vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: the cover of Arnold E. Grisman’s Early To Rise with art by Robert Maguire. It’s a rags to riches story about a young guy fresh out of the army who becomes a fabric dye tycoon. Doesn’t sound thrilling, does it? Well, there are also trade secrets, connections to Indian maharajahs, and romance, if that helps. 1958 on this originally, with the Berkeley paperback appearing in ’59.
Andrew Garve’s The End of the Track was published in 1955, with this Berkeley Books paperback appearing in 1958. Garve, who was actually British author Paul Winterton and also wrote as Roger Bax and Paul Somers, livens up the thriller formula a bit here by pitting a forest ranger and his wife against two blackmailers, then mixing in a wilderness blaze that kills one villain but leaves the other missing. When police suspect the ranger of incinerating the blackmailer intentionally, he’s suddenly the focus of a murder investigation even as the other crook needs to be dealt with. The stunning, almost sepia toned art here is uncredited—a crime in itself.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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 more than 2,800 stars.
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.
