Honey, I don't know football, but maybe quarterbacking is too much pressure. Could you play eighthback or sixteenthback instead?
Earle Bergey, the man behind thousands of covers for pulp magazines and paperbacks, painted this piece for Millard Lampell’s novel The Hero. It first appeared in 1949, with this Popular Library edition coming in 1950. Interestingly, Lampell was first a musician, a member of a folk group called the Almanac Singers with Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Lee Hayes. Later he wrote radio scripts before finally turning to novels. His literary career was curtailed for some years because he was blacklisted for refusing to snitch to the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he eventually wrote plays, and later returned to radio. The Hero turned out to be his only novel, but gratifyingly, he did get to see it