 Yup, there's something here. Based on your personality I'm inclined to say it's a “666,” but no—they're just bruises. 
 A.A. Fair's Doublé de dupes, which is a translation of The Bigger They Come, was first published in hardback in 1939, appeared as a U.S. paperback from Pocket Books in 1952, and above in 1958. It's the first in a series starring sixty-something private investigator Bertha Cool and her pint-sized sidekick Donald Lam. Fair, aka Erle Stanley Gardner, had already made his Perry Mason series a success and the Cool/Lam shift got him out of the courtroom. In this one the protagonists attempt to serve divorce papers, but of course the seemingly simple task falls apart spectacularly, leaving a man dead and Lam under suspicion of having committed a serious crime. The British version's title—Lam to the Slaughter—gives that aspect of the story away immediately. The curious cover art you see here by Maurice Thomas was used on both the U.S. and French versions (a bit of a surprise considering the six year gap) and shows Lam checking out injuries on the femme fatale, who has been attacked by another character. General consensus online is that this series improved greatly after the first couple of entries.
 Actually, I came in here because I thought you said pancakes. No biggie, though. Let's get this pancreas removed. 
Above, the cover of East Side General by Frank G. Slaughter, originally 1952, with this Perma Books paperback appearing in 1957. This is no typical New York City hospital. One doctor is an ex-Nazi, and the main plot contrivance involves the arrival of burn victims whose injuries turn out to be caused by radiation, which leads police to seek an atomic serial killer. The book was re-issued several times with different art, but this effort by Verne Tossey is by far the best.
 Midnight lowers the bar even more than usual. 
Around here we often debate whether to post something, but generally believe that as a sort of history site, it’s always a bad idea to hold back. Today we have an issue of Midnight, published October 24, 1966, that goes over the top with gore. It isn’t the woman whose face has been eaten off by rats that particularly worries us, nor the cop that supposedly had his eyeballs ripped out. We’ve posted those. No, it’s the autopsied infant that gave us pause. We sometimes prattle on about refusing to self-censor, but when we say that, what we’re referring to is sex and nudity, not vivisected one year-old babies. We want you to enjoy the site, not scroll down the page cringing at what gore will leap from the jack-in-the-box. So long story short: eaten face—okay; ripped out eyeballs—hunky dory; autopsied infant? Hellz no. We have our standards, though Midnight didn’t. Anyway, you do get some interesting articles in this issue. Of special note is William Holden answering questions about a guy he ran over and killed on a highway in Geneva, where he was living to avoid paying U.S. taxes. The Swiss sweated Holden for a while, but in the end he escaped with an eight month suspended sentence for manslaughter. What’s especially intriguing about this story is that an online search uncovered no links to this Swiss snafu. Instead, we learned that Holden had been convicted of vehicular manslaughter not in Switzerland, but in Italy, where he had rammed another car while drunk and killed the driver. But in the Midnight story, Holden is said to have run over a hiker. Asked whether he was under the influence, his response is: “No, I wasn’t drunk—not this time.” So did William Holden kill two people with his car in two separate incidents? We tend to doubt it, but on the other hand, how could Midnight get everything so wrong, with the accompanying quote: “not this time”? Sure, Midnight made things up, but as blatantly as this? We think it very likely that the editors simply tried to write about the Italian accident, but were working on the fly and mangled everything. They probably assumed the accident was in Switzerland because Holden lived there, took his “not this time” quote out of context, and—somehow—saw the phrase “second automobile” in all the other accounts and wrote it as “hiker.” Anyone could make those mistakes, right? Yeah, anyone could. But Midnight does.
 
It feels like we’re piling on, but mugshots are pulp, and this one makes our last mugshot look tame by comparison. Besides, we have a responsibility to you, our readers. So at top is Phil Spector wearing one of his fright wigs, and below you see the cringe-worthy fringe he was hiding the whole time. There we did it—we joined ten-thousand other websites in posting poor Phil’s imprisoned puss, but we did it with alliteration because that's how classy we are.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1937—The Hindenburg Explodes
In the U.S, at Lakehurst, New Jersey, the German zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg catches fire and is incinerated within a minute while attempting to dock in windy conditions after a trans-Atlantic crossing. The disaster, which kills thirty-six people, becomes the subject of spectacular newsreel coverage, photographs, and most famously, Herbert Morrison's recorded radio eyewitness report from the landing field. But for all the witnesses and speculation, the actual cause of the fire remains unknown. 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.
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