Vintage Pulp

January 21 2025

MINK STOLE

You thought you'd gotten away from me, but the cheaper furs shed, my dear. Your trail was easy to follow.

This uncredited art of a woman wearing only a fur fronts Sax Rohmer’s exotic adventure Nude in Mink, also known as The Sins of Sumuru. Rohmer created the character of Sumuru for a BBC radio serial that ran in 1945 and 1946, after having already turned the occult-tinged pulp villain Fu Manchu into an international brand. He redeveloped Sumuru from radio into novel form, and the above result came in 1950, treating readers to the dark tale of a mysterious woman with mystical powers heading a secret organization called the Order of Our Lady. The core goal of this order is to institute matriarchal global rule and do away with war and deprivation, which are the result of men screwing up the world for millennia. And she’s the villain. Can you believe that? We were incredulous.

Anyway, since women are able to easily manipulate men and advance the Order’s aims, Sumuru utilizes great beauties exclusively, including herself—because sometimes you have to send in the first team. Nude in Mink opens with main character Mark Donovan meeting and being smitten with the lovely Claudette Duquesne, who shows up at his London flat one night dressed as in the cover art. She’s being pursued by the Order, who plan to indoctrinate her. When she disappears Donovan investigates and quickly uncovers traces of Sumuru. He teams up with his secret agent pal Steel Maitland and soon they’re trying to thwart a plot to remove, “as by the surgeon’s knife,” specific men of power, or anyone who may pose a threat to the future matriarchy. Sumuru’s main tool, aside from boner-inducing hotties, is rigor Kubus, a sort of infection that induces total and fatal rigidity. The medusan aspect of it is clear.

Nude in Mink is fine. In order to be better than fine—to be excellent—it would need to have been published twenty years earlier, which is to say Rohmer is behind the times in approach and style. The narrative mainly comprises set-piece conversations that make for broken flow, and truncated bursts of action that aren’t put across visually as well as they should be, considering the kinetic advancements in fiction that had taken place since his first book in 1913. However he’s one of the kings of atmosphere, and he makes London dark, mysterious, and laden with uncertainty. The book was a smash hit, which is why there were several sequels. While we don’t fully endorse it, we think it’s worth reading, and because of the “villain” Sumuru we may graduate to installment two if we can locate it for cheap.

London, BBC, Fawcett Publications, Gold Medal Books, Sax Rohmer, Arthur Henry Ward, cover art, literature

Femmes Fatales

December 19 2024

BARBER SHOT

She's liable to take a little off the top for you—permanently.

South African born actress Glynis Barber is seen here in two publicity photos made in London for her late 1970s-early 1980s British sci-fi television series Blake’s 7. They were made in 1981, and though they date later than images we typically feature, we like them, so here they are.

South Africa, Britain, London, Blake's 7, Glynis Barber, television, sci-fi

Intl. Notebook

November 13 2024

AN AIR THAT KILLS

It was impossible to see the city for the smog.

Above: four photos of Los Angeles made in 1948 showing the poor quality of air in the city at that time. Bad air is only occasionally mentioned in period fiction, and of course old movies created a clean air illusion by striving to shoot at a distance only on clear days, but low visibility due to smog was a common occurrence. And L.A. wasn’t the only metro area with such problems—it was general around the U.S.

The same year these photos were made, smog covered a swath of rural Pennsylvania south of Pittsburgh for five days, killing twenty people and sickening thousands. Smog was also a problem globally. In London in 1952 during an extended bad air event, an estimated 12,000 people died. It probably comes as no surprise to know that pollution tends to concentrate around industrial areas and transit hubs, which are nearly always where low income residents live.

In the U.S., when the 1970 Clean Air Act passed over opposition from conservative and business interests, air quality improved, but pollution still kills seven to eight million people a year globally. U.S. mortality numbers rose significantly between 2016 and 2020 because the Clean Air Act was weakened then, with thirty-plus portions of the legislation abolished. Even so, more deregulation is coming.

Pennsylvania, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, London

Vintage Pulp

October 5 2024

A DEEP SENSE OF LOSS

Disappearing is easy. Staying disappeared takes luck and determination.

Searching for a woman who’s disappeared is a standard plot in vintage fiction. John Boswell’s 1959 novel Lost Girl, the sequel to the previous year’s entertaining The Blue Pheasant, takes a swipe at the theme with professional photographer Chris Kent starring again. He meets a beautiful woman with a haunted past in a London painting studio, but right when they begin to take an interest in each other she vanishes. He’s inclined to forget her. She appears to have moved away, though the circumstances are unusual. But maybe she doesn’t want to be found. Who is he to ruin that ambition for her?

