The cover of Adam magazine from this month in 1962 is simpler than normal but very effective too. Instead of the usual three figures, you get the lone woman with an explosion in the background. It pairs with Jay Edmond’s short story “The Deadly Angel,” about a test pilot’s wife whose husband dies in the fictional X-20 jet (modeled after jets like the Bell X-1 flown by Chuck Yeager). After her husband goes down in flames Lorrie Chambers takes up with another pilot, who also dies during a test flight. Then she takes up with another who dies, and another. Protagonist Len Jacobs meets her in a bar the night before his own X-20 test flight. Is Lorrie a jinx, or is she suffering a run of otherworldly bad luck? He’s advised not to go near her, but he can’t stay away because she’s beautiful—of course—and he can’t back out of the test. So the story concludes with his flight into the stratosphere. Does he survive? The cover tells you. We’ll just say the story was an interesting change from the tiger hunts and treacherous fatales you usually get in Adam.
In terms of art and photography there’s less than in later issues, especially those from the mid-seventies and onward. You get a mere five model pages. The inside back cover features one with slicked back hair in a pool. Whoever photographed her may have been in love with Grace Kelly. He posed his blonde exactly the way Howell Conant famously posed Kelly in Jamaica in 1955 for a cover of Collier’s magazine. We’ve added an inset of that shot.
