Pulp International

vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news

MORTGAGE YOUR SOUL

Don't be so dramatic. It's not evil. Overpriced for this area, yes. Evil, no.

You see here the front and rear covers for House of Evil, a thriller published in 1954 and written by the wife/husband team of Clayre and Michel Lipman (you’ll see them as Clayre and Michael on some sites, but that’s an incorrect spelling of his name). It’s a crime novel, but horror-adjacent as the plot develops. Basically, it deals with an everyman named Roman Laird who gets tangled up in a macabre mystery when he walks into a murder scene in his girlfriend’s San Francisco apartment. His girlfriend is out of town, so the initial elements of the puzzle are: why kill in her apartment, and did the killer get who he was really after?

When the body seems to vanish, only to reappear, the puzzle deepens. As Laird begins to feel observed and the killer goes after another woman, answers continue to be in short supply. The few uncertain eyewitnesses are unhelpful with identification. Later Laird and the police uncover a set of oil paintings depicting terrors such as women hung upside down on hooks and strange beasts assaulting terrified victims. The Lipmans don’t make direct comparisons to existing artists, so the choice of what the art looks like is up to the reader’s imagination. People often go to Bosch or Goya when it comes to dark art, but we decided the paintings probably looked like those of Francis Bacon. In any case, the riddle in the story is what they might mean.

House of Evil is bold, and it’s well written and interesting, however because iterations of the book’s central gimmick have appeared quite a bit since 1954 (click only if you want to find out about a book—and movie—with an identical twist), you may guess what’s happening a few chapters in. That’s no fault of the Lipmans, but it means for modern readers that the mystery may not scintillate, the ending may feel too drawn out, and the final shocker may not hold sufficient impact. But even so, it’s a deft, dark, deeply psychological, outside-the-box thriller. We had to appreciate it.

San Francisco, Lion Books, Clayre Lipman, Michel Lipman, cover art, literature, horror

LESSON LEARNED

You take instruction remarkably well. If you show the same aptitude academically you might actually graduate.

Above: a classic in the lesbian sleaze genre, 1964’s Tutor from Lesbos, by A. P. Williams. If you want a copy of this it’ll run you upwards of two-hundred dollars, which we can tell you is a lot for a book that’s almost guaranteed to be bad. We’ve never paid more than thirty dollars for a paperback, and then only a rare few times. At that maximum price, we might never be able to buy Tutor from Lesbos, but we can certainly buy something almost identical. That’s the real lesson learned.

Beacon Signal, A.P. Williams, cover art, literature, lgbt

CHANGE THE NARRATIVE

From the moment I armed myself people stopped making dirty jokes about my name. Weird, huh?

Jean Moorhead makes a fourth appearance as a femme fatale on our website in this image from 1956, which, like the previous one we shared, was made for The Violent Years. We really must watch that movie. Click Moorhead’s keywords to see everything we’ve done on her.

The Violent Years, Jean Moorhead

WAR CRIMINALS

Honor and humanity are always the first casualties.

Above you see a poster for a Japanese film called Jingi naki tatakai: Sôshûhen, known in English as Battles without Honor and Humanity. Aside from having one of the great titles in cinematic history (though it’s also known less poetically as The Yakuza Papers), this is a landmark production from Toei Company, helmed by director Kinji Fukasaku, and starring Bunta Sugawara, Hiroki Matsukata, Kunie Tanaka, and Gorô Ibuki. It was the first of what turned out to be a five film series, all adapted from Weekly Sankei newspaper articles by journalist Kōichi Iiboshi that were themselves distillations of material originally written by an actual yakuza named Kōzō Minō.

The movies are a deep dive into organized crime in postwar Japan, and in this first entry various yakuza clan allegiances and hatreds are formed in the shattered and lawless cities controlled by the occupying U.S. soldiers, who are themselves without many scruples. Sugawara becomes enmeshed in violence that leads to his imprisonment, there to become blood brothers with a yakuza footsoldier. Upon release from jail Sugawara goes to work for the same clan as his friend, and this group becomes the feared Yamamori crime family.

From that point the movie follows the fortunes and misfortunes of various families vying for supremacy, as loyalties shift and betrayals beget betrayals. This will probably be hard to follow for most viewers, as many characters have been introduced in rapid succession during the opening minutes, but the focus is always on Sugawara. The story plays out over years, with important characters singled out via freeze frame when they die, and noted with onscreen titles: December 17, 1949: _______ died. By the film’s final frame, a clean conclusion has not been reached (hence sequels).

