Vintage Pulp

February 24 2025

ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS ASK

If trouble is what you really want you'll always find it.

Another book chosen at random, another interesting story. This time, though, the story isn’t by the author, but about him. Joe Rayter was in reality Mary Fuller McChesney, who wrote three novels under pseudonyms, but is remembered as a sculptor. She was a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and became famous enough during her career to receive a New York Times obituary when she died in 2022.

McChesney’s first job was as a welder in the San Francisco shipyards, so the story goes, but before or by 1949, when she married artist Robert McChesney, she had turned her attention to sculpting. She had to pay her bills, so simultaneously she was teaching art in Point Richmond. When the state of California ordered all public employees to sign oaths disavowing politically inconvenient beliefs (a terrible period of American history that seems about to repeat), she refused and was fired. She and her husband moved to Guadalajara, where she kept sculpting.

Asking for Trouble came in 1954, so it seems she turned to literature to earn a bit of money outside of art, writing as Rayter, as well as Melissa Franklin. We should note that, as always, details vary when it comes to life stories. In particular, there’s contradiction over her Mexico period. Some sources say she spent less than a year in Guadalajara, while others say she spent two years in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende. In any case, she and her husband returned to the Bay Area, and she was based there the rest of her life.

Asking for Trouble is set in and around San Francisco and tells of private eye John Powers, who discovers his friend’s shotgunned body and sets out to determine who killed him. The plot follows normal detective yarn forms: he might get blamed for the killing, there are available femmes fatales, etc. The story is enlivened somewhat by a couple of leftfield characters and a trip to Reno, but we never quite developed an affinity for Mr. Powers, and the mystery doesn’t progress in the most engrossing fashion.

Still though, the book is readable and we’re happy to have picked it up. We chose it based on price and cover art alone. Its unknown backstory turned out to be a bonus, and who knows, might even increase the book’s value if its provenance becomes more widely known. It doesn’t hurt that the cover art is by James Meese, who depicted a scene from the story in which a character gets her dressed ripped off. We may try one of Rayter/McChesney’s other crime novels. If we do we’ll report back.

Mexico, California, Nevada, Guadalajara, San Francisco, Reno, Pocket Books, Joe Rayter, Mary Fuller McChesney, Melissa Franklin, Robert McChesney, James Meese, cover art, literature, communism

Mondo Bizarro

November 14 2024

MAJOR URSA SCAM

Either a California bear had very good taste in cars, or something strange was afoot.

What you’re looking at above isn’t roadkill. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not involved in this story. Yesterday, four men in the Lake Arrowhead region of California were arrested on charges of defrauding three insurance companies after they claimed their luxury cars were damaged by a bear—which was actually someone wearing the costume you see. We love stories like this. Remember the Minnesota bigfoot, and the Montana bigfoot, and the North Carolina bigfoot, and the South Carolina terror clown? It amuses us greatly that someone would dress up in a costume to achieve ultimately nothing. At least if you do it during Halloween you get candy. If it’s a really good costume and you’re at a halfway decent Halloween party it can even help you get laid. But insurance scams have a pretty low success rate. They do in film noir, at any rate, and in example after example after example after example of crime fiction.

One particular firm, presented with a damage claim on a $400,000 Rolls Royce Ghost, was immediately suspicious. The company analyzed video footage provided by the scammers and decided: guy in costume. We’re unsurprised. Even real bears can look fake under certain circumstances. Police raided the claimants’ apartment and found the disappointed looking creature above. All a foregone conclusion. Insurers by definition make money by not paying settlements, and deny coverage for the flimsiest of reasons. Even if the cars had been mauled by a real bear, we suspect the company would have found a way to not pay. “Claim denied: incident occurred due to owner carelessness, as it is known that bears love luxury cars due to their roominess and smooth rides.” Next time these con artists need extra cash we suggest they do what everyone else does: drive for Uber.

California, Lake Arrowhead

The Naked City

January 12 2024

FINAL SHOT

Life and death in the cinema.

