SETTLE IT LIKE ADULTS

Men! Always resorting to violence. They should have a battle of wits instead. Then they'd both be unarmed.

Above: the cover and selected interior scans from Australia’s Adam magazine published this month in 1962, with art by Jack Waugh, Hart Amos, and others. As always, we have more from this publication to come.

Thanks for dropping by. Let me see you to the floor.

Above: a 1954 Australian edition from Star Books for 1953’s excellent smalltown thriller Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams. This uncredited cover isn’t especially wonderful, but we love the scene. Does anyone actually go down a staircase in the story? Well… we wouldn’t want to spoil it, but yeah, someone goes down the stairs and rolls all the way into the living room. But don’t worry. It isn’t the main character. Read more about the book here.

Hi there, convict. How'd ya like to perform a cavity search for a change?

We’ve been eyeing a Russell Trainer novel called His Daughter’s Friend for a while. It has one of illustrator Paul Rader’s best covers. But since it’s a pretty empty feeling to buy a book with a nice cover that turns out to be terribly written (often the case with sleaze novels), we wanted to sample Trainer’s prose. With the price of His Daughter’s Friend running as high as $200.00, a trial run was needed on cheaper books. Incidentally, we’d never pay that for a book anyway, but if Trainer can write, we’d probably go as high as $30.00, if we ever found a copy at that price. We ended up buying two Trainers, both at around fifteen bucks. You see the first above—Jail Bait. It’s an Australian edition published by New Century Press without a copyright date or cover artist attribution. Originally it appeared in the U.S. and Canada in 1962 as The Warden’s Wife.

That title pretty much sums up the idea behind the book, as a felon named Eddie Koski, after three years in max, is made a trustee and given a form of freedom as he works around the prison for the warden and other high ranking corrections officials. Unfortunately, the warden’s smoking hot wife Thelma is keenly interested in working Eddie’s shlong, which, of course, can only lead to trouble, if not more jail time. Things become doubly complicated when Eddie falls for a beautiful sociologist who comes to the prison to work on a dissertation. Can he escape the clutches of the dangerous Thelma and find love and freedom? Perhaps. The book is fun for the most part, but we’d have preferred the story to conclude without its late turn toward vicious homophobia. We weren’t surprised when it happened, though. Consider yourselves forewarned.

Overall, we wouldn’t say Jail Bait is either great or awful, which means Trainer probably will fail to add value to His Daugher’s Friend. While we often buy books entirely for the cover art, we never buy expensive ones for that reason. What we love is a book that surpasses our expectations, like, for example, Val Munroe’s surprisingly good 1952 sleazer Carnival of Passion. We suppose requiring decent writing skill with the cover art makes us amateurs at the book collecting game, but we’re not really collectors anyway. We’ll never sell them, in all likelihood. Nearly all the buyers would be in the U.S., and mailing them overseas, even at a profit, is too much work to even contemplate. So we’ll give up our quest for His Daughter’s Friend unless Trainer knocks book two—1963’s No Way Back—completely out of the park. We’ll read it in a bit and see where matters stand.

She makes sure a Pheasant time is had by all.

We were attracted to the 1958 John Boswell thriller The Blue Pheasant not only because of the lovely cover art, and the tale’s setting in East Asia and New Zealand, but because the title suggests that a bar plays a central role. We always like that, whether in fiction or film. The teaser text confirms it. The title refers to a fictional bar in Hong Kong. Irresistible.

The book stars professional photographer, amateur painter, and rolling stone Chris Kent, who’s at desperate ends and takes a job to travel from Hong Kong to far away Auckland to recover two Chinese scrolls that are the keys to a vast inheritance. Needless to say, there are other interested—and ruthless—parties. In addition there are three femmes fatales: Sally Chan, the bar dancer who puts Kent onto the job; Sonya Sung, whose family are the rightful owners of the misplaced scrolls (or are they?); and Ann Compton, mystery woman who becomes Kent’s reluctant partner.

We were amused by how easily Kent’s head was turned by all three women. He’s tough, but he’s also an all-day sucker. In trying to sort out why women are so confounding to him, there are numerous moments of, “Well, what’s a guy to do when women are ________” By the end, though, he starts to wonder if he’s the problem. Spoiler alert: pretty much. The actual caper is well laid out, with a lot of sleuthing and surveillance, a few moments of swift action, a suspicious Kiwi cop, a love/hate dynamic between Kent and Compton, and precise local color in both Hong Kong and Auckland.

We consider The Blue Pheasant to have been a worthwhile purchase. That was actually almost a given, considering the low price for the book (Seven dollars? Sold!). But our point is that you never know what you’ll get with a writer as obscure as Boswell. Well, now we do. And we have his sequel, 1959’s Lost Girl. We’ll get around to reading that later.

