 Actually, I'll pay first. I once bought a television on installments and I can tell you easy financing is a scam. 
This cover illustration from Robert McGinnis features one of his more famous elongated femmes fatales. He's also cleverly included iconic detective art objects such as a pistol, a martini glass, a smoldering cigarette, and a tumbler of some amber liquid or other, and with some nifty positioning he's placed all these items clearly in view why keeping the poses of his stylized figures easy and balanced. And for good measure his femme has lost a heel, which invites speculation as to how that happened. That's GGA (good girl art) at its best.
Could Robert Kyle's, aka Robert Terrall's, aka Brett Halliday's 1960 thriller Kill Now, Pay Later possibly be as good as its cover art? That's a big ask. Too big, really, though the book is pretty good. Kyle's franchise detective Ben Gates is hired to guard gifts at a high society wedding, but someone slips a mickey into his coffee and he's in la-la land while two murders and a robbery occur. As a matter of self preservation he has to solve the crimes or his chances of securing more work will be pretty slim. After all, who'd hire a detective that passes out on the job?
So Gates delves into the mystery, unravels a complicated plot, and handles the advances of three beautiful women. We think of these babe-magnet detectives as the male analogue to the dewy maidens of romance novels. As male wish fulfillment goes, Kill Now, Pay Later gets the job done, offering up a tough and competent protagonist and an engaging assortment of secondary personalities. This was third in the Gates series after Blackmail, Inc. and Model for Murder. We'll probably try to locate those. Kyle/Terrall/Halliday knows how to entertain a reader.
 *gasp* That phone is just everything! Where did you find it in that color? I'm dying of jealousy right now. 
Murder takes no holiday and neither does artistic talent, as proven by this beautiful Robert McGinnis cover of a man losing his shit over the latest pink phone from Ma Bell. Okay, that isn't what's happening, but it looks that way, right? Actually the male figure is way over his head in a smuggling plot and the female figure—a femme fatale named Vivienne Larousse—is keeping him from losing his nerve. The book is set on the fictional Caribbean Island of St. Albans, a British enclave that seems to be modeled after the Caymans. Brett Halliday's franchise sleuth Michael Shayne is thrown into the mix to solve a murder that took place in the U.S., and follows the clues to the tropics. Of the approximately seventy Shayne novels, this one—number thirty-five or so—is merely adequate. Actually, all the ones we've read have been merely adequate. But we'll keep at it. McGinnis, on the other hand, is masterful. Of all the moments in an action oriented book to illustrate he chose an unlikely one, but the result is just everything. His alternate cover, below, is also great. 
 Michael Shayne stabs Phillip Marlowe in the back. 
Above you see a promo poster for the detective yarn The Time To Kill, a movie that premiered in the U.S. today in 1943 and has a mildly convoluted provenance that will be interesting to pulp fans. Mystery authors Brett Halliday and Raymond Chandler were both popular writers, but Twentieth Century Fox had already made six movies based on Halliday's novels. So they bought Chandler's The High Window and changed the main character from Phillip Marlowe to Halliday's franchise detective Michael Shayne. We don't know if Chandler and Halliday had any sort of rivalry to that point, but we wouldn't be surprised if one started.
Fox had made the previous Shayne flicks in just two years, and they're light in tone, which is one reason we think websites that label The Time To Kill a film noir are stretching. The lead character is not a driven loner, the general sense of corruption is nowhere to be found, and most of the usual noir iconography, such as rain or water, neon, newspapers, sidewalks, etc., is absent. No flashbacks. No voiceover. Nothing. Co-star Doris Merrick is a femme fatale perhaps, but virtually any woman in a crime thriller can fit that cubbyhole. Then surprise—four fifths of the way through its running time the movie shifts gears—Shayne walks into a nighttime murder scene that's draped with shadows and ill portent, but even this is played for laughs when he pratfalls down a staircase. And the ultimate fate of the villain is basically a bad barroom joke.
Director Herbert Leeds had worked on a variety of low budget westerns, comedies, and serials, and was a technician, not a stylist. His spliced in noir sequence is a nice nod to an emerging trend, but we don't think it pushes what is mainly a goofball detective film into noir territory. In general, his were a safe pair of hands tasked with churning out movies at high speed. The Time To Kill is a typically perfunctory Leeds effort—one hour and one minute long, meant to be consumed like penny candy. So we don't think it's a film noir, but hey—we just run a silly website. What do we know? And does it even matter? The Time To Kill is a decent enough distraction, however you categorize it.
 For better or worse, in sickness and health, women in pulp don’t have a heck of a lot of choice about it. Pulp is a place where the men are decisive and the women are as light as feathers. We’ve gotten together a collection of paperback covers featuring women being spirited away to places unknown, usually unconscious, by men and things that are less than men. You have art from Harry Schaare, Saul Levine, Harry Barton, Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan, and others.
 They got on like a hayloft afire—until the barn burned down. 
In pulp, people are careless with cigarettes, as we’ve pointed out before, and above is another example. Originally published in 1937 as Too Smart for Love, Rainbow Books came out with this digest paperback in 1951. The set-up here is simple—bad girl Janet Stang pursues men for their money. Author Kathryn Culver was in reality the prolific Davis Dresser, who also wrote as Brett Halliday, Don Davis, Asa Baker, Matthew Blood, Don Davis, Hal Debrett, et.al. The art here is by Howell Dodd and it’s top quality work, in our opinion. Dodd had a thing about redheads and made them a staple of his work, so we’re going to gather up a collection of these women and show you more later.
 Sexiness is a warm gun (on a book cover anyway). 
This cover of Peter O’Donnell’s Sabre Tooth, part of his popular Modesty Blaise series, shows Italian actress Monica Vitti as the title character, and it got us thinking about all the paperback covers that feature photos of women with guns. Of course, we realize that, as far as the gun-crazed U.S. is concerned, thinking of armed people as enticing or artistic may seem a little tone deaf, but we're talking about book covers, that's all. So we decided to put together a collection. We should mention that the Blaise series is worth reading if you’re looking for something along the lines of light thrills. It’s breezy and sexy as only 1960s spy literature can be, and Blaise herself is an interesting character, born in Greece, raised by a Hungarian scholar, trained in martial arts, and proficient in piracy, theft, and all around sneakiness. In Sabre Tooth she finds herself trying to thwart an invasion of Kuwait by an Afghan warlord. Below we have a dozen more photo covers featuring heat-packing women. As always with these collections, thanks to the original uploaders, most from Flickr, but particularly Muller-Fokker and Existential Ennui.
           