But others want answers, including the owner of the art studio, and a random acquantaince of the missing woman. Still, Kent remains blasé about the entire affair until a wealthy man offers to hire him to find the woman because she supposedly owns stock he wants to buy from her. Photographic proof is required, and Kent already knows her, so the rich guy considers him perfect for the job. Plus, the pay is quite good, and every photographer needs extra money. Kent accepts, and ultimately—no spoiler—traces his target all the way to Australia and into a twisted and sinister caper.

This was a good book. It made us curious about Boswell, but information on him is scarce. Well, we shouldn’t say scarce, exactly. Maybe he’s just tricky to isolate online because of other famous John Boswells that have lived. We suspect he was Australian, but don’t quote us on that. It’s possible he wrote only two books, but again, don’t quote us. You’d think two reasonably adept novels would lead to more output, but it’s never a guarantee. We’ll keep looking for info, and in due course we’re sure we’ll solve the mystery.

Australia, London, William Collins Sons & Co., John Boswell, John Rose, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

January 6 2024

CLAWS FOR ALARM

Me? Why should I touch it? You’re the one always going on about how you can tell everything about a man from his handshake.

British author Sax Rohmer, aka Arthur Henry Ward, wrote many novels but made his reputation with the Fu Manchu series. Tales of Chinatown doesn’t feature that famous character, but instead deals in short story form with other characters and various unsavory goings-on in the Chinese underworld of London’s Limehouse district. There are problems with Rohmer’s depictions of Chinese, Jews, and other groups, but the writing is more than a century old, so no surprise there.

In terms of execution, there’s a sinister mood of a type here that’s quite effective. “The Daughter of Huang Chow,” the opening tale, deals with a series of fatal poisonings among the Limehouse criminal set, and the mysterious contents of an ornamental coffin. “The Hand of the Mandarin Quong,” from which the cover is derived, is set in Singapore and London, and tells the story of a man who loses a hand in a failed attempt to rescue his kidnapped wife, but whose severed body part continues to haunt and hunt the kidnapper.

Tales of Chinatown is an atmospheric collection, well written and imaginatively conceived. It’s easy to see why Rohmer became an international sensation. Many of his tropes are by now familiar if not hackneyed (and his racialized musings are deservingly excoriated), but back when his ideas were fresh they must have given his readers the megacreeps. Crime, suspense, mystery, mysticism, horror—Tales of Chinatown has all that. It first appeared in 1922, and this Popular Library edition with art by Rudolph Belarski is from 1949.

Singapore, London, Popular Library, Sax Rohmer, Arthur Henry Ward, Rudolph Belarski, cover art, literature

Femmes Fatales

September 29 2023

EXCELLENT SLICER

Hi, I heard there are some enormous veggies around here.

We’ve been looking at this image for a few years, and while it’s often said to feature U.S. actress Anita Page, there’s an amazing amount of disagreement about that. Many sites say this is actually an actress named Marie Hopkins. The debate is a fascinating microcosm of internet behavior. We’ve seen people called stupid over their opinion. Well, we’ll try to weigh in, and hopefully not in a stupid way, about whether this is Page or Hopkins.

Some sites, splitting the difference, essentially claim both, saying this is Marie Hopkins posed as Anita Page, or Marie Hopkins posing under the pseudonym Anita Page. Here’s the problem with that: there’s no Marie Hopkins listed in cinema or stage databases. There’s a Miriam Hopkins, from the right period, but even so, this is probably not her. For clues toward an answer we’re turning to the pros—i.e. professional brick and mortar galleries.

Black & Whites Gallery is no longer around, but from its London locale during the 1980s and into the 1990s it staged shows by renowned photographers such as Richard Sawdon Smith and David Leslie Anthony. That gives it at least something resembling reputability, because when galleries with actual street addresses sell art with mistaken attributions or under false pretenses, it has a way of turning into a reputational problem that’s hard to shake among the habitués of the gallery scene. This is not nearly as true of online sellers.

So for the record: Black & Whites Gallery, once located at 50-52 Monmouth Street, London, sold limited lithographs of this image and identified the subject as the actress Anita Page, shot by Clarence Sinclair Bull in 1929. Is that 100% definitive? Maybe not, but it’s getting into the neighborhood. You can see a previous Page here.

London, Anita Page, Marie Hopkins, Miriam Hopkins, Clarence Sinclair Bull, nudity

Vintage Pulp

September 27 2023

ANATOMY OF AN ASSASSINATION

A murder by any other name would kill as dead.

