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.

Any time is the right time for great cover art.

Above, a cover for K. Beerman’s Baarnse Moord (Murder in Baarn), painted by Dutch artist Martin Oortwijn. We said we’d get back to Oortwijn and here we are, three years later. He remains, in our eyes at least, a unique talent. We were reminded of him because he illustrated the cover of a Christine Keeler biography, and Keeler is back in the spotlight thanks to the new BBC series The Trial of Christine Keeler, which we’ve been watching. So far so good on that, and we’ll try to dig up more from Oortwijn.

Section of CIA trove of declassified material reveals research into psychic phenomena.

The Central Intelligence Agency has just published 800,000 formerly classified files online. The data dump, comprising some 13 million separate documents, isn’t technically new. The files had been declassified years ago, but had only been available at the National Archives in Maryland, on only four computers tucked away at the back of the building which were accessible only during business hours. A freedom-of-information group called MuckRock sued the CIA and forced it to upload the collection, and the process took more than two years. Among the discoveries in the trove are documents related to the Stargate Project, which was tasked with examining psychic phenomena. A subset of those investigations involved celebrity paranormalist Uri Geller in 1973.
 
For those who don’t know, Geller is a guy who used to show up on television programs like The Tonight Show and perform various paranormal tricks. His fame drew the roving gaze of the CIA, and they had him come in for a series of tests. No word on whether he had a choice in the matter. The testers ultimately reached the conclusion that Geller was legit, stating in the declassified dox that he had, “demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner.” How did they reach that conclusion?Through double blind experiments, one of which involved sealing Geller in a room, having a worker make a drawing, and asking Geller to recreate the drawing without having seen it. The images above and below show three of the original drawings, and Geller’s eerily accurate renderings.
 
Geller made a nice career for himself finding hidden objects, bending spoons, and reproducing hidden sketches, but the really interesting part is he may have been a spy. In 2013, a BBC documentary titled The Secret Life of Uri Geller–Psychic Spy? claimed Geller worked for the CIA, was recruited by Mossad, and performed such missions as using only the power of his mind to erase floppy discs carried by KGB agents. Geller allegedly spent years in Mexico working as security for President José López Portillo, and the aforementioned documentary suggests he was also involved in some capacity in the famed Israeli hostage rescue in Entebbe, Uganda in 1976. It may take a few more CIA declassifications before we get to the bottom of all that.
 

Geller is still around at age seventy (looking about fifty, which might the most convincing evidence yet of his paranormal ability) and he still appears in news reports for antics such as purchasing Lamb Island, off the eastern coast of Scotland, which was the site of many witch trials, and for building a 12 foot-tall statue of a gorilla made from

40,000 metal spoons. We aren’t believers in psychic ability or any form of the paranormal. And we won’t be unless we see evidence proving these realms exist. But the CIA said Geller was the real deal, so that’s worth something. Of course, they also said Iraq had a nuclear weapons program, so maybe their opinion should be taken with a grain of salt.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1925—Mein Kampf Published

While serving time in prison for his role in a failed coup, Adolf Hitler dictaes and publishes volume 1 of his manifesto Mein Kampf (in English My Struggle or My Battle), the book that outlines his theories of racial purity, his belief in a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, and his plans to lead Germany to militarily acquire more land at the expense of Russia via eastward expansion.

1955—Disneyland Begins Operations

The amusement park Disneyland opens in Orange County, California for 6,000 invitation-only guests, before opening to the general public the following day.

1959—Holiday Dies Broke

Legendary singer Billie Holiday, who possessed one of the most unique voices in the history of jazz, dies in the hospital of cirrhosis of the liver. She had lost her earnings to swindlers over the years, and upon her death her bank account contains seventy cents.

1941—DiMaggio Hit Streak Reaches 56

New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio gets a hit in his fifty-sixth consecutive game. The streak would end the next game, against the Cleveland Indians, but the mark DiMaggio set still stands, and in fact has never been seriously threatened. It is generally thought to be one of the few truly unbreakable baseball records.

1939—Adams Completes Around-the-World Air Journey

American Clara Adams becomes the first woman passenger to complete an around the world air journey. Her voyage began and ended in New York City, with stops in Lisbon, Marseilles, Leipzig, Athens, Basra, Jodhpur, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Wake Island, Honolulu, and San Francisco.

1955—Nobel Prize Winners Unite Against Nukes

Eighteen Nobel laureates sign the Mainau Declaration against nuclear weapons, which reads in part: “We think it is a delusion if governments believe that they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of [nuclear] weapons. Fear and tension have often engendered wars. Similarly it seems to us a delusion to believe that small conflicts could in the future always be decided by traditional weapons. In extreme danger no nation will deny itself the use of any weapon that scientific technology can produce.”

Uncredited art for Poker de blondes by Oscar Montgomery, aka José del Valle, from the French publisher Éditions le Trotteur in 1953.
Rafael DeSoto painted this excellent cover for David Hulburd's 1954 drug scare novel H Is for Heroin. We also have the original art without text.
Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.
Uncredited cover art for Orrie Hitt's 1954 novel Tawny. Hitt was a master of sleazy literature and published more than one hundred fifty novels.

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