NO TELL MOTEL

Need to rendezvous in secret? Chas Ray Krider shows you how.

Chas Ray Krider’s Dirty Rendezvous is the third and final book in his motelesque trilogy, the first two entries of which were Motel Fetish and Do Not Disturb. Krider’s meticulously staged scenes in book three continue to conjure the retro chic of those lonely highwayside stopovers of American lore. The images nod strongly toward mid-century film noir and melodrama. Anything from The Postman Always Rings Twice to Psycho could apply, but soaked in deep, lush color. Krider’s women are the dangerous type—smokers and drinkers garbed in fetish wear, and often lavishly tattooed. Despite their tough looks, there’s an undercurrent of romance—the isolated motel is linked in the American psyche to freedom, adventure, and never knowing what you’ll find past the next solitary mile marker. Or who. 

But while motels suggest travel by road and the exhilaration of unexpected encounters, the title Dirty Rendezvous and the models’ elaborate garb speak of illicit plans and long guarded secrets. Not random meet-ups, but carefully woven webs of deceit—wives lied to, hats pulled down low, furtive glances in the rear view mirror. Krider has deftly achieved all these sensations and more, and when you add in the fact that his motel sets are as clean and carefully arranged as pages from vintage furniture catalogs, the result is guilty sleaze done with considerable class.

Dirty Rendezvous is a book depicting the moments just before wicked acts are committed with soul-freeing joy. You imagine Krider’s women checking in wearing demure garb, then transforming once concealed in the room. Of course, the desk clerk doesn’t care either way. He smirks when guests register under obviously false names and pay with cash, but all that really matters to him is that they don’t wake the family in 3B. It’s a futile wish—3B is about to hear things they never heard before. Get more info at the artist’s blog here.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

1960—Woodward Gets First Star on Walk of Fame

Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains nearly 2,800 stars.

1971—Paige Enters Baseball Hall of Fame

Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.

1969—Allende Meteorite Falls in Mexico

The Allende Meteorite, the largest object of its type ever found, falls in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The original stone, traveling at more than ten miles per second and leaving a brilliant streak across the sky, is believed to have been approximately the size of an automobile. But by the time it hit the Earth it had broken into hundreds of fragments.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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