Pulp International

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

GAMES OF CHANCE

The dice haven't been kind, but there's still one way he can leave the casino a winner.

This is a nice orange cover painted by Raymond Johnson for William Ard’s 1956 thriller Mr. Trouble. Johnson is good every time out, and you already know that Ard at his worst is decent, while at his best he’s better than almost anyone. This one stars his recurring insurance investigator hero Timothy Dane, who’s sent to Tampa to retrieve a stolen diamond but—thanks to his gun falling out of his suitcase—is thought to be a hitman sent to eliminate two Vegas gamblers who owe money to the mob and have fled to Florida. He soon finds himself in the crossfire between the gamblers and the real hitman sent to eliminate them, all while trying to pry the diamond from the clutches of femme fatale Leora Grant. The book has an involving scattered narrative of half a dozen characters operating from mistaken assumptions, and it all comes together seamlessly in the end, resulting in another Ard winner, no trouble at all. The guy is good. Buy it.

Florida, Tampa, Popular Library, William Ard, Ben Kerr, Ray Johnson, cover art, literature

READY CETTE GO

I said one hour, yet here you are, still in your underwear. Take your time. We're only being hunted by killers.

This is pretty nice work by French illustrator James Hodges for Éditions Baudelaire and its Détective Pocket edition of William Ard’s Donne moi cette femme. It’s copyright 1963, and bears Hodges’ signature on the lower left of the front cover.

The title translates as “give me this woman.” Usually French retitles are wildly different from the English originals, but this is a rare case where that isn’t true. This book is the French version of Ard’s 1962 thriller Give Me This Woman.

We’ve talked about Ard, aka Ben Kerr, aka Mike Moran, et al before. We especially enjoyed Hell Is a City, When She Was Bad, and Club 17. Luckily, we also have four more of his efforts awaiting attention on our shelves. In short: we think he’s great. Read anything you can find by him.

James Hodges was a prolific artist who worked not only in publishing, but advertising, television, set design, puppet making, and live special effects, at one point designing the visuals for Christian Fechner’s Grand Guignol at the famed Théâtre de l’Européen. Later in his multi-faceted career he even delved into illusion and stage direction. We’ve shared many of his pieces, and you can see a few here and here. He’ll surely pop up on our website again.

France, Éditions Baudelaire, William Ard, Ben Kerr, Mike Moran, James Hodges, Christian Fechner, cover art, literature

LOSING HIS EDGE

Guess he never heard the old saying about bringing a knife to a gunfight.

In so many instances an author’s first novel is their best, but in 1951’s The Perfect Frame William Ard had not yet fully harnessed the wordcraft that would serve him in composing sparkling crime thrillers like Club 17, Wanted: Danny Fontaine, and When She Was Bad. The seeds are there, but in this debut outing for both him and his franchise character Timothy Dane, he hasn’t yet reached the elevation of subsequent work. The story deals with Dane being hired under false pretenses by a beautiful woman in danger, and leads to a New York City insurance brokerage called Oceanic where things are not quite as they seem. It doesn’t work as well as it could, but as Dane’s origin story it’s probably obligatory. Ard would later become one of the top talents in crime fiction and, later, even westerns. 

Popular Library, William Ard, Ben Kerr, cover art, uncredited art, literature

CITY HEAT

Temperatures rise and tempers fray in Ard thriller.

We’ve been searching for everything we can find by William Ard because his books have been consistently good. This Popular Library edition of 1955’s Hell Is a City has George Mayers cover art. We dove right into it, and the narrative (which is unrelated to the movie of the same name) focuses again on Ard’s NYC private investigator Timothy Dane, who this time tries to prove that a slam-dunk murder charge is a frame put together by a predatory cop.

Ard reveals this in chapter one, when young Jamie Colyero, barely more than a boy, shoots the cop who tries to rape his sister Rita. The cop had been after her for weeks, and finally plants heroin on Jamie, engineers an arrest, then tells Rita the charges can possibly dropped if she meets him at a hotel and gives up her goodies. Out of desperation to help her brother, she agrees.

Unbeknownst to her, she’s followed to the hotel by her brother, who’s out on bail, and Jamie kicks in the door and ruins the cop’s plan—lethally. Dane is in the picture shortly thereafter, working for a newspaper editor who wants to expose the lies of a rival sheet that has used its pages to turn the dirty cop into a saint. All of this will swing the next mayoral election, so the stakes are as high as can be.

Long story short, the book is great. Like other Ard tales it moves exceedingly fast for a piece of vintage fiction, racing through numerous twists and scrapes, with intermittent bursts of action, until it reaches a conclusion that shakes the city to its foundations and leaves readers satisfied. If you enjoy 1950s crime novels, read anything by Ard. You won’t regret it.