Turning back to the cover for a moment, the example at top is one we downloaded from an auction site because the William Collins Sons & Co. edition, which is a hardback with a dust jacket, shows the wonderful art painted by British talent John Rose to best advantage. The edition we actually bought is a paperback from Fontana Books, and our scans of that appear below. They’re fine, but the cleaner Collins version is frameworthy. We have another Rose cover at this link, and we’ll be getting back to him again shortly.

Get outta the frickin' way you lunatic! Are you out of your goddamned— Oh. I mean... need a lift?


We’re going back-to-back with Adam magazine. We posted one yesterday, but we have another because, despite the fact that this is the eighty-sixth issue we’re sharing, we have a stack yay high we still need to get to. At this point we’ll make the claim—without any proof whatsoever, but hey, that just means we’re in step with the times—that we have more copies of Adam under our roof than any other place in the world. Prove us wrong. It’s all the more impressive considering we don’t live in Australia, where the magazine originates, and have needed to ship them wherever we were living at the time, currently (and permanently?) Spain.

Today’s issue from this month in 1977 has the slightly more streamlined look the magazine moved toward as it approached its mid-1978 dissolution. The cover illustrates Jay Ruth’s story “The Third Run.” We were eager to learn why the femme fatale crossed the road. It wasn’t to get to the other side. She was trying to keep from being flattened, and not in the road as we assumed, but in a warehouse. In the story, she’s part of a truck hijacking ring, and to her misfortune, she chooses as her newest victim an undercover operative posing as a truck driver. He’d been out there hoping to lure the hijackers, and on his third run he did. It’s a pretty good story.

It wouldn’t be an issue of Adam without models, and you get plenty here. By 1977 it was go full frontal to survive in the men’s mag market or quit, and Adam quit—though resisting the shift to porn was probably only one of many considerations (moving to color and glossy page stock were probably others) However, though Adam never went all the way, one of the models wearing a bikini shows a bit of overflow bush and a treasure trail. Many times with later issues of Adam we’re able to identify a model or two, but all the ones here are unknown to us. We’re especially intrigued by the woman on the title page, with her short-shorts, superhero boots, and spectacular hair. Seems like, given the crucial masthead position, we should know who she is, but no such luck.

As a side note, we got an e-mail about our scans recently, another request for larger dimensions. We don’t have the capability to do that easily, do to our website’s design. We did offer a large scan once, a while back, for something special, but it was one image, not dozens. We couldn’t even begin to do it for multiple images. Really, we’re glad it’s beyond the realm of practicality to change our scan sizes—for reasons already stated. But hey, at least we have a lot of them. Forty-plus panels worth, below. Please enjoy.

Edit: the mystery woman is Minah Bird, a Nigerian born model and bit-part actress, whose onscreen credits include The Stud, Old Dracula and Four Dimensions of Greta.
Get the right two people together and the heat can set the world on fire.

Above: an issue of Adam magazine with another beautiful cover by Jack Waugh or Phil Belbin, illustrating C.H. Christie’s story, “Deal of Death.” It’s about a man named Grover Singer who’s in debt and fakes his own death for $50,000 in insurance money (about $325,000 today). He does it by crashing his car with another man inside, but his wife knows right away the body isn’t his. She doesn’t tell the police, though, because she’s been having an affair and recognizes the opportunity to run away with her lover and the cash. All that needs to happens is for someone to kill Grover for real. That’s what lovers are for.

Also of note is the factual story “Doctor in Disguise.” The illustration give the disguise away. It’s about a nineteenth century doctor named James Barry who practiced for forty years and upon death was revealed to be a woman. The long subterfuge involved everything from pretending to shave every morning in order to explain her smooth face to surviving a duel. In 2024, as women’s rights remain under sustained attack, there’s an opportunity built into this story for extensive commentary, but you know where we’d go, so pretend we went there and we’ll let you get on with your Saturday. More from Adam soon.

She's a true professional. She doesn't care who shot who. She just gives to the utmost of her ability.


We have yet another issue of Adam magazine for you, published this month in 1971, with a cover illustrating Dick Love’s story, “Night Nurse.” Generally the magazine’s covers showed literal scenes from the fiction, but this one is more of a composite, with the nurse superimposed atop a scene of earlier violence. The story is about a cop who’s shot multiple times and almost killed, is nursed to health during two months in the hospital, and upon his release tracks down his almost-killer. It has a present-moment framing device in which, first, a shotgun blast tears open a door he’s standing just to one side of, sending his mind into a long reverie about the earlier wounding and recovery, before returning to him crashing through the door and taking down his quarry. The nursing aspect involves some sexual healing, but isn’t cheesy or obvious. Instead, there are weeks of talking at bedside before the deed happens, and the mood and pacing are generally good. So it’s nice work from “Dick Love,” whoever he or she may have been in reality. We have thirty-plus scans below, and those with sharp eyes and good memories will notice British glamour beauty Susan Shaw in the middle pages and again at the end. More from Adam soon.
I've never been a fan of lingerie, but your nightgown elevates this whole abduction into something really special.


