Vintage Pulp | Jan 19 2017 |
3 Doors to Death is a collection of Nero Wolfe mystery novellas by Rex Stout, published by the Viking Press in 1950, with this Dell paperback appearing in 1952. The stories are “Man Alive,” “Omit Flowers,” and “Door to Death,” and as the cover states, these all star Stout's famed detective Nero Wolfe, who was created back in 1935, and since has been adapted to stage, film, radio, and television. His assistant Archie Goodwin is on hand to assist in each of the tales. The art on this paperback was painted by Rafael DeSoto, who we've featured before, like here and here. And we should mention we found this cover at Noah Stewart's book blog. We recommend a visit there for more interesting covers.
Vintage Pulp | Jan 20 2016 |
Two hard-luck juvenile delinquents find each other and fall in love in the slums of New York City, but can they keep it together when their surroundings threaten to destroy them? That's the basic idea of Yield to the Night. Author Jack Karney specialized in this, writing about East Side gangs in many novels, including Work of Darkness, Cry Brother Cry, Cop, and Tough Town. 1960 copyright on the above, with Rafael DeSoto cover art.
Vintage Pulp | Dec 12 2015 |
When we started thinking about this post we went straight to candies for tattoo ideas. Apparently there's a candy called Nik-L-Nips that you have to suck the juice out of, but we thought that was too obscure, and of course Milk Duds was an obvious option, but it sounds a bit insulting, so in the end “the twins” seemed like a classic. The Pulp Intl. girlfriends agreed. Brian Agar's Have Love, Will Share is a bit of a classic too, or at least it uses a classic sleaze set-up—the marriage counselor whose patient is a nymphomaniac and soon sets her eyes on the doctor. Agar was a pen name used by author W.T. Ballard, an original contributor to Black Mask who wrote many novels under many names, including Jack Slade, Clay Turner, et al. This effort is from 1961 and it has Rafael DeSoto cover art.
Vintage Pulp | Jul 17 2015 |
We have another collection today as we prepare to jet away on vacation with the girls. Since the place we’re going is known for rowdy British tourists (what place isn’t known for that?), we thought we’d feature some of the numerous paperback covers featuring fights. You’ll notice, as with our last collection, the preponderance of French books. Parisian publishers loved this theme. The difference, as opposed to American publishers, is that you almost never saw women actually being hit on French covers (we’d almost go so far as to say it never happened, but we’ve obviously not seen every French paperback ever printed). The French preferred man-on-man violence, and when women were involved, they were either acquitting themselves nicely, or often winning via the use of sharp or blunt instruments.
Violence against women is and has always been a serious problem in the real world, but we’re just looking at products of the imagination here, which themselves represent products of the imagination known as fiction. Content-wise, mid-century authors generally frowned upon violence toward women even if they wrote it into their novels. Conversely, the cover art, stripped of literary context, seemed to glorify it. Since cover art is designed to entice readers, there’s a valid discussion here about why anti-woman violence was deemed attractive on mid-century paperback fronts, and whether its disappearance indicates an understanding of its wrongness, or merely a cynical realization that it can no longer be shown without consequences. We have another fighting cover here, and you may also want to check out our western brawls here.
Vintage Pulp | Mar 17 2011 |
Above is 1953’s Beyond the Law by Edward D. Radin, an author who used several pseudonyms to write a series of true crime books, the most famous of which was probably Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story. In that one he proposed that Clarice Blackburn was the murderer, and his theory about the crime was later adapted for a 1961 episode of the television show Armstrong Circle Theater. Beyond the Law is a collection of slightly more prosaic criminal case studies, but the Rafael DeSoto cover art is just sublime, so we had to share it.