You’ve won a colonial war of choice by shattering a non-violent Ethiopia as world powers such as Britain and France stood by and watched. You’ve rammed through privatizations, laws favoring the wealthy, and made unions virtually illegal. And you’ve got an ultra-nationalist, militarized police force to help you crush social unrest. What does a satisfied dictator do to unwind? Clearly, he takes his yacht out for a spin on the Tyrrhenian Sea. Italian strongman Benito Mussolini used that yacht—the Fiamma Nera or “Black Fire”—for aquatic romps with his hot mistress Clara Petacci, but scuttled the boat in 1943 after Italy’s World War II fortunes turned for the worse. The boat was raised and had several owners over the decades, but is in the news today because it was part of €28 million worth of assets seized from alleged organized crime figure Salvatore Squillante. 

Squillante was thought to be just another high flying one-percenter until his dealings with a Rome-based mafia network run by neo-fascists emerged as part of a legal investigation. He already had been convicted of filing a fraudulent bankruptcy in 1993, and the new information suggests he may be tied to systematic corruption in Rome involving politicians and businessmen who teamed with mobsters to scrape profits off the top of public contracts. Squillante is also connected via property dealings to convicted murderer Salvatore Buzzi, who as part of the aforementioned investigation was caught on tape telling criminal associates that schemes taking advantage of desperate Middle Eastern and African migrants were more profitable than the drug trade. The implications of that statement are truly frightening considering the drug trade is so profitable that some of the biggest banks in the world are connected to it.

But as interesting as Squillante and Buzzi are (who, by the way, have a long way to go before they hold a candle to slippery Silvio Berlusconi, whose antics we detailed here, here, and here), it’s the bit about Mussolini’s love boat that’s most fascinating. We suspect it was totemic for its various owners, who all certainly knew Il Duce was a sex maniac who trysted with hundreds or thousands of women—at sea and land—during his time in power. Fiamma Nera is destined to increase even more in value now that people outside Italy are aware of its existence. Will we be subjected to the spectacle of some hedge fund manager buying it for a fortune? Some software princeling or fat oligarch? After all, it's been bought numerous times before. But by virtue of its seizure it's now owned by the state for perhaps the first time, which means there's an alternativeto selling it—make it a floating monument dedicated to the crimes and hubris of Il Duce and the evil of fascism. Or destroy the thing completely and eternally.

Reiko Ike appears here in a bold photo published in the French magazine Euro Cinéma in November 1972. The text reads: A beautiful oriental pearl came to Rome for the turn Toei’s “A modern biography.” What does that mean? Unfortunately, our translating widget cannot clear that up. Seems as though the magazine is telling us Ike was sent to Rome earlier that year to promote either one of her own films, films by her studio Toei Company, or both. We found no references to anything made by Toei called A Modern Biography, and nothing that would translate to such. Our guess is the name refers to a Japanese film festival in Rome they put together or participated in. Anyone out there want to clear this up? You know the drill—editor@pulpinternational.com. Anyway, what’s extra cool about this magazine is that it also has Christina Lindberg on the cover and inside, plus Florinda Bolkan and Laura Antonelli. Euro Cinéma is good cinema.

We watched Frank Sinatra’s 1967 detective movie Tony Rome last week and, except for some nice Miami exteriors and the presence of Jill St. John, it was strictly average. But it did give us the idea of digging up the source material, so above you see the covers of the three popular books in the literary series, published in 1960, ’61, and ’62. In an attempt to make readers think the tales were real-life adventures they’re credited to Anthony Rome, but they were actually written by veteran author Marvin H. Albert, who churned out more than one hundred books in the western, mystery, spy, and history categories. In addition to writing as Rome, he published as Albert Conroy, Al Conroy, Nick Quarry, Ian MacAlister, and J. D. Christilian. The cover art above is by, top to bottom, George Porter, Bob Abbett, and Victor Kalin. A while back we published a rare promo image from the film version of Lady in Cement and you can see that rather unusual shot here. 

Io, Emmanuelle, aka A Man for Emmanuelle, was the movie that unveiled the immortal character of Emmanuelle to cinema audiences, but the film isn’t actually based on anything written by Emmanuelle Arsan.  Instead its source is Graziella Di Prospero’s spin-off tale “Disintegrazione 68,” a title that describes the film better than any summation we can offer. This is a brooding and stylish study of a sexually unfulfilled woman played by Erika Blanc wandering around wintry Rome from encounter to encounter, seeking but never finding satisfaction. Dark stuff, but pretty cool. Io, Emmanuelle premiered in Italy today in 1969.

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.

The hitchhiker has been a central element of many a mid-century thriller, with the results of these rides ranging from hot sex to bloody murder, and several outcomes between. Above you see a cover for Jean Holbrook's Girl on the Run, and below is a collection of more paperback covers depicting various characters casting their fates to the road. Wish them luck—they’ll need it. And thanks to all the original uploaders on these.

FBI Fichiers Secrets was a series of crime novels published in France by Rome-based Editions ERP during the early 1960s. The authors’ names are all pseudonyms—the books were really written by guys like Pino Belli, Aldo Crudo, Gualberto Titta, Nino Giannini, Gianfranco Parolini, and others. Above you see ten covers with top art from Mario Ferrari. You can see more masterworks from Ferrari here, here, and here. 

Above is a collection of covers from Movie Pictorial, aka Movie Information, a Japanese cinema and celeb magazine that thrived from the 1950s until the 1980s. Typically one side was Japanese in nature, and the other was Western. These were filled with photos, but we haven’t managed to find one at a reasonable price yet. When we do we’ll show you what’s inside. You can see more covers here and here. 

Italian actress and revered beauty Virna Lisi has died aged seventy-eight of cancer. Her film career began in 1953 and she has acted on televison in 2014 and in a film to be released next year. We’ve featured her quite a bit here. You can see a couple of entries here and here.