Pulp International

vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news

A MATTER OF TASTE

I didn't care for it. I prefer the wine of Sonoma.

Though you wouldn’t guess from the title, Martha Gellhorn’s The Wine of Astonishment is a war novel in which the lead character experiences such horrors as the Battle of the Bulge and Dachau. It originally appeared in 1948 with this Bantam edition and its James Avati cover art coming in 1949. Gellhorn was a towering literary and journalistic figure who reported from Civil War Spain, D-Day Normandy, and Vietnam, and who today has a prize named after her—The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism. She also married Ernest Hemingway. The Wine of Astonishment isn’t something we’ll read, because we stopped with war literature a while back, but we may try one of her other books.

Bantam Books, Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, Martha Gellhorn, James Avati, Ernest Hemingway, cover art, literature

LAST GUESS

Really? You have a surprise for me? Is it flowers? Is it a kitten?

Above: a cover for One More Unfortunate, written by British author Edgar Lustgarten and published in hardback in 1947, before this Bantam paperback followed in 1949. Lustgarten, who was also a broadcast personality, generally wrote true crime. He also hosted the British series of film shorts known as Scotland Yard, which were shown in cinemas before the main features. Later he hosted a true crime television series called The Scales of Justice. Altogether he wrote five novels and numerous true crime books. One More Unfortunate, grim fiction about an unjustly accused man ramrodded to the gallows, was his debut. 

Bantam Books, Edgar Lustgarten, Bernard Safran, cover art, literature

I OF THE STORM

Chaos thy name is woman.

Above you see a Mitchell Hooks cover for the 1951 Robert Standish novel Storm Centre, and yes, from the art alone you can see that once again we’ve taken the plunge into tropical island fiction. It’s impossible for us to resist the stuff. This one is about what happens when a devastatingly beautiful woman named Diana Maynard shows up at an isolated British plantation community in Malaysia. Everyone immediately covets her, particularly John and Adrian, friends and business partners who turn against each other. Even the local orangutan Jimmie is driven to distraction, theoretically because he senses something “primal” in Diana.

The consequences of all this lust are serious. An eye is lost. A skull is fractured. A face disfigured. A suicide completed. It’s an interesting story in that there are no villains at first, but rather good people acting increasingly out of character due to obsession. Diana, the titular “storm centre”, is up front from the beginning about not wanting any of the men. Well, until a charming rogue of a Frenchman turns her head. Storm Centre is a surprisingly forward-looking tale by Standish about male toxicity and aggressive attitudes toward beauty. Because he’s writing about women to depths that seem a bit beyond him, the story may not ring entirely true for some. But it certainly rings.

Malaysia, Bantam Books, Robert Standish, Mitchell Hooks, cover art, literature

THE HAND OF DEATH

West Virginia town develops a miner problem.

Dorothy Salisbury Davis entertained us with her debut novel The Judas Cat, so we decided to jump ahead to see how she fared after a few years of literary seasoning. The Clay Hand, which Bantam published in paperback in 1952 with uncredited cover art, is set in a coal mining town where a famous journalist is found dead. His pal Phil, who writes for the Columbus Dispatch, shows up for the inquest and starts to dig into the circumstances of the death, as well as his own complicated feelings for his friend’s beautiful widow Margaret.

Davis was good with characterizations in her first novel. Here, instead of the usual mutual affection between the male and female leads, she opts for a love/hate relationship. Owing to the tension they feel toward each other, both characters can sometimes be unpleasant. It makes for a few jarring moments, but certainly presents interesting backstory as the two try to unravel the mystery. Eventually they figure out both the journalistic angle, the reasons for the death, and their own feelings. All in all, another good result from Davis.

Bantam Books, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, cover art, literature

EXTREME WEATHER

It's characterized by a rise in freak events and a general increase in harming.

We used the term “swooning flowers of maidenhood” last time we read a Mignon Eberhart novel, and she holds true to form with 1949’s House of Storm. It’s set on a small Caribbean island—so small in fact that it’s named for the family that runs a plantation there. Murder occurs as a tropical storm shuts down transport and strands swooning flower and bride-to-be Nonie Hovenden with others in a large house. The real storm is (of course) emotional and deals with a weighty romantic subplot centered around her wishing to escape her pending nuptials so she can marry the man she really loves—who soon becomes murder suspect number one.

It’s less complicated than it sounds. The murder plotline is interesting enough and the atmosphere is reasonably well rendered, but all you really need to know is that Eberhart operated at the nexus of suspense and romance, and here Nonie’s breathless flutterings are almost intense enough to riffle the book’s pages. If you can take that sort of thing, you’ll like House of Storm. We kept making moments to finish it despite our reservations, so we have to call it a success. But we’re suckers for tropical island fiction—even when there’s breastbeating romance at its core—so take our endorsement with a grain of salt.