Police Lt. Hugh Crowley lies dead in the Fox Westwood Village Theater in Los Angeles after being shot today in 1932. Crowley had gone to the theater after closing time to retrieve box office receipts, but instead surprised two thieves. Crowley reached for his sidearm and fired, and one of the crooks gunned him down. Both men were captured and tried, and Joseph Francis Regan, who had fired the fatal shot and actually been hit in the abdomen by a bullet fired by Crowley, was sentenced to death. Jack Green, who had no prior criminal record, had not fired a shot, and had cooperated in the police investigation, nevertheless also was sentenced to death, probably because he had planned the crime. Regan was hanged at San Quentin State Prison in August 1933. Green came close to the gallows, but received numerous reprieves after public pleas for leniency from his parents, and rulings from higher courts. Eventually his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

Although Green was probably never aware of it, legal authorities often cited his case during the long battle over the constitutionality of the death penalty in California. The idea put forth by the pro-death penalty side around 1960 was that even though Green’s commuted sentence specified “without possibility of parole,” there was no actual reason in California jurisprudence or the state constitution that he could not be released. All that was required was for an appropriate state authority to decide to do it. They felt therefore that anti-death penalty campaigners’ assurances that criminals could be imprisoned for life if such punishment was deemed necessary meant nothing. No matter the language of the original life sentence, any criminal could later be released. Green doubtless would have found all this fascinating, but none of it ever came to affect him. As far as we can tell, he did in fact spend the rest of his life in San Quentin.

California, San Quentin State Prison, Hugh Crowley, Joseph Francis Regan, Jack Green, murder

Vintage Pulp

April 4 2023

BURY BAD PEOPLE

Mess with her and you'll end up six feet under.

We can’t say the promo poster you see above is expertly executed, but it has a quality we appreciate. It was made for the low budget action flick Bury Me an Angel, which premiered this month in 1971, and stars Dixie Peabody. She plays a tough biker chick named Dag Bandy whose brother is messily murdered via shotgun, sending her humping a hot steel hog on a roaring mission of revenge. Nice copy there from the promotional scribes behind the poster. It’s a wonder people walking past the cinemas where the movie played weren’t sucked bodily into the front row, such being the irresistible power of those words. Note to our non-U.S. readers (and thank you for your visits): a “hog” is a motorcycle. Normally, it’s even a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. And to hump it, well, is— Oh, never mind.

The star here, Dixie Peabody, is obscure. She appeared in only two other films, Night Call Nurses and Angels Die Hard, both of which, like Bury Me an Angel, issued from Roger Corman’s grindhouse mill New World Pictures. She was seventy-two statuesque inches tall—seventy-six counting her hair—so she definitely looks the part of an action hero, but even action heroes gotta act, and as Hamlet said so concisely: There’s the rub. Peabody can emote, but she can’t act. There’s a difference. Of course, numerous b-movie performers of the 1970s couldn’t act, so if we adopt the principle of willing suspension of expectation™, what do we have here? We have a lead performer with flashes of talent and more than a bit of presence, but who’s stuck in a cheap-ass movie that doesn’t feature much in the way of script or structure. It worked for Easy Rider, but not here.

You won’t necessarily go away disappointed, though, because you get the expected cheapo movie fare: a drug montage, a bar fight, a skinny-dip, the three b’s (boobs, bush, and booty), counterculture lingo, and cheesy mysticism. Somewhere in there you also get future Grizzly Adams portrayer Dan Haggerty as a guy in a diner who entices Peabody into bed, which somehow doesn’t collapse under their combined weight. If you ever wanted to see a naked Grizzly, this is your chance. Eventually the film gets back on track toward Peabody’s roaring rampage of revenge, which has been all roar and no rampage to this point, but finishes with a climax that asks the age-old question, also possibly from Shakespeare, since he seemed to ask every question ever: If you murder a murderer, is it justice or murder?

We can’t actually recommend Bury Me an Angel, but as with its promo poster, though it isn’t expertly executed, it has a quality we appreciate. It seems to us that, combined with the inhalation or ingestion of a psychoactive substance, you might find some real enjoyment here. Maybe in the end that’s the surest sign of a worthwhile b-movie: it’s much better high. As a side note, it was written and directed by Barbara Peeters, one of the few women who called the shots behind the camera during the grindhouse era. She would helm five motion pictures, all of them bad, reaching her apogee with 1980’s Humanoids from the Deep, which took sexualized schlock to virtuosic levels. We’ll be checking out one or two of her other efforts later.

California, New World Pictures, Bury Me an Angel, Night Call Nurses, Angels Die Hard, Humanoids from the Deep, Grizzly Adams, Barbara Peeters, Dixie Peabody, Terry Mace, Clyde Ventura, Stephen Whittaker, Dan Haggerty, Roger Corman, poster art, cinema, movie review

Vintage Pulp

September 30 2021

POINT OF NO RETURN

Some guys just can't catch a break.

