Below, four evocative covers from the French imprint Editions Les Presses de la Cité for, top to bottom, Mickey Spillane’s En quatrième vitesse (Kiss Me Deadly), Dans un fauteuil (The Big Kill), Charmante soirée (One Lonely Night), and Nettoyage par le vide (The Long Wait). Does that last one sound familiar? Look here. Artist or photographer unknown on these. You can see more excellent Presses de la Cité Spillane covers on Müller-Fokker’s blog.

We love vintage paperback covers featuring armed women. But we especially love them when the women are directing their attention toward the viewer. Since pulp style literature is read primarily by men, such illustrations speak implicitly about a man’s thwarted expectations, and conversely of threatened women turning the tables to become empowered. We see this above, where a beleaguered woman defends her helpless man against an enemy we can't see because we're living inside his body. Below are thirteen more examples of women menacing you the viewer, with art by James Avanti, Robert Maguire, Harry Schaare, Rudolph Belaski, Harry Barton, and others. Thanks to flickr.com for some of these.

Below, fifteen pieces of pulp art with terror as their central theme. The cover in panel three from Erle Stanley Gardner is the German version of 1948's Perry Mason and the Case of the Vagabond Virgin, retitled Perry Mason und die Unschuld vom Lande, or Perry Mason and the Innocence of the Country.

This Dutch edition of Mickey Spillane’s Everybody’s Watching Me has one of the cooler covers we’ve seen. From the supersaturated red shade, to the handlettered text, to the brunette in a bikini and Roman sandals, this one is picture perfect. Definitely a new favorite, and we’re not just saying that because we’re in Amsterdam this week. It's repurposed from somewhere, originally from a U.S. paperback, we suppose, and the art would be by an American artist. We just aren't sure which one. Interestingly, there is not a lot of Dutch-language pulp. At least, we haven't spotted much thusfar. But we'll keep digging and see what turns up.

On the cover of this August 1955 issue of the tabloid Lowdown the editors get confrontational with the then-governor of Michigan, G. Mennen Williams. The story involves chart-topping singer Johnnie Ray, who in June 1951 was convicted of propositioning a man in the restroom of a Detroit burlesque house called the Stone Theatre. Lowdown’s insistence upon a pardon for the singer is simply a backdoor way of airing out the scandal while pretending to crusade on his behalf.

How do we know that was Lowdown's intent? Simple—because any tabloid worthy of labeling itself such would have known Ray was bisexual. He pled guilty on that solicitation charge without even bothering to bring a lawyer to court, and his sexual involvement with both halves of the husband-wife comedy team of Bob Mitchell and Jay Grayton was not exactly a state secret.

On stage Ray was an emotional singer whose antics earned him the nicknames the Prince of Wails (for his unrestrained style) and the Nabob of Sob (for his tendency to burst into tears), so even if his fans didn’t realize he was bi, they certainly understood that macho was not his stock-in-trade. Which meant, in the end, he had a nice career even with the tabs dogging his heels. He scored numerous big hits, including “Cry” in 1951, and “You Don’t Owe Me a Thing” in 1957. But even if Ray was impervious to slander, some of Lowdown’s other victims were less fortunate. We'll discuss some of them in the future.

Mickey Spillane pulp covers from Holland, circa 1950s, 1960s, with art from Robert McGinnis, except possibly book four. These are, top to bottom, Survival...Zero, Me Hood (aka The Affair with the Dragon Lady), I the Jury, My Gun Is Quick, Kiss Me Deadly, The Body Lovers, Vengeance Is Mine, and The Snake.