vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
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.
Above: more office sleaze. We’ve thought up numerous silly quips for these, but we’ll never run out. Office sleaze is ripe for creativity, which may be one reason there are so many books comprising the sub-genre. Also, chauvinistic depictions of women as subordinate and subservient to men might be, just maybe, who can really say, another reason. This one, 1960’s Office Wife by Richard Grant, comes with excellent art by Robert Stanley, whose female faces are always distinctly recognizable. See what we mean here, here, and here.
Above: a fun cover for John Carver’s sleaze novel The Sex Twist, published by Beacon Signal, 1962. The art is uncredited, but if you want to buy it anyway the original painting is available for €3,300 from Netherlands based Simonis & Buunk fine art dealers. Have fun with that.
On this lovely Wednesday it’s once again time for your regular visit to the doctor—the sleaze doctor. Above you see a cover for Florenz Branch’s 1960 romp Intimate Physician, about a specialist in “female disorders.” The book is a re-issue of 1953’s Dr. Breyton’s Wife. You have ob/gyn Dr. Paul Breyton, haunted that one of his patients died when she received a backroom abortion he feels he could have prevented. You have the doctor’s wife Cathy, who is a 100% terror, openly entertaining various men, and who invites one to live with her and Breyton. And you have the illegal abortionist’s beautiful daughter Maggie, with whom Breyton falls in love. Add these ingredients and you get one of the darker sleaze novels, though not one of the better ones. But Branch—aka Florence Stonebraker—wrote so many books that they varied greatly in quality. This one you can skip. We’ve featured more medical sleaze novels than we can count, and you can rest assured that we’ll have another doctor’s appointment again soon.
We’ve been eyeing a Russell Trainer novel called His Daughter’s Friend for a while. It has one of illustrator Paul Rader’s best covers. But since it’s a pretty empty feeling to buy a book with a nice cover that turns out to be terribly written (often the case with sleaze novels), we wanted to sample Trainer’s prose. With the price of His Daughter’s Friend running as high as $200.00, a trial run was needed on cheaper books. Incidentally, we’d never pay that for a book anyway, but if Trainer can write, we’d probably go as high as $30.00, if we ever found a copy at that price. We ended up buying two Trainers, both at around fifteen bucks. You see the first above—Jail Bait. It’s an Australian edition published by New Century Press without a copyright date or cover artist attribution. Originally it appeared in the U.S. and Canada in 1962 as The Warden’s Wife.
That title pretty much sums up the idea behind the book, as a felon named Eddie Koski, after three years in max, is made a trustee and given a form of freedom as he works around the prison for the warden and other high ranking corrections officials. Unfortunately, the warden’s smoking hot wife Thelma is keenly interested in working Eddie’s shlong, which, of course, can only lead to trouble, if not more jail time. Things become doubly complicated when Eddie falls for a beautiful sociologist who comes to the prison to work on a dissertation. Can he escape the clutches of the dangerous Thelma and find love and freedom? Perhaps. The book is fun for the most part, but we’d have preferred the story to conclude without its late turn toward vicious homophobia. We weren’t surprised when it happened, though. Consider yourselves forewarned.
Overall, we wouldn’t say Jail Bait is either great or awful, which means Trainer probably will fail to add value to His Daugher’s Friend. While we often buy books entirely for the cover art, we never buy expensive ones for that reason. What we love is a book that surpasses our expectations, like, for example, Val Munroe’s surprisingly good 1952 sleazer Carnival of Passion. We suppose requiring decent writing skill with the cover art makes us amateurs at the book collecting game, but we’re not really collectors anyway. We’ll never sell them, in all likelihood. Nearly all the buyers would be in the U.S., and mailing them overseas, even at a profit, is too much work to even contemplate. So we’ll give up our quest for His Daughter’s Friend unless Trainer knocks book two—1963’s No Way Back—completely out of the park. We’ll read it in a bit and see where matters stand.
With a title like Nest of Summer Widows we absolutely had to read this 1962 effort from sleaze author Francis Loren, with its cool (uncredited) cover art, but guess what? There’s no nest of widows. We took that to mean many widows. But there’s only Ellen and Carla. The story is mainly about Ellen, whose husband spends each week away while she summers at Lake Powhatan. Let’s stop for a sec. See, kids, “summering” is this thing people did—way before our time too, but we’ve read about it and seen it depicted in movies like The Seven Year Itch—where people left big cities for lake or beach regions and spent the hot months hanging around in swimsuits.
Ellen’s husband is a lawyer, but isn’t rich, which is the only measure of success she knows. She figures he doesn’t lawyer hard enough. Since he comes to the lake only on the weekends, Ellen has plenty of idle time to get oopsied into bed by rich lake resident Tony Marsh. When Marsh later offers Ellen’s hubby a lucrative job, lawyer boy hesitates because he thinks Marsh is a phony. The story finds Ellen torn between her husband and her sidepiece. Personally, we question a lawyer who’s smart enough to pass the bar but not smart enough to know a rival’s been dropping caseloads in his wife’s inbox, but whatever.