New York City, Popular Library, William Ard, Ben Kerr, Mike Moran, George Mayers, cover art, literature

BAD AS IN GOOD

Fontaine returns for another deadly installment of the hunger dames.


It’s official. William Ard, in all his incarnations, is a trusted author. In 1960’s When She Was Bad, the follow-up to 1959’s As Bad As I Am, Danny Fontaine is now a fledgeling detective on his first case. Many mid-century detectives are ladykillers, but Fontaine is on a level that silences rooms when he enters. He’s what women these days might amusingly call a “dilf”—a detective I’d like to fuck. His job is to locate a missing minor royal, a thrillseeker who’s caused a ruckus from Grand Bahama to New York City but now may be in trouble way over her head. Fontaine mixes with women ranging from a marquess related by marriage to the Queen of England to a trio of top rank call girls, and they all fall hard for him. His efforts to earn his wings as a private operator under these circumstances are often funny and always exciting. Simply put, Ard’s got skills. The cover art on this Dell edition is by Robert McGinnis, and he’s got skills too.
New York City, Dell Publications, William Ard, Ben Kerr, Mike Moran, Robert McGinnis, cover art, literature

OBJECT OF DESIRE

Do you ever put the gun away? I'm just wondering because you'll probably need two hands for what I have planned.

We recently called Barye Phillips a ubiquitous illustrator, but we keep running into Robert McGinnis too. Which mid-century artist do you suppose painted the most paperback covers? Surely both Phillips and McGinnis have to be in the running. Here’s the latter’s masterful work on the cover of William Ard’s Wanted: Danny Fontaine, a 1960 re-issue of 1959’s As Bad As I Am. In this novel the title character has just been paroled after his third prison stint. Because his crimes always involve helping damsels in distress, a provision of his parole is that he must stay away from women for eighteen months. That’s not easy. He has movie star looks on a six-four frame, and an overt but non-aggressive masculinity wrapped inside a genuine charm that verges on innocence. All of that makes him irresistible to women. But the fact that his probabtion officer can’t wait to send him back to prison offers all the motivation he needs to keep his life unentangled.

Unfortunately, Fontaine gets entangled anyway. He gets involved in a cop killing, at which point a beautiful actress named Gloria Allen risks everything to come to his aid. We thought it was a clever thematic reversal by Ard after taking such lengths to portray Fontaine as a habitual white knight. The man who’s gone to prison three times rescuing women is doomed unless a woman helps him—and at great risk to herself, since the police have gone full vigilante in an attempt to avenge one of their own. While the plot Ard spins is unlikely in parts, and there are some of the issues regarding race that are endemic to vintage fiction, Danny Fontaine and Gloria Allen are both winning creations, the supporting cast is good, and the story is propulsive. With this one on his ledger, plus the excellent Club 17 and Deadly Beloved, we may have to elevate Ard to our top rank of vintage crime authors, that lofty designation we like to call “trusted.”

Dell Publications, William Ard, Ben Kerr, Mike Moran, Robert McGinnis, cover art, literature

BUYERS CLUB

No, my husband doesn't mind that I have sex with other men. Though he probably would if he knew.

Ben Kerr, who we first knew as Mike Moran, then William Ard, might make the trusted author category. His 1957 novel Club 17 is a nice little yarn. It deals with a down-on-her-luck actress finally driven to prostitution, but her first customer is a vice cop out to bust the crime ring she works for, which operates out of an unassuming Manhattan watering hole called Club 17.

She can’t go through with the deed, which transforms the cop’s appraisal of her from hooker to sweetheart, and romance is born. We know what you’re thinking, but the same old motif of love at first sight works because Kerr writes fast and with style. He had to write fast—he churned out three books a year, but his work didn’t suffer for it. Some writers just have that gift. He pulls together a cohort of major characters—the cop, the call girl, the groomer, the pimp, a political climber, his two-timing wife, and a private investigator—and effortlessly sets the narrative spinning within only twenty pages.

Turning to the cover, which is amazing, it’s unattributed, but we think it’s by Ray Johnson. He was working with Popular Library from at least 1955 onward, as we’ve shown you here and here. The rear cover below reinforces our conviction on this. Look below and note the hair, the shape of the face, and that certain lift of the eyebrows, then check the links. He’s the prime suspect. If so, excellent work, from a top rank illustrator.

Popular Library, Ben Kerr, Mike Moran, William Ard, Ray Johnson, cover art, literature

ORANGE CRUSH

Packed with flavor and fortified with the recommended daily allotment of vitamin f.