From the movie’s opening credits, shown atop an image of the nuked core of Hiroshima and the skeletal dome of the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, to its narrated interstitials, and its overlays of subtitles, there’s a historical feel here and a weightiness that had perhaps been unseen to that point in yakuza dramas. While the film is often called the Japanese version of The Godfather, it isn’t the same type of movie and isn’t on the same technical level. It may occupy a similar place in Japanese cinema culture, but Battles without Honor and Humanity is its own thing. A very good thing, and a mandatory watch for fans of Japanese film. It premiered this week in 1973.

Japan, Toei Company, Jingi naki tatakai: Sôshûhen, Battles without Honor and Humanity, The Yakuza Papers, Bunta Sugawara, Hiroki Matsukata, Kunie Tanaka, Gorô Ibuki, Kinji Fukasaku, Kōzō Minō, Kinji Fukasaku, poster art, cinema, yakuza, movie review

BEING MEIKO

Kaji keeps it casual.

Japanese actress Meiko Kaji wasn’t just one of her era’s foremost action stars, appearing in epics such as the Female Prisoner Scorpion series and the Stray Cat Rock franchise, but was also a prolific recording artist who released more than a dozen albums and an equal numbers of EPs and singles. Even if you haven’t sought her out you’ve probably heard her. Her song “Flower of Carnage” was prominently featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1.

Above you see a promo poster made by Teichiku Records, for whom Kaji recorded a 1974 album titled Sareyo Sareyo Kanashimi No Shirabe, or Go Away, Go Away, Melody of Sadness. The above shot was used for the rear cover. The softer focus look of the poster compared to the CD is the printing, not the scan (actually hi-rez photo). We’ve included the crystal clear poster text below as proof. Feel free to seek out everything we have on Meiko by clicking her keywords at bottom.

Japan, Kill Bill: Vol. 1, Teichiku Records, Meiko Kaji, Qunetin Tarantino, pinku, pinky violence, cinema, album art

RED IN CAPTIVITY

Some call it kidnapping. He prefers to think of it as privatization.

Above: a cover for La Venere d’Amburgo, “the Venus of Hamburg,” by Georges H. Boskero. This is nice work. The gunman’s orange hair, yellow tie, and the captive’s blazing red dress really make this jump from the black, grey, and blue background. It isn’t signed but it’s probably by Franco Piccioni, who was used often by this particular publisher, Edizioni MA-GA. The copyright is 1965.

Italy, Edizioni MA-GA, Georges H. Boskero, Georges H. Bosckero, Giorgio Boschero, Franco Picchioni, cover art, literature

COMMUNIST SLUMBER PARTY

Chinese espionage cabal sleeps with one spy open.

A while back, when we read Holly Roth’s 1954 Cold War novel The Shocking Secret, we said we suspected she’d done better work. Well, we found it. 1955’s The Sleeper is also an anti-communist thriller, but Roth course-corrected after her middling previous effort by making the main communist agent in this story intellectually and tactically brilliant. That’s been a regular complaint of ours, that mid-century writers cheat by making Cold War antagonists too hapless to realistically worry about. They rarely took the easy way out with other types of villains, so we wonder if, considering the anti-commie hysteria of the period, they were afraid of seeming sympathetic. But The Sleeper features an agent who’s smart, charming, and determined to a level nobody else in the story can match.

This spy, an all-American boy type, is introduced to the reader while already in jail. A journalist named Robert Kendall has interviewed him for a profile in a prestigious magazine, but comes to believe—as does the U.S. government—that messages to other spies have been seeded into the article. Quaint ideas about press freedom prevent the Feds from killing the piece. And there’s no proof anyway. Nobody can figure out the embedded message, but time is a factor—the piece is to be published in a few weeks. Drawn into the turbulence is an acquaintance of the jailed spy, Marta Wentwirth. Is she in on the plot? Maybe, but Kendall likes the cut of her jib, and decides she isn’t. How else can he get laid?

As in The Shocking Secret, the protagonist here is just a regular guy and journalist, and Roth is again interested in the Chinese more than the Russians, which is no surprise with the Korean War just ended. She smartly kept her chapters short, and the overall narrative compact. The gimmick of a sleeper agent being able to carefully load an interview with crucial information may seem unlikely, but it ends up believable the way Roth works it. We have a feeling the concept was used previously. If not, it was certainly used afterward. It’s too good not to recycle. We’ll probably try Roth once again at some point. As Cold War focused authors go, this one makes clear that she’s no sleeper.

