![DYING SOLO](/images/headline/7557.png) Murder hates company. ![](/images/postimg/dying_solo.jpg)
Rudolph Belarski, whose work is always instantly recognizable, painted this cover for Rufus King's 1944 mystery Never Walk Alone, earlier known as The Case of Dowager's Etchings. The change tells you that Popular Library thought a less old-fashioned title would boost sales for this 1951 re-issue. But the old-fashioned nature of the story is a feature, not a bug. What you get is intrigue at the residence of Carrie Giles, who's opened her large home up as a boarding house called River Rest and had the rooms filled by workers in an arms factory.
Giles is a throwback who's still driven around by horse and carriage in an era of cars and planes. The tale is told from her point of view, and never has a more self-contained observer been committed to the printed page. This derives from her belief in politeness and decorum. Even if you're a bit nosy, as she is, you don't make a fuss. When she finds a body on her grounds she simply leaves it there for someone else to stumble across the next afternoon. Maybe she's not such a throwback after all—we can see that happening even today, so she's an interesting figure created by King.
Her genteel nature is summed up in a passage about Humphrey Bogart. Don't forget that Bogart was a famous film villain before he altered the trajectory of his career. Giles knows only the early Bogart, and is horrified when someone compares one of her boarders to Humphrey: Mrs. Giles shut her eyes. She was fairly familiar with Mr. Bogart's characterizations on the screen, and to have any one of those blood-throttling roles in the house was the last straw.
Can a mystery be fun when told from the point of view of a hidebound busybody? Turns out it can. While other elements of the story are interesting too (she thinks the murder has to do with wartime spies, and particularly suspects an outspoken and modern-minded female guest), Mrs. Giles is ultimately such a fascinating and delicate creation that it was her who kept us turning pages. Never Walk Alone isn't for readers seeking fireworks and sexual intrigue, but as an example of a character-driven mystery, it worked fine.
![GIRL MEETS CORPSE](/images/headline/2980.png) What do you call forty dead men? A good start. ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_01.jpg)
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.
![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_02.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_03.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_04.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_05.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_06.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_42.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_43.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_07.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_08.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_09.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_10.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_13.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_11.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_12.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_14.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_15.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_16.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_17.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_18.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_19.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_21.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_22.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_23.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_24.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_25.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_26.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_27.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_28.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_29.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_30.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_41.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_31.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_32.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_33.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_34.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_36.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_38.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/girl_meets_corpse_39.jpg)
![ART ATTACK](/images/headline/1665.png) Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. ![](/images/postimg/art_attack_01.jpg)
Above is the cover of Rufus King's 1945 mystery The Deadly Dove, which isn't a particularly notable book, except that it demonstrates one of the time-honored motifs in pulp cover art—the woman fighting for her life. We've cobbled together a small collection of such covers, with art by Robert Hilbert, Robert Stanley, and others.
We're curious, but unfortunately have no way of knowing, how readers reacted to these depictions when they first hit newsstands. There are probably some examinations of that question out there somewhere, but not in a place where we can find them. To our contemporary eyes, though, some of these images seem brutal to the extent that if someone actually saw us holding one in a store, we'd be like, "Oh this? Not mine. No, no, no. Found this uh, on the floor and was just, er, putting it back on the shelf. No, I was actually buying this copy of Genital Warts and U."
Okay, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement. You get the point, though. But violent or not, there's no denying the artistry on display on these covers. Thanks to various Flickr groups for some of these, by the way. In other news, that long delayed internet installation is so close we can almost taste it. How much you wanna bet it all fails spectacularly?
![](/images/postimg/art_attack_02.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/art_attack_03.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/art_attack_04.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/art_attack_05.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/art_attack_06.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/art_attack_07.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/art_attack_08_robert_hilbert%C3%82%C2%A0.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/art_attack_09.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/art_attack_10_robert_stanley.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/art_attack_11.jpg) ![](/images/postimg/art_attack_23.jpg)
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
2003—Hope Dies
Film legend Bob Hope dies of pneumonia two months after celebrating his 100th birthday. 1945—Churchill Given the Sack
In spite of admiring Winston Churchill as a great wartime leader, Britons elect
Clement Attlee the nation's new prime minister in a sweeping victory for the Labour Party over the Conservatives. 1952—Evita Peron Dies
Eva Duarte de Peron, aka Evita, wife of the president of the Argentine Republic, dies from cancer at age 33. Evita had brought the working classes into a position of political power never witnessed before, but was hated by the nation's powerful military class. She is lain to rest in Milan, Italy in a secret grave under a nun's name, but is eventually returned to Argentina for reburial beside her husband in 1974. 1943—Mussolini Calls It Quits
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini steps down as head of the armed forces and the government. It soon becomes clear that Il Duce did not relinquish power voluntarily, but was forced to resign after former Fascist colleagues turned against him. He is later installed by Germany as leader of the Italian Social Republic in the north of the country, but is killed by partisans in 1945.
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