vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Stud boy there is gonna need a bigger knife. Not only that—he needs peripheral vision, better hearing, and a little something called a sixth sense. We’ve talked before about cover artists taking liberties with classic literature, but in this case the cover is accurate—the hero of French author Victor Hugo’s seafaring novel The Toilers of the Sea (originally Les Travailleurs de la mer) does indeed fight a giant octopus. Hugo even painted the octopus in question himself, which you see below. As to whether Gilliat survives his deadly encounter, let’s just say he really developed a taste for tako sashimi.
Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov is assassinated in a scene right out of a spy novel. As he’s waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge in London, he’s jabbed in the calf with an umbrella. The man holding the umbrella apologizes and walks away, but he is in reality a Bulgarian hired killer who has just injected a ricin pellet into Markov, who develops a high fever and dies three days later.
Polish-born anarchist Leon Czolgosz shoots and fatally wounds U.S. President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley dies September 12, and Czolgosz is later executed.
The Neutrality Acts, which had been passed in the 1930s when the United States considered foreign conflicts undesirable, prompts the nation to declare neutrality in World War II. The policy ended with the Lend-Lease Act of March 1941, which allowed the U.S. to sell, lend or give war materials to allied nations.
During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, West Germany, a paramilitary group calling itself Black September takes members of the Israeli olympic team hostage. Eventually the group, which represents the first glimpse of terrorists for most people in the Western world, kill eleven of the hostages along with one West German police officer during a rescue attempt by West German police that devolves into a firefight. Five of the eight members of Black September are also killed.
The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, mobilizes the National Guard to prevent nine African-American students known as the Little Rock Nine from enrolling in high school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
