 The New York City fashion scene turns out to be murder. 
This cover for by George Harmon Coxe's Fashioned for Murder was painted by Fred Scotwood, and we love it. The point-of-view is a reflection in a camera lens, and check out the detail of the focal length numbers above the title text:  Nice touch. This book is one that was mailed to us from the United States by a friend, so thanks to Alex for that. In the story, a model poses with an elaborate set of costume jewelery she's been told is worthless, but comes to believe the gems are real after a stranger robs her of them, and an acquaintance returns them just before dying at her feet—shot twice in the back. She enlists the aid of a photographer who's smitten with her, and the two try to unravel the mystery. There's a very funny line about one of the supporting characters:
From the first she had been one of the best reporters the Bulletin ever had, never asking favors because of her sex and never making excuses when things went wrong.
Was there a time when women in professional settings asked favors because of their sex? We thought they barely got hired at all. The line reveals a prevalent mid-century myth that women (and minorities) rarely deserved what they achieved. Today all but the most stubborn people understand that the opposite was true—women and minorities had to be supernaturally good to get anything resembling a fair shake. Admittedly, the main female character in Fashioned for Murder, whose name is Linda Courtney, does need help solving the mystery of the possibly-real gems, but anyone would—there's a killer (or killers) on the loose and that's nothing to tackle alone. Her photographer friend is very happy to help, though he's a bit of a twerp, in our opinion. But with a cool setting in the NYC fashion industry and some deft writing, Coxe has crafted a nice thriller, one that's well worth your time.
 Hey, lady! Yo, I need this space! You gonna be here all freakin' day or what? 
What's happening here? In George Harmon Coxe's mystery Murder for Two a character named Rosalind Taylor has been shot in the back of the head. We're not giving anything away. It's an early moment and you know it's going to happen because it's on the book cover. At least on this 1952 Pocket Books edition. Murder for Two stars Coxe's intrepid photo-journalist Flash Casey, who starts out dealing with industrial intrigue and soon gets mixed up with mobsters and more. Coxe's Casey novels were very popular and two of them became movies, which would make you think he'd ride Flash until he broke down, but he wrote only five of these novels out of more than sixty books published, which just shows how many ideas he had. The cover for this one is uncredited, amazingly.
 What do you call forty dead men? A good start. 
Two years ago we shared five covers of women standing over men they had just killed and mentioned that there were many examples in vintage cover art of that particular theme. Today we’ve decided to revisit the idea in order to reiterate just how often women in pulp are the movers and shakers—and shooters and stabbers and clubbers and poisoners and scissorers. Now if they do this about a billion more times they’ll really be making a difference that counts. French publishers, interestingly, were unusually fond of this theme—so egalitarian of them. That’s why many of the covers here are from France, including one—for which we admit we bent the rules of the collection a bit, because the victim isn’t dead quite yet—of a woman actually machine gunning some hapless dude. But what a great cover. We also have a couple of Spanish killer femmes, and a Dutch example or two. Because we wanted to be comprehensive, the collection is large and some of the fronts are quite famous, but a good portion are also probably new to you. Art is by the usual suspects—Robert Maguire, Barye Phillips, Alex Piñon, Robert Bonfils, Robert McGinnis, Rudolph Belarski, et al. Enjoy.                                      
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1964—Soviets Shoot Down U.S. Plane
A U.S. Air Force training jet is shot down by Soviet fighters after straying into East German airspace. All 3 crew men are killed. U.S forces then clandestinely enter East Germany in an attempt to reach the crash but are thwarted by Soviet forces. In the end, the U.S. approaches the Soviets through diplomatic channels and on January 31 the wreckage of the aircraft is loaded onto trucks with the assistance of Soviet troops, and returned to West Germany. 1967—Apollo Fire Kills Three Astronauts
Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee are killed in a fire during a test of the Apollo 1 spacecraft at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Although the ignition source of the fire is never conclusively identified, the astronauts' deaths are attributed to a wide range of design hazards in the early Apollo command module, including the use of a high-pressure 100 percent-oxygen atmosphere for the test, wiring and plumbing flaws, flammable materials in the cockpit, an inward-opening hatch, and the flight suits worn by the astronauts. 1924—St. Petersburg is renamed Leningrad
St. Peterburg, the Russian city founded by Peter the Great in 1703, and which was capital of the Russian Empire for more than 200 years, is renamed Leningrad three days after the death of Vladimir Lenin. The city had already been renamed Petrograd in 1914. It was finally given back its original name St. Petersburg in 1991. 1966—Beaumont Children Disappear
In Australia, siblings Jane Nartare Beaumont, Arnna Kathleen Beaumont, and Grant Ellis Beaumont, aged 9, 7, and 4, disappear from Glenelg Beach near Adelaide, and are never seen again. Witnesses claim to have spotted them in the company of a tall, blonde man, but over the years, after interviewing many potential suspects, police are unable generate enough solid leads to result in an arrest. The disappearances remain Australia's most infamous cold case.
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