Bantam Books, Mignon G. Eberhart, cover art, literature

DIVERGED IN A WOOD

I can see the forest for the trees just fine. What I can't see is how you got us lost.


Above: Robert Maguire art for Conrad Richters’s 1940 novel The Trees, which Bantam Books issued in this paperback edition in 1951. This was a serious novel, the first in an Ohio frontier trilogy known as The Awakening Land. The third novel, The Town, won Richter a Pulitzer Prize in 1951, which may have precipitated Bantam’s pulpy re-issue. This isn’t one we’ll read, but we do like the art.

Ohio, Pulitzer Prize, Bantam Books, Conrad Richter, Robert Maguire, cover art, literature

LIFE ON THE INSIDE

If you don't get me out of here I'm a dead woman. The sheets are like sandpaper and the toilet has no seat.

Above is a cover painted by Bert Lannon for the 1948 novel Love Is a Surprise! by Faith Baldwin, a major author of romance flavored fiction who produced around one hundred books in a career than ran six decades, from 1921 to 1977. Lannon is a new illustrator for us. We like his style. The moment he’s used for his illustration is also highlighted by editors in the intro page:

She stood in the prison cell, a steel bar in either hand, her face pressed against the metal. He bent his head, and before she could pull away, just managed to kiss her startled lips. “My fee,” he remarked – and went toward the waiting sheriff.

We haven’t read Baldwin, but we expect we’ll run into something of hers we want to check out eventually. In addition, some of her work was translated to the silver screen, resulting in such films as 1937’s Portia on Trial and 1938’s Men Are Such Fools. Lannon, conversely, doesn’t seem to have been very prolific. There’s a little gallery of his work at Flickr, which you can see at this link.

Portia on Trial, Men Are Such Fools, Bantam Books, Faith Baldwin, Bert Lannon, cover art, literature

WOMAN’S PRISON

There aren't any bars, but there's no way out.


A few years ago we read a thriller by Ben Benson titled The Venus Death, the first of a series featuring his franchise character Massachusetts state trooper Ralph Lindsay. It was good enough that we wanted to return to Benson, so here we are with his second Lindsay novel, 1954’s The Girl in a Cage. Benson writes in a style more akin to novels from the mid-sixties and beyond, which is to say things happen in his books. There’s excellent pacing. The stories aren’t built solely around dialogue. By a quarter of the way through this one there’s a fistfight, a second fistfight/brawl, and a few other attention getting moments. Amidst all this trooper Lindsay is working undercover to bust a car theft ring, but finds himself dealing with an unusual brand of sociopathic kingpin. The caged girl of the title is Leta Nofke, who the villain considers his personal property, so much so that he’s branded her. Lindsay thinks he can help her, but only if she wants to be helped. And there’s the rub. Another nice effort from Benson, who we’ll read again. 

Massachusetts, Bantam Books, Ben Benson, cover art, literature

HALO GOODBYE

Yeah, you're right, that was pretty evil of me. But I find that a swift kick in the nuts works better than plain old no.

In detective yarns the MacGuffin—the thing everyone is chasing—might be a suitcase of money, or diamonds, or bearer bonds, or a shipment of heroin. In John Evans’, aka Howard Browne’s, intriguingly titled Halo for Satan the thing being pursued is an ancient parchment allegedly written by Jesus Christ. Its discoverer wants to sell it to the Catholic church for $25 million (that would a third of a billion in today’s money), but disappears without a trace. A high ranking Chicago bishop hires private dick Paul Pine to find the missing man and document. Pretty soon others want the artifact too. One of them is a former top gangster who’s near death and believes he can make his way into the good graces of the church—and thus into heaven—by donating the parchment. That’s where the unusual title comes into play. A criminal Satan wants a halo.

Naturally, the question of authenticity is important to the story, but the central themes here are greed and ruthlessness. As Pine puts it: “You have to be a violent person to make money. I don’t necessarily mean the stab-and-shoot kind of violence. I mean the kind that will let you kick other people aside to get your hands dipped in gold.” Since the parchment is a classic MacGuffin, it doesn’t appear until the end—like the Maltese Falcon. Meanwhile betrayals abound, bodies accumulate, and Evans turns numerous hard-boiled phrases while leading readers to a bloody resolution. We found Halo for Satan reasonably fun, even though it would be pretty thin without its gimmick. It was originally published in 1948, with this Bantam edition coming in 1950. The cover art is uncredited.

Bantam Books, John Evans, Howard Browne, cover art, literature
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

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 panting 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”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

1960—Woodward Gets First Star on Walk of Fame

Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains nearly 2,800 stars.

1971—Paige Enters Baseball Hall of Fame

Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.

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PANTS ON FIRE

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.

GLOBAL WAR

Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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