We found a few aspects of the book interesting, but the chief curiosity is how most of what happens is a direct result of alcohol consumption, including the job offer. Those lake summerers really drank (scotch-sours and martinis, mainly). We guess the idle time made a body thirsty? It’s a question we’d like to answer through firsthand experience one day. Cue the Pulp Intl. girlfriends: “You guys are thirsty 24/7. Why wouldn’t you be thirsty idle?” It seems a fair point until you read the level of boozing in this book. But since they mention it— *off to the kitchen to build a quick cocktail*
Back now. And by the way, kids, that was a pro move, relationship-wise. Whenever your girl, wife, partner, mentions that you drink a lot, make a drink. It’s a drinking game they won’t know they’re playing at first. It works best if you’re flawless in every other aspect of your relationship. Hah—we only write stuff like that so they’ll read it and roll their eyes at us. But returning to the book, Loren asks several questions that need resolution. What does a person do when their head says one thing but their sex organs say another? Is Ellen’s husband a loser? Is Marsh a phony? Will summer ever end? Oh what tangled sleaze Loren weaves.
Above: cover art for After Office Hours, classic work/office sleaze from author Brian Black and publisher Beacon Signal, copyright 1964. The excellent art is by Ernest Chriacka, who signed this piece as his alter ego Darcy.
Charles Willeford’s 1956 novel Pick-Up is fronted by the work of Frank Uppwall, who we’ve featured here once before. We’ve featured a bit more of Willeford. In this one a down-on-his-luck San Francisco diner counterman named Harry Jordan meets a down-on-her-luck customer named Helen Meredith and sparks fly. Also flying in short order are emotional turmoil, tears and regrets, and unsound life choices. The duo mostly drink and dream. They fall into a mutual depression. They make a suicide pact but fail in their wrist-slashing attempt to shuffle off this mortal coil. They check themselves into a hospital for mental care but manifest no discernible benefits. Finally they return to their downward spirals of alcoholic self-medication. The story is a bit like a noirish Days of Wine and Roses, as Harry is able to keep a grip on his drinking but Helen isn’t. When you reach the end you’ll go, “Huh?” and wonder whether you should read the entire thing again. It’s a black tale. Willeford might not be the best writer, but his ideas are definitely unique.
Above: a cover for the 1963 novel Bachelor Girl by Francis Loren. This was painted by acknowledged master Robert Maguire. As for Loren, we’ll soon find out about him. We have one of his novels on deck. We’ve put together a couple of collections of covers featuring Venetian blinds. You can see those here and here.
The 1962 novel Witch with Blue Eyes, which you see here with its Ernest Chiriacka cover art, is about a man who quits a big hotel operation, hires on as manager of the Snug Haven roadside motel, but must battle two craven partners in order to turn it from a shady dive into a respectable success. The hours and stress test his marriage to the owner’s daughter, and problems worsen when his former lover—the eponymous witch with blue eyes—arrives on the scene (accompanied by her evil cat Big Bad) to ruin him. The book was presented by publishers Beacon-Signal as sleaze, but it’s virtually sexless, and as a pure drama it’s flatter than a flapjack. We suggest you don’t check in to this motel.
A B-52 Stratofortress carrying two H-bombs experiences trouble during a refueling operation, and in the midst of an emergency descent breaks up in mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. Five of the six arming devices on one of the bombs somehow activate before it lands via parachute in a wooded region where it is later recovered. The other bomb does not deploy its chute and crashes into muddy ground at 700 mph, disintegrating while driving its radioactive core fifty feet into the earth.
The International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague, Netherlands, and is the first international drug control treaty. The agreement was signed by Germany, the U.S., China, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam.
U.S. president Harry S. Truman establishes the Central Intelligence Group or CIG, an interim authority that lasts until the Central Intelligence Agency is established in September of 1947.
The New York City “Mad Bomber,” a man named George P. Metesky, is arrested in Waterbury, Connecticut and charged with planting more than 30 bombs. Metesky was angry about events surrounding a workplace injury suffered years earlier. Of the thirty-three known bombs he planted, twenty-two exploded, injuring fifteen people. He was apprehended based on an early use of offender profiling and because of clues given in letters he wrote to a newspaper. At trial he was found legally insane and committed to a state mental hospital.
American lawyer Alger Hiss is convicted of perjury in connection with an investigation by the House unAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), at which he was questioned about being a Soviet spy. Hiss served forty-four months in prison. Hiss maintained his innocence and fought his perjury conviction until his death in 1996 at age 92.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter pardons nearly all of the country’s Vietnam War draft evaders, many of whom had emigrated to Canada. He had made the pardon pledge during his election campaign, and he fulfilled his promise the day after he took office.
