 Citywide virus lockdown continues, with exceptions made for essential workers. 
Who constitutes an essential worker is really a matter of opinion, isn't it? In pulp terms, a city without vice can't claim to be a functioning city at all. And since they say prostitution is the oldest profession, it follows it would be the last to shut down. Brothels in various cities are now requiring customers to wear masks when having sex, and the international gimp crowd is like: “Right? You see? It's hella fun. You should try it with leather.” We wonder what happens when the brothels run out of masks (The international gloryhole crowd is like, “You can't guess? Really?”). You won't find any such dickulous variations in Women of the Evening, written by Peggy Gaddis and published by Belmont Books in 1962. In fact, you won't find much sex at all, if our previous Gaddis experiences are an indication. We just finished a Gaddis a few days ago—Once a Sinner, which she wrote as Gail Jordan—and it was more like a romance novel. Well, we'll keep looking. She wrote not only as Gaddis and Jordan, but as Peggy Dern, Sylvia Erskine, Roberta Courtland, Perry Lindsay, et al. One of those alter egos has to be the dirty version of Peggy. We'll find her. She can't hide. Not from us. See more from her extensive bibliography here, here, here, and here.
 The Sugar high doesn't last. 
This eye-catching cover for Adam Knight's 1960 mystery novel Sugar Shannon was painted by an uncredited artist. The image lured us toward a purchase, and reading the book we immediately discovered that the main character is supposed to be a sort of Honey West clone. We didn't think much of This Girl for Hire, the book that introduced West to the world, so a derivative version was probably never destined to thrill us. And indeed, the whole thing—which involves the title character and her sidekick Gwen trying to solve two murders in the New York City art underground—is pretty silly, and more than a little condescending. For instance, Knight makes constant references to Sugar's “girlish instincts,” “womanly intuition,” and “feminine corpuscles" (huh?), suggesting his investigative reporter heroine works less by logic than by a sort of gender-based magic. Sugar Shannon was supposed to be the first book of a series, but it turned out to be a series of one. That says it all.
 While part of me believes your claim that you're an A+ in bed, another part of me is skeptical because you're a consistent D in class. 
It's sleaze so nice they published it twice. The 1960s was the heyday of student/teacher sleaze novel, but even in that receptive era Babette Hall's The Professor and the Co-Ed must have sold especially well to warrant a new run. Hall really deserves credit because, amazingly, this was even published a third time—way back in 1946 as Last Night When We Were Young. 1946 books weren't terribly daring on the whole, so it's safe to assume this isn't sleaze at all, but a deliberately misleading rebranding, greatly helped by art from Robert Maguire at top, and an unknown on book two. The copyright is 1963 and 1967 on these.
 Step away from the controls, men. You've had your shot at running the world and the results speak for themselves.   
The James Bond book and movie franchises spawned an army of literary and cinematic spies with numerical and acronymic designations. The film we talked about yesterday is a good example, and 1964's television show The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is another. Author Bob Tralins joined in the fun in 1966 with his creation The Miss from S.I.S. The letters stood for the Society for International Security, and the group consisted of women—particularly lead spy Lee Crosley—cleaning up the mess men had made of the globe. Above you see the three entries in the series with their great cover art that is, amazingly, uncredited. We'll keep digging for info. In the meantime, more Bob Tralins here.
 It’s kill or be killed. 
Above, unusually gritty cover art by A. Leslie Ross for William Wiegand’s 1960 prison riot novel The Incorrigibles, first published in 1959 as The Treatment Man. Inspired by the Jackson, Michigan prison riot of 1952, the original title gives a clue to the novel’s contents—a psychologist who believes in rehabilitation is confronted by a riot in what had seemed an orderly prison. Good men are defeated and ulterior motives emerge. As the cover says, the book was an award winner.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1914—Aquitania Sets Sail
The Cunard liner RMS Aquitania, at 45,647 tons, sets sails on her maiden voyage from Liverpool, England to New York City. At the time she is the largest ocean liner on the seas. During a thirty-six year career the ship serves as both a passenger liner and military ship in both World Wars before being retired and scrapped in 1950.
1914—RMS Empress Sinks
Canadian Pacific Steamships' 570 foot ocean liner Empress of Ireland is struck amidships by a Norwegian coal freighter and sinks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence with the loss of 1,024 lives. Submerged in 130 feet of water, the ship is so easily accessible to treasure hunters who removed valuables and bodies from the wreck that the Canadian government finally passes a law in 1998 restricting access. 1937—Chamberlain Becomes Prime Minister
Arthur Neville Chamberlain, who is known today mainly for his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938 which conceded the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany and was supposed to appease Adolf Hitler's imperial ambitions, becomes prime minister of Great Britain. At the time Chamberlain is the second oldest man, at age sixty-eight, to ascend to the office. Three years later he would give way to Winston Churchill.
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