DOING HER PARTS

Well, sure, honey, if that's what you want, I guess I can try to help you put this deal to bed.


Midwood Books had a near-monopoly on artist Paul Rader, and good thing, because the guy was brilliant. His cover for the sleaze novel Strictly Business features an amusing tableau of a dapper businessman chatting with his leering colleague, as a coy beauty sits nearby.

The cover blurb is a little deceptive. The husband in this tale is actually the first to cheat, which drives his wife to do the same, first sampling some same-sex sweetness, then bedding down with her hubbie’s hated rival. While the husband has an affair to help his business, his wife cheats in retaliation. When the husband encourages her to use her wiles to help him seal a deal, she leaves him. End of book. So the cover text is not on target. Not only that, but the rear synopsis makes up a scenario that never occurs at any point. Such are the hazards of sleaze novels, but this one is still a pretty fun read. Midwood was top of the genre for good reason.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1901—McKinley Fatally Shot

Polish-born anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots and fatally wounds U.S. President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley dies September 12, and Czolgosz is later executed.

1939—U.S. Declares Neutrality in WW II

The Neutrality Acts, which had been passed in the 1930s when the United States considered foreign conflicts undesirable, prompts the nation to declare neutrality in World War II. The policy ended with the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, which allowed the U.S. to sell, lend or give war materials to allied nations.

1972—Munich Massacre

During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, a paramilitary group calling itself Black September takes members of the Israeli olympic team hostage. Eventually the group, which represents the first glimpse of terrorists for most people in the Western world, kill eleven of the hostages along with one West German police officer during a rescue attempt by West German police that devolves into a firefight. Five of the eight members of Black September are also killed.

1957—U.S. National Guard Used Against Students

The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, mobilizes the National Guard to prevent nine African-American students known as the Little Rock Nine from enrolling in high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.

1941—Auschwitz Begins Gassing Prisoners

Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps, becomes an extermination camp when it begins using poison gas to kill prisoners en masse. The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, later testifies at the Nuremberg Trials that he believes perhaps 3 million people died at Auschwitz, but the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum revises the figure to about 1 million.

This awesome cover art is by Tommy Shoemaker, a new talent to us, but not to more experienced paperback illustration aficionados.
Ten covers from the popular French thriller series Les aventures de Zodiaque.
Sam Peffer cover art for Jonathan Latimer's Solomon's Vineyard, originally published in 1941.

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