Victor Kalin went the tight focus route with this cover of an orange femme fatale he painted for William Ard’s 1958 thriller Deadly Beloved, also published as The Root of His Evil. We love the art, and we loved the book too. An insurance investigator named Tim Dane is hired to transport a $100,000 gambling debt from an unlucky loser to a Miami hood named John Cashman. Cashman plans to use the money to help finance a war in Latin America, but that’s just background. The more immediate part of the narrative involves an exotic dancer named Lissa, real name Elizabeth Ann Miller, who he has ringfenced with the help of 24/7 bodyguards and a lifetime management contract. Dane ignores warnings to keep away and is soon giving Lissa deep nocturnal lovin’—a pleasure that could cost his life if Cashman finds out about it. Ard, who also wrote as Ben Kerr, Mike Moran, et al, is a talented stylist with an approach all his own. His way of cutting transitional exposition is pretty neat. Every writer is required to do it, but Ard can cross town within the space of a sentence and still not sound like he’s rushing. We’re already trawling the auction sites for more from him. Highly entertaining.

Edit: We got an e-mail asking exactly what we meant by “cutting transitional exposition.” We don’t want to search through the book for an example, so we’ll make up one. It would go something like this. “He decided he’d have to drive to Coral Gables to ask Cashman in person, and two days later when the door opened to his knock, he was surprised that it wasn’t a servant but Cashman himself who answered.”

Miami, William Ard, Ben Kerr, Jonas Ward, Mike Moran, Thomas Wills, Victor Kalin, cover art, literature

KISSY FACE

First of all, hell no. Second, why are you wearing lipstick? And third, crushed strawberry is not your color.

When it comes to mid-century fiction, basically all the guys had problems respecting women’s boundaries. There are so many covers of the above type we could curate an entire collection. We can’t think of any others, however, where the guy looks like he’s wearing lipstick. We checked a few other examples of this one online, just in case this look was courtesy of some kid with a crayon, but he’s wearing that crushed strawberry in all of them. Not that we disapprove. More guys probably should do it. We’ve done it, and it was fun, if not even educational. But maybe we’re drilling too deep into this subject. Boundaries we were talking about, right? So, Mike Moran was aka Ben Kerr, Jonas Ward, and Thomas Wills, and this book deals with a private eye who takes a job bodyguarding a boxer who’s run into problems as the night of a big bout approaches. Reviews are mixed to middling. But this cover opens the door to all sorts of discussion, which makes it worth sharing. 1953 on this.

Popular Library, Mike Moran, William Ard, Ben Kerr, Jonas Ward, Thomas Wills, cover art, literature
Femme Fatale Image

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1961—Plane Carrying Nuclear Bombs Crashes

A B-52 Stratofortress carrying two H-bombs experiences trouble during a refueling operation, and in the midst of an emergency descent breaks up in mid-air over Goldsboro, North Carolina. Five of the six arming devices on one of the bombs somehow activate before it lands via parachute in a wooded region where it is later recovered. The other bomb does not deploy its chute and crashes into muddy ground at 700 mph, disintegrating while driving its radioactive core fifty feet into the earth.

1912—International Opium Convention Signed

The International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague, Netherlands, and is the first international drug control treaty. The agreement was signed by Germany, the U.S., China, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam.

1946—CIA Forerunner Created

U.S. president Harry S. Truman establishes the Central Intelligence Group or CIG, an interim authority that lasts until the Central Intelligence Agency is established in September of 1947.

1957—George Metesky Is Arrested

The New York City “Mad Bomber,” a man named George P. Metesky, is arrested in Waterbury, Connecticut and charged with planting more than 30 bombs. Metesky was angry about events surrounding a workplace injury suffered years earlier. Of the thirty-three known bombs he planted, twenty-two exploded, injuring fifteen people. He was apprehended based on an early use of offender profiling and because of clues given in letters he wrote to a newspaper. At trial he was found legally insane and committed to a state mental hospital.

1950—Alger Hiss Is Convicted of Perjury

American lawyer Alger Hiss is convicted of perjury in connection with an investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), at which he was questioned about being a Soviet spy. Hiss served forty-four months in prison, but maintained his innocence and fought his perjury conviction until his death in 1996 at age 92.

1977—Carter Pardons War Fugitives

U.S. President Jimmy Carter pardons nearly all of the country’s Vietnam War draft evaders, many of whom had emigrated to Canada. He had made the pardon pledge during his election campaign, and he fulfilled his promise the day after he took office.

  • FEATUREd PULP

KISS AND TELL STORIES

We can't really say, but there are probably thousands of kisses on mid-century paperback covers. Here's a small collection of some good ones.

INCLEMENT WEATHER

Two Spanish covers from Ediciones G.P. for Peter Cheyney's Huracan en las Bahamas, better known as Dark Bahama.

DON GIOVANNI

Giovanni Benvenuti was one of Italy's most prolific paperback cover artists. His unique style is on display in multiple collections within our website.

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