Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan, the towering figure of French paperback and pin-up illustration.
| Vintage Pulp | Nov 8 2018 |
You know why I'm great at my job? Because I'm sweating like a racehorse in this get-up and you can't tell.
French artist Alex Pinon knocks this cover for the spy thriller Mission spéciale à Rio out of the park with his black clad femme fatale and backdrop of Guanabara Bay and its famed Sugarloaf Mountain. Since Rio's average daily temperature never drops below 80 Fahrenheit, no Brazilian would actually dress like this, at least not during daytime, but the art is great. The book was published by Société des Éditions Nouvelles Valmont and its author called himself Commandant René. You're probably assuming that's a pseudonym, and you're right. It was used by Jacques Dubessy, Guy de Wargny, Henri Certigny, and other authors. Between them they wrote more than thirty books as this Commandant person, with the above coming in 1959. We have a lot of French art in the website, so poke around if it interests you. We'll have more soon.
FranceBrazilSociété des Éditions Nouvelles ValmontAlex PinonCommandant RenéJacques DubessyGuy de WargnyHenri Certignycover artliterature
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 21 2013 |
Look out! The phallic symbol is about to blow!
Slim Harrisson, whose Chute Libre was published in 1963 by Éditions Atlantic for their Top Secret series, was in reality a French writer named Jacques Dubessy. He had many other pseudonyms as well, and under those and his own name he wrote an absolute pile of books, but today we’re not going down the rabbit hole of pen names and publication dates. Mainly we wanted to show you the cool cover from Jef de Wulf, one of the more interesting French illustrators from the period, who we imagine must have smirked all the way through painting this one. Of course, the French do, after all, have the world’s most famous phallic symbol overlooking their capitol. That has to affect the thoughts. It affected ours last time we were there. You can see more Jef de Wulf here.