This issue of Australia’s greatest men’s magazine Adam reached newsstands this month in 1974. The cover illustrates Alexander Tait’s story “The Catch,” about a boat captain who’s given a slow-acting poison in order to ensure his compliance in a smuggling scheme. Adam covers were always painted to order, and that’s especially clear here because not only does this lingerie bondage scene occur in the narrative, but the woman is described as having hair that “stuck out in all directions in some kind of afro style.”

What didn’t stick out in the story was a lot of talent or imagination, but that’s okay—there’s always another thing to enjoy in these mags. For example, we thought “Sex and Serpents” was rather interesting. It’s a factual story written by Paul Brock about snakes and sexual symbolism. Brock discusses cultures from ancient Egypt to modern Burma, and reveals that snakes are sometimes pickled or powdered. Our favorite anecdote involves an Appalachian preacher who allegedly used a live snake to beat three men and a woman into repentance for sexual sins. Afterward he probably beat his own snake. You know how it goes with these types.

Elsewhere in the magazine are the expected assortment of nude and semi-nude models, but one of them (panel eight below) is a photographed head and arms atop an illustrated torso. Can’t say we’ve seen that before. Maybe she had a rash that day. Or maybe she refused to pose nude. Imagine her surprise when the issue hit the racks. We can only hope she beat the photographer with a snake. Moving on, there’s art by Jack Waugh, and few cartoons that made us smile. Not laugh, mind you. Just smile. Scans below, and we’ll be revisiting Adam later this month.

This is what's called in the realm of answers a hard no. Don't let the door hit you in the dick on the way out.

To say that Adam magazine is an interest of ours is an understatement, but we haven’t shared an issue for eight months. That’s been a result of our drawn out and complicated move, which we initiated last summer, thought we’d have finished by November, but actually just completed to the point of unpacking our scanner last month. Lesson: buying a house in the south of Spain takes three times longer than you anticipate. Rest assured, though, we’re still collecting Adam, and today we’re sharing our eighty-fourth issue, which takes us down to fifty-four more we need to upload.

This particular example, which was published this month in 1965, was tightly bound, so we have only a handful of scans because we didn’t want to destroy the magazine by flattening it. Apparently there’s such a thing as a triangle scanner meant for such situations, but we never heard of one until this week. Anyway, the cover here of a woman holding off a prospective assailant was painted to illustrate Walter S. Bratu’s story, “Ice That Burns,” in which a random everyman runs afoul of a Nordic femme fatale, and gets snared in a blackmail and bribery plot. In a twist he eventually uses his car to bash hers off a cliff, but it didn’t surprise us. In vintage men’s magazines women who are sexually unavailable to the hero usually come to bad ends.

There’s also a story from Carl Ruhen that wins the award for best title of the issue, if not all of 1965: “So Ineffably Sad.” It’s about a man named Jacky Ryan who accidentally kills a woman and must somehow cover up the crime. This issue also has signed work from Jack Waugh (he’d give up on signatures as the years progressed), and of course a couple of pictorials, both with unidentified models. As we said, we can’t show you everything because of our desire to preserve the magazine, but if we ever get a triangle scanner we’ll add to this post. For now, we have a mere fifteen panels below.

It's a beautiful Window even if it doesn't illuminate the identity of the cover artist.

Above: a cover scan of Raymond Chandler’s thriller The High Window. This book sold on Sotheby’s a while back for more than 5K. It was published in 1943 in identical editions by British imprint Hamish Hamilton and Australia’s George Jaboor with cover art that’s signed but uncredited inside. It’s possibly the work of British painter John Hewitt. He was born in 1922, which would make this an (extremely) early effort. But maybe he was a prodigy. With connections that could get him into the commercial art scene by age twenty-one. Okay, no. Alternatively, this could be the work of Don Hewitt, a British painter born in 1904. He repatriated with his parents to the U.S. in 1907, but could have later worked for an across-the-pond publisher, we suppose. Publishing continued there even during World War II. How Hewitt got his art to London we can’t speculate. So, probably not him either. Call it unattributed, then. If you want to know what The High Window is about, check our earlier musings here.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago

Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the painting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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