 When you go out can you pick me up some Visine or Blink-n-Clean? My eyes are killing me. 
This is wonderful work from Italian illustrator Benedetto Caroselli, fronting Lucien Le Bossù's La zingara, which is number fifty-two in Grandi Edizioni Internazionali's series I Capolavori della Serie KKK Classici dell’Orrore. “Zingara” is Italian for gypsy, and this one has red hair and red eyes, which is not the first time Caroselli went this route with one of his women. The author here, Le Bossù was actually Renato Carocci, who wrote scores of books under too many pseudonyms to list, with this one coming in 1965. Caroselli was prolific, as well. If he didn't paint more covers than anyone else in Italy during the 1960s, he certainly came close.
 In pulp you're always on the wrong side of the tracks. 
We're train travelers. We love going places by that method. It's one of the perks of living in Europe. Therefore we have another cover collection for you today, one we've had in mind for a while. Many pulp and genre novels prominently feature trains. Normal people see them as romantic, but authors see their sinister flipside. Secrets, seclusion, and an inability to escape can be what trains are about. Above and below we've put together a small sampling of covers along those lines. If we desired, we could create a similar collection of magazine train covers that easily would total more than a hundred scans. There were such publications as Railroad Stories, Railroad Man's Magazine, Railroad, and all were published for years. But we're interested, as usual, in book covers. Apart from those here, we've already posted other train covers at this link, this one, this one, and this one. Safe travels.                          
 I don't go home with strangers, mister. So let's take a few minutes and get to know each other. 
Our copy of Albert Quandt's Passion C.O.D. holds together only thanks to the miracle of scotch tape, yet the great George Gross cover still shines through. It's another masterpiece from him—and another nice addition to our collection. The “c.o.d.” in the title doesn't relate to Quandt's story in any discernible way, unless we start speculating that the “c” stands for something other than “cash.” That's right—we just went there, because this is an unusually lusty novel, considering its 1951 copyright. The main character, the beautiful Sheila Salem, defying norms for literature of the period, gets with multiple men and arrives in the tale with a history of having done so for years. That's fine—we love lusty women. She also habitually ruins men. Is absolutely driven to do it. Again, fine. Hell, those two elements are vintage crime literature in a nutshell—lusty women; dudes ruined. Huzzah.
But on the down side for modern readers, Sheila believes forceful, even violent men, are “real men.” If any of you are seeking Exhibit A for a seminar on male authors writing female characters as embodiments of sexist mid-century attitudes, this is your baby right here. But we can't say Quandt is unable to write. For this genre, he's a better author than most. His story sustains interest. As Sheila discards empty husks of men behind her, gets one guy sent to prison, shoots another, and is soon consorting with criminal types, the only question becomes whether her behavior with these dupes will cost her. In pulp, dupes are expendable, so we were rooting for Sheila all the way. But to find out what actually happens you'll have to lay out cash for the book yourself. 
 We deal in human slaughter. But when the killing business is slow we also hire out to open Champagne bottles at parties.  
We ran across this menacing promo image online showing the titular quintet of delinquent girl bosses from Delinquent Girl Boss: Worthless To Confess, originally titled Zubekô banchô: zange no neuchi mo nai, and which premiered in Japan today in 1971. Reiko Oshida is front and center, flanked by Yukie Kagawa, Mieko Tsudoi, Masumi Tachibana, and Yumiko Katayama. We've shared plenty of promo art from the film, and discussed what it's about. You can see all that by clicking its keywords below. And if you get the urge to be trendy and open a Champagne bottle with a sword, try to do better than these people.
 What do you mean you're not in the mood? 
It's time for another look at George Gross, one of the true giants of mid-century paperback and magazine illustration. On this cover for 1945's As Good As Married you see that the artist who was a master of ornate clothing and highly sculptural hair was also capable of dialing it back a bit. The author here, Perry Lindsay, was Peggy Gaddis writing under a pseudonym. We recently bought a book she wrote as Lindsay that we'll get to in a bit. She's usually an entertaining author, so we're looking forward to that.
 Louisiana territory proves extremely inhospitable in 1957 manhunt thriller. 
We bought The Tight Corner by Sam Ross because it was cheap. We knew nothing about Ross, and the uncredited cover art is decent but not special. But price sometimes wins, so we found ourselves reading a five dollar paperback about an ex-boxer named Tommy Berk who gets tangled up in a gambling scam gone wrong, is hunted by police for a murder he didn't commit, and after being shot and falling off a ferry in the Mississippi River Delta near New Orleans, is rescued by a Cajun fisherman and his sister as they take their shrimp boat out to sea.
Meanwhile, back on land, Berk's partners in the scam are looking for him to kill him. They're a diverse trio. Steve is a cold, calculating sociopath, but one with a secret weakness; Willy is an addle-brained killer, a trained attack dog; and Vi is a femme fatale who serves as the plot's honeytrap but is looking for a way to get out of the criminal life. It doesn't take long for them to realize Berk is somewhere at sea and has no choice but to come back sooner or later. When he does, they'll be waiting.
The Tight Corner is why we love buying vintage books. It's well written. Its bayou and ocean setting, simple but believable plot, and hard luck main character you end up liking all work in its favor. In addition, the prose has a lyrical style that's pleasing to read:
It was all mixed up in him and he saw himself swirling in her sea-green eyes. All at once, in the way she gazed at him, he seemed to plunge into them. He found himself close to her. And when he kissed her, he felt the sun she had been under all her life melt through him.
There are page-long passages written in that style and they're mostly interesting, though the book's dialogue suffers from name overusage. You know what we mean:
“It takes a lot of living to grow up, Jo.”