Pyramid Books, Holly Roth, cover art, literature, communism

A BIRD’S APPETITE

She eats tiny portions but she enjoys them to the fullest.

We last saw Nigerian model and actress Minah Bird—that’s her real name—in a 1977 issue of Adam magazine. As a film performer she appeared in such efforts as The London Connection (sounds watchable), Vampira (sounds even more watchable), and Four Dimension of Greta (watched it). Here you’re watching her enjoy dessert one strawberry at a time in 1973.

Nigeria, Four Dimensions of Greta, Vampira, The London Connection, Minah Bird

THE PIRATE BAY

They upload themselves then download the loot.

We dropped by the post office to retrieve this copy of Conrad Dawn’s 1960 novel Chartered Love accompanied by one of our more literary friends, and when he saw the cover this reader of Vonnegut and Voltaire said, “This looks great!” He meant ridiculous and fun, which was our hope when we ordered it. The uncredited art is both, with its foreground figure holding a pistol in his teeth, yet behind his shoulder in a way that stretches the limits of human physiology. We couldn’t attempt this with a gun because we don’t own one, but we tried it with a dagger we picked up* during a jungle foray in Central America and succeeded in getting the hilt into a similar position as above—though very awkwardly. Therefore, this is objectively a weird painting. We suppose cheapo publishing house Novel Books had to take what they could get.

The book is about a Macao based boat captain named John Darrow who’s hired by beautiful Elizabeth McClain to locate twelve million dollars worth of gold bars that sank in 1938 with a torpedoed ship in the Sulu Sea. Naturally, others have heard about the treasure, most importantly a ruthless pirate named Suto Hayama who travels in a speedy junk and remains on Darrow’s trail throughout the novel. The story leads readers through the expected nautical cat and mouse between ships, tropical typhoon, hairsbreadth salvage operation, and seaborne showdown between protagonists and pirates.

Chartered Love is a deceptive title. The book’s only sex is of the fade-to-black variety. It’s mainly an action tale, and as such it basically works. Authors often focus on a specific aspect of a trade or culture to provide verisimilitude. Dawn chose decompression. Depending on how deep a scuba diver descends and for how long, they need to pause while ascending from the depths in order to avoid the bends—the condition arising from the increase then decrease of pressure on the body that causes dissolved gases to emerge as microbubbles inside body tissues. It’s debilitatingly painful, and sometimes deadly.

Decompression stops can last for hours, which in this case is managed thanks to support personnel lowering fresh oxygen tanks. A couple of times Darrow is literally stuck waiting below while crucial events take place topside. It’s a nice ticking clock device. We suspect Dawn took it from earlier novels, but fine—action literature is built on borrowed ideas. Chartered Love isn’t written at a high level, but the decompression gimmick adds interest and elevates the realism of the narrative. If you find the book for a few dollars, it’s worth buying for a quick and fun read.

*Actually, we didn’t pick it up. PI-1 did. Always thinking of others in her lovely way, she traded a Mickey Mouse watch for it and gave it to PSGP as a gift.

Macao, Novel Books, Conrad Dawn, cover art, literature
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1950—The Great Brinks Robbery Occurs

In the U.S., eleven thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car company’s offices in Boston, Massachusetts. The skillful execution of the crime, with only a bare minimum of clues left at the scene, results in the robbery being billed as “the crime of the century.” Despite this, all the members of the gang are later arrested.

1977—Gary Gilmore Is Executed

Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by a firing squad in Utah, ending a ten-year moratorium on Capital punishment in the United States. Gilmore’s story is later turned into a 1979 novel entitled The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and the book wins the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

1942—Carole Lombard Dies in Plane Crash

American actress Carole Lombard, who was the highest paid star in Hollywood during the late 1930s, dies in the crash of TWA Flight 3, on which she was flying from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after headlining a war bond rally in support of America’s military efforts. She was thirty-three years old.

1919—Luxemburg and Liebknecht Are Killed

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps. Freikorps was a term applied to various paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. Members of these groups would later become prominent members of the SS.

1967—Summer of Love Begins

The Human Be-In takes place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with between 20,000 to 30,000 people in attendance, their purpose being to promote their ideals of personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological preservation, and higher consciousness. The event is considered the beginning of the famed counterculture Summer of Love.

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LOVING DIFFERENTLY

Any part of a woman's body can be an erogenous zone. You just need to have skills.

EATING OUR FILLE

Uncredited 1961 cover art for Michel Morphy's novel La fille de Mignon, which was originally published in 1948.

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