This is a rather pretty cover painted by Charles Copeland for E.M. Harper’s 1960 novel The Assassin, the story of Alec Jordan, who’s spared the guillotine in an Algerian prison but must repay the shadowy government operatives who freed him by murdering an Arab political figure. We’ve seen convicts turned into assassins a couple times in vintage literature. What sets this story apart is its many flashbacks to Jordan’s youth, from the time he was witness to his moonshiner father’s killing by cops, to being sprung from reform school to play high school football (seems someone always wants to put his skills to use), to his various war experiences.

The story begins in Paris, from which Jordan pursues his target to London and Vienna, world weary, haunted by the past, and hounded by the people who are operating him. There’s, unsurprisingly, the requisite woman-from-his-past for whom he still has feelings—a beauty named Renée who married an Austrian count while Jordan was hors de combat. Conveniently, she’s now a widow, but is reclaiming the past an option for Jordan? To survive but lose your soul, to resist corruption but be killed, to find redemption in love. You’ve read it before, and though Harper breaks no new ground plotwise, he wrote a contemplative iteration of the story that offers some enjoyment.

Algeria, Paris, London, Vienna, Berkley Books, E.M. Harper, Charles Copeland, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

August 13 2023

SCREAM BLOODY MURDER

Wait, don't kill me! I can be useful! I can teach you this lindy hop I learned in my dance class!

We said last week we’d get back to British actress Susan George. Above you see her on a poster for Die Screaming Marianne, along with the claim that the movie is the ultimate in suspense. Well, if that’s the case, how could we say no? George plays a nightclub dancer hiding out from her father, a former judge who took bribes during his long career. He lives in a villa in Portugal with George’s half sister. When George turns twenty-one she’ll receive her mother’s inheritance, which is in a Swiss bank account along with papers proving her father was a crook. Her half sister wants the money, which amounts to $700,000, and her father wants the documents. Both decide that killing George is the only way to achieve their goals.

The filmmakers, including cult horror director Pete Walker, primarily come at all this via a somewhat elliptical route that brings to mind giallo cinema, where you aren’t sure what’s significant, or really what’s even going on at first. But by halfway through, it all begins to make sense and the story boils down to the very conventional question of whether George’s father and half sister can get away with murder. We won’t answer that, but we’ll tell you we can’t fully recommend the movie because of its obtrusively oddball style. George definitely made better films, a few of which we mentioned in our previous post on her. That being the case, we’ll see her again. Die Screaming Marianne premiered today in 1971.

Portugal, London, Die Screaming Marianne, Susan George, Barry Evans, Christopher Sandford, Judy Huxtable, Pete Walker, poster art, cinema, horror, movie review

Intl. Notebook

June 29 2023

VISIONS OF THE PAST

They're as real as ink printed on paper can be.

Above is the cover of a fun vintage nudie magazine called Mirage, made in London by an outfit known as Swanedge Publications. We like the name of the magazine. Glamour photography implies the ephemeral. You know what else is ephemeral here? Pubic hair. The muff-munching airbrush monster has struck again, removing the fuzzy bits and vaginal convolutions of a couple of models. Pubic regions as obscenity is something we talk about often here because we share a lot of Japanese nudes in which those areas are banned. The difference is that in Japan the models covered those parts in various clever ways so they still looked human. In the West underpaid guys in pre-press removed nether regions entirely and made the models sexless like Barbie dolls. We’ll talk about this more later.

Mirage‘s cover star, who’s typing in the nude very much the same way we write this website, is identified only as Anna. Inside the issue is a tri-panel centerfold of a model the editors call Alicia, and she’s bracketed by other models named Wendy, Kismet, Jan, Ella, Sylvia, etc. All of those are professional names, we assume. Meanwhile the photographers work under probable pseudonyms too, we suspect, such as Don Pleasance and Len Humber. There’s no copyright on the magazine, therefore only someone who was around at the time could say for sure when it appeared, and that leaves us out. However, the look of it says mid-1960s to us. It’s a nice publication. There are more pages, but only so much scanning time in the world. Maybe we’ll return here later and do a more thorough job.

Britain, London, Mirage Magazine, nudie mags, nudity

Femmes Fatales

January 28 2023

FINAL HOUR

You never know when your time is up. Usually.

Above: Veronica Lake stars in a menacing promo photo made for her 1944 spy movie The Hour Before Dawn. She plays a pure femme fatale, a bad woman living in London as a double agent in the employ of the Third Reich. The movie was poorly reviewed, but we give this image five stars.

Germany, England, London, The Hour Before Dawn, Veronica Lake, nazis

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

January 24

1961—Plane Carrying Nuclear Bombs Crashes

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.

January 23

1912—International Opium Convention Signed

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.

January 22

1946—CIA Forerunner Created

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.

January 22

1957—George Metesky Is Arrested

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.

January 21

1950—Alger Hiss Is Convicted of Perjury

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.

January 21

1977—Carter Pardons War Fugitives

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.