 I'd shoot you in the head or chest, but you're already brainless and heartless. So I think I'll make you dickless too.  
It isn't just us, right? The perspective of Olivier Brabbins' art for Stuart Brock's, aka Louis Trimble's Killer's Choice makes it seem as though the woman is aiming dangerously low. At best, her male target will soon be missing his appendix; at worst, he can kiss the royal scepter goodbye. What did he do to deserve this? Well, the novel is a basic parlor murder mystery about the patriarch of a dysfunctional family who believes one of his progeny is trying to kill him. He has a pile of money, but is very stingy with it, giving nearly everyone a motive for murder. A killing eventually occurs, a body disappears, subterfuges take place, and the police are of course not to be involved. Luckily there's a detective on the premises. Everyone in the family thinks he's a secretary, but only because the patriarch hired him to play this role while trying to figure out who's planning to off daddy. Now with an actual murder on the premises, the detective has an even more urgent mystery to solve. And hopefully he can do it without being shot in the gonads. 1956 on this one, from Graphic Publishing Co.
 Beauty and the beasts. 
Wade Miller was a shared pseudonym of Robert Wade and William Miller, and in Kiss Her Goodbye they tell the tale of a pair of siblings—a steady, responsible brother named Ed and his childlike but beautiful sister Emily. By childlike, we mean she’s fully grown but was stricken in her youth by some kind of brain ailment, maybe encephalitis, that stunted her mental development. She violently explodes when men make sexual advances toward her, something that happens constantly because, well, mainly because men are scum, but also because bombshell Emily is friendly toward strangers. You can imagine where this all leads. We’ve shared quite a few fronts from Corgi Books this year and this one from British artist Oliver Brabbins is especially nice with its color blocking and sprawled figure. Truly excellent work, and the book is good too. We have another piece from Brabbins here, and we’ll definitely have more later.
 Please don’t! *gasp* I’ll tip more! I’ll rate you a 10 on the hotel evaluation form! *wheeze* Really! Let me get a pen! 
Above, an unusually violent but very effective cover from Oliver Brabbins for Manning O’Brine’s Dagger Before Me, Corgi Books. If you look out the window you see that the novel is set somewhere in the East. At a glance we would have guessed Istanbul, but it turns out to be Cairo and Damascus, with spies, agents, murder, and mayhem, 1958.
 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—Olivier Brabbins, 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, particularly Pulpnivora for the very nice front to La llamada de la muerte.                   
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1955—Rosa Parks Sparks Bus Boycott
In the U.S., in Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city's racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott resulted in a crippling financial deficit for the Montgomery public transit system, because the city's African-American population were the bulk of the system's ridership. 1936—Crystal Palace Gutted by Fire
In London, the landmark structure Crystal Palace, a 900,000 square foot glass and steel exhibition hall erected in 1851, is destroyed by fire. The Palace had been moved once and fallen into disrepair, and at the time of the fire was not in use. Two water towers survived the blaze, but these were later demolished, leaving no remnants of the original structure. 1963—Warren Commission Formed
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson establishes the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. However the long report that is finally issued does little to settle questions about the assassination, and today surveys show that only a small minority of Americans agree with the Commission's conclusions. |
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