“Why'd he leave us, Adam?”
“Animals in a trap do strange things, Jo.”
“But I don't understand, Adam.”
People don't talk like that, so we generally take it as a sign of a bad ear for dialogue, but Ross does well with Cajun vernacular. He doesn't try to write their accents. Instead he uses careful word choices to lightly infuse their speech with the correct flavor. It works, and in the end, that and other positives outweigh the negatives, making The Tight Corner a saga that entertained us greatly. If you see it somewhere at a reasonable price, we think it's worth a read.
 There are different ways to win and lose, cowpoke. You'll find that out if you keep me waiting one more hand.
The temptation to buy Archie Joselyn's 1951 Star Books western Wyoming Outlaw was strong, but we have so many books piled up it's stupid. Plus, the Pulp Intl. girlfriends say—well, actually just PI-1 says this—we have too many books and too many plants. First of all, there's no such thing as too many books. Second, is it our fault that plants grow like viruses in this climate? No. But they win this round. We do have a lot of new books because our Stateside visitors over the last several months were each laden with a set we arranged to be mailed to their homes, which they then muled across the pond for us. Big thanks to them for reducing our mailing expenditures considerably. True friends, they are, and those tend to be thin on the ground as time goes by. You'll see those books begin popping up soon.
 Uh... well... I might consider it, Gloria. Would this third naked soul be male or female?  
Above is another high quality cover from Quarter Books, this time for 1949's Three Naked Souls by Ross Sloane. The art isn't credited in the book, but it was painted by Fred Rodewald. You see his signature on the original art, rudely covered up by the folks at Quarter. The book is about an upper crust woman named Gloria Ashton trapped in a bad marriage who's tempted by her husband's best friend. According to the title page, it was published earlier as Three Lovers, but we found no reference to it anywhere. Possibly it was credited to a different name, and with such an anodyne title is simply imposible to isolate online. In any case, nice work from Rodewald. If you want to see him at his best look here and here.
 Tabloid offers pills, thrills, and various painful aches.                    
Above: assorted pages from an issue of National Close-Up published today in 1968, with sex pills called vitogen, sexual perversion, sex parties, and sex swingers, then conversely, mass suicides, a monster baby, an acid burn victim, car crash deaths, and all that is terrible and painful in the world. Somewhere between those extremes are celebrities, including Julie Christie, Bing Crosby, Donna Marlowe again (seems she was a tabloid staple in ’68), Playboy centerfold Sue Williams (in the advertisement for strip poker cards), and, just above, the lovely June Palmer.
 Expectation and reality don't meet in Rat Pack classic. 
This is a tasty poster for Colpo grosso, and at first glance you'd expect the movie to be a dark thriller, giallo, or film noir. But then you notice the cast list at top—Martin, Sinatra, Davis, Jr.—and it probably dawns on you that this must be Ocean's Eleven. The poster was painted by Averado Ciriello and we have no idea why he went so dark with what is basically a comedy, but it's great work. Actually, it's better than the movie. For Sinatra-philes, Rat Pack lovers, or people who haven't yet seen Ocean's Eleven, that statement may seem sacriligious, so we won't try to back it up with our words—we'll just note that reviews of the day called it lazy and too long, and currently it has less than a 50% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Basically, despite being a cultural touchstone of a film, it isn't that good, with its main problem being that it's plain boring in parts. However...
The movie has tremendous value. A lot of contemporaneous reviews hated it because of its insouciant attitude toward the heist. New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther said it was “nonchalant and flippant towards crime,” and also described it as amoral. “Young people,” he wrote, “are likely to find this more appropriate and bewitching than do their elders. The latter are likely to feel less gleeful in the presence of heroes who rob and steal.” So it's clear that Ocean's Eleven flagrantly defied the strictures of the Hays Code censorship regime, which was weakening but still intact. The Code stated that in no film should the sympathy of the audience be “thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil, or sin,” yet audiences loved Sinatra and his party bros, and their laissez faire attitude was a needed course correction after decades of creative suppression. It's a shame then, that Ocean's Eleven isn't just a bit better.         
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1921—Chanel No. 5 Debuts
Gabrielle Bonheur "Coco" Chanel, the pioneering French fashion designer whose modernist philosophy, menswear-inspired styles, and pursuit of expensive simplicity made her an important figure in 20th-century fashion, introduces the perfume Chanel No. 5, which to this day remains one of the world's most legendary and best selling fragrances. 1961—First American Reaches Space
Three weeks after Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly into space, U.S. astronaut Alan Shepard completes a sub-orbit of fifteen minutes, returns to Earth, and is rescued from his Mercury 3 capsule in the Atlantic Ocean. Shepard made several more trips into space, even commanding a mission at age 47, and was eventually awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. 1953—Hemingway Wins Pulitzer
American author Ernest Hemingway, who had already written such literary classics as The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, is awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novella The Old Man and the Sea, the story of an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream. 1970—Mass Shooting at Kent State
In the U.S., Ohio National Guard troops, who had been sent to Kent State University after disturbances in the city of Kent the weekend before, open fire on a group of unarmed students, killing four and wounding nine. Some of the students had been protesting the United States' invasion of Cambodia, but others had been walking nearby or observing from a distance. The incident triggered a mass protest of four million college students nationwide, and eight of the guardsmen were indicted by a grand jury, but charges against all of them were eventually dismissed. 2003—Suzy Parker Dies
American model and actress Suzy Parker, who appeared the films Funny Face and Kiss Them for Me, was the first model to earn more than $100,000 a year, and who was a favorite target of the mid-century tabloids, dies at home in Montecito, California, surrounded by family friends, after electing to discontinue dialysis treatments.
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