 Pull the blinds and turn out the lights. 
We’ve explored several cover motifs in pulp art, and another we’ve grown to appreciate is the use of venetian blind shadows or silhouettes. Always a dramatic addition to a cover, we could probably compile fifty of these, at least, but here are twenty examples. The artists—Emilio Freix, Robert Maguire, James Hodges, and others—use them to greater and lesser degrees, and opt for both literal and stylized renderings. For instance, the above cover from Maguire shows vertical shadows, but the sense of venetian blinds remains. As always, thanks to all the original uploaders.
                  
 Vintage literature reminds us that murder, deceit, betrayal, lust and greed know no boundaries. 
There’s a saying that the world is a book and those who don’t travel read only one page. But on the other hand, if you stay home the danger and mayhem at least happen in your own language. Which is the better course? Pulp authors seem to think it’s the latter. Above and below are twenty-one vintage bookcovers for fiction set in various cities around the globe. The writing spans genres such as romance, sleaze, horror, and espionage, and the art is by Mitchell Hooks, Barye Phillips, Robert McGinnis, et. al. Thanks to all the original uploaders.
                   

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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1957—Sputnik Circles Earth
The Soviet Union launches the satellite Sputnik I, which becomes the first artificial object to orbit the Earth. It orbits for two months and provides valuable information about the density of the upper atmosphere. It also panics the United States into a space race that eventually culminates in the U.S. moon landing. 1970—Janis Joplin Overdoses
American blues singer Janis Joplin is found dead on the floor of her motel room in Los Angeles. The cause of death is determined to be an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol. 1908—Pravda Founded
The newspaper Pravda is founded by Leon Trotsky, Adolph Joffe, Matvey Skobelev and other Russian exiles living in Vienna. The name means "truth" and the paper serves as an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991. 1957—Ferlinghetti Wins Obscenity Case
An obscenity trial brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the counterculture City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, reaches its conclusion when Judge Clayton Horn rules that Allen Ginsberg's poetry collection Howl is not obscene. 1995—Simpson Acquitted
After a long trial watched by millions of people worldwide, former football star O.J. Simpson is acquitted of the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson subsequently loses a civil suit and is ordered to pay millions in damages. 1919—Wilson Suffers Stroke
U.S. President Woodrow Wilson suffers a massive stroke, leaving him partially paralyzed. He is confined to bed for weeks, but eventually resumes his duties, though his participation is little more than perfunctory. Wilson remains disabled throughout the remainder of his term in office, and the rest of his life. 1968—Massacre in Mexico
Ten days before the opening of the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, a peaceful student demonstration ends in the Tlatelolco Massacre. 200 to 300 students are gunned down, and to this day there is no consensus about how or why the shooting began.
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