The Breaking Point is the second of three Hollywood adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not, and it’s a very good one. You’re already starting from an advantageous point when you have John Garfield in the starring role. He could act, and this part requires quite a bit from him. This was his next-to-last movie—he would be dead two years later, victim of a congenital heart problem, exacerbated by high stress, reportedly from his blacklisting that was the result efforts by commie hunters.

Casablanca director Michael Curtiz is on board here too, and he does a masterful job bringing the story to life. Curtiz, or Warner Brothers, or both, decided to transplant the novel’s action from Cuba to Newport Beach, but the theme of a man caught in untenable economic circumstances remains. Those who wanted a reasonably faithful adaptation of Hemingway’s story got it in this film. The first version, also called To Have and Have Not, was amazing but had little in common with the source material. The third adaptation, The Gun Runners, was also good but downplayed certain political themes. (There’s also an Iranian version we haven’t seen and which we’ll leave aside for now.)

So, which of the three U.S. versions is best? Is it really a competition? They’re all compulsively watchable, but this effort with Garfield is the grittiest by far, and the most affecting. It’s strange—To Have and Have Not is supposed to be Hemingway’s worst book, but with three good movies made from it, maybe it isn’t that bad after all. Perhaps because it’s a work from one of the most influential authors ever to write in English, the bar was just set too high. Maybe it really is Hemingway at his worst, but personally we think it’s very good. The Breaking Point premiered in the U.S. today in 1950.

California, Newport Beach, Catalina, The Breaking Point, To Have and Have Not, John Garfield, Patricia Neal, Phyllis Thaxter, Michael Curtiz, Ernest Hemingway, poster art, cinema

Femmes Fatales

March 15 2021

THE IDEAS OF MARSH

So, this will shock you—I can tell you it shocked me—but I realized I've wanted to shoot you since our very first date.

Marian Marsh was born in what is now Trinidad and Tobago, but which was at the time of her birth part of the British West Indies. She started life as Violet Krauth, but for Hollywood changed her name. She appeared in such films as The Road to Singapore, Crime and Punishment, In Spite of Danger, Murder by Invitation, and the horror classic The Black Room. All worthy achievements, and she also founded a nonprofit called Desert Beautiful, which had a mission to preserve the environment of Palm Desert, California, where she lived after retirement. The organization lasted for about fifty years, which is quite good for a nonprofit. The above photo, made back when she was interested only in murder, is from the 1931 drama Five Star Final.

Trinidad and Tobago, British West Indies, California, Palm Desert, Five Star Final, In Spite of Danger, Murder by Invitation, The Black Room, The Road to Singapore, Crime and Punishment, Marian Marsh, Violet Krauth

The Naked City

September 7 2020

BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

Man tries to catch train, train catches him instead.

These photos show an unfortunate man named John Heldt, Jr. trapped under a Pacific Electric freight car in Gardena, California. Getty Images has this listed as happening August 7, 1951, but the USC digital film archive where the image is stored has the date as today. We trust USC over Getty, but whenever it happened, it was a bad day for Heldt, maybe not the worst of his life, but certainly in the top five, we can be sure. His rescuers had to bring in special equipment to lift the train off him, so he was probably pinned for hours, his indignity compounded by the fact that a Los Angeles Examiner photographer made these snaps of him. “Can you hold that pose? Heh heh, that’s a joke, see, because you can’t move at all, you poor, stupid sap!” There’s no info on whether Heldt recovered, nor whether he lost any body parts. Still, as bad as this looks, it’s better than flying Ryanair.

California, Los Angeles Examiner, University of Southern California, Gardena, John Heldt Jr.

Vintage Pulp

June 7 2020

HASSLES IN THE SAND

The beach is always fun and games until someone gets burned.

What a coincidence. We were just talking about Joan Bennett a couple of days ago. You remember the story. Her husband tried to shoot her lover in the balls. Or unit. Or really anywhere in the vicinity of his reproductive organs. And he succeeded in hitting the vicinity, but missed all the crucial plumbing. It was a Hollywood love triangle that ended in blood and violence. Woman on the Beach stars Bennett, Robert Ryan, and Charles Bickford, and is also a love triangle that causes violence. The plot concerns a Coast Guard officer who becomes infatuated with a married woman. The woman’s husband is an artist who lost his sight in an accident, but the Coast Guard officer becomes convinced the artist isn’t really blind, but rather is using it as an excuse to hang onto his wife. Under the careful direction of French auteur Jean Renoir, Woman on the Beach makes for a decent ninety minutes of entertainment. We don’t consider it a film noir, by the way, as some crowdsourced sites and blogs suggest. It just doesn’t meet the requirements, in our view. AFI.com agrees, and calls it drama. It premiered in New York City today in 1947.

California, Malibu, Woman on the Beach, Joan Bennett, Robert Ryan, Charles Bickford, Jean Renoir, poster art, cinema, movie review

Hollywoodland

August 11 2019

RAVENOUS RITA

Hayworth enjoys a not-so-light snack in Santa Monica.

Published today in 1941, we love this Life magazine cover of Rita Hayworth on the beach in Santa Monica, California. But we love the second photo even more. Movie stars will do just about anything to avoid being photographed unhinging their jaws to cram in a pile of food. You can’t blame them. Paparazzi lurk in hope of getting exactly this type of shot, which they sell for big money to websites that specialize in making celebs look bad. Hayworth turns the idea into comedy while simultaneously looking appetizing herself. That’s star power for you.

California, Santa Monica, Life Magazine, Rita Hayworth

The Naked City

February 14 2019

DRAW TO A CLOSE

Serial killer art released in effort to solve cold cases.

As pulp art fans we were a bit amazed by this next news item. The FBI has just released drawings imprisoned serial killer Samuel Little made of his victims, with the hope that the images will help in solving open cases. Little is serving life for three murders he committed in California, but he claims to have killed ninety women over nearly four decades. Law enforcement in various states have definitively linked him to more than thirty murders. Many of those killings were not classified as such at the time because Little’s preferred method of dispatch was to knock the women out and strangle them, which meant that there were not always clear signs of foul play if the remains went undiscovered for any amount of time.

But now, by circulating these drawings, authorities hope to close dozens of cases scattered throughout the United States in places the nomadic Little is suspected to have traveled. The feds are being helped by Little himself, who agreed to cooperate in exchange for being allowed a transfer to a new prison. He’s 78 years old and in poor health, which means it’s basically now or never in securing his assistance.

After Little dies in prison it will be interesting to see what eventually happens to these drawings. In the past such artifacts tended to end up in repositories such as the Black Museum and similar places, but in this day and age we suspect they’ll be destroyed once their usefulness is agreed to have passed. Since they’re incredibly sad when considered in context, destruction may be a fitting end for them. But it’s also possible, though not likely, that they could be sold and the proceeds used to compensate victims’ families. One thing is for sure—there are plenty of collectors of the morbid out there who would buy them.

FBI, California, Samuel Little, mugshots, murder

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

April 22

1912—Pravda Is Founded

The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country’s leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid.

April 22

1983—Hitler's Diaries Found

The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler’s diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess’s flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison.

April 21

1918—The Red Baron Is Shot Down

German WWI fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, sustains a fatal wound while flying over Vaux sur Somme in France. Von Richthofen, shot through the heart, manages a hasty emergency landing before dying in the cockpit of his plane. His last word, according to one witness, is “Kaputt.” The Red Baron was the most successful flying ace during the war, having shot down at least 80 enemy airplanes.

April 21

1964—Satellite Spreads Radioactivity

An American-made Transit satellite, which had been designed to track submarines, fails to reach orbit after launch and disperses its highly radioactive two pound plutonium power source over a wide area as it breaks up re-entering the atmosphere.

April 20

1939—Holiday Records Strange Fruit

American blues and jazz singer Billie Holiday records “Strange Fruit”, which is considered to be the first civil rights song. It began as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, which he later set to music and performed live with his wife Laura Duncan. The song became a Holiday standard immediately after she recorded it, and it remains one of the most highly regarded pieces of music in American history.

April 19

1927—Mae West Sentenced to Jail

American actress and playwright Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity for the content of her play Sex. The trial occurred even though the play had run for a year and had been seen by 325,000 people. However West’s considerable popularity, already based on her risque image, only increased due to the controversy.

April 19

1971—Manson Sentenced to Death

In the U.S, cult leader Charles Manson is sentenced to death for inciting the murders of Sharon Tate and several other people. Three accomplices, who had actually done the killing, were also sentenced to death, but the state of California abolished capital punishment in 1972 and neither they nor Manson were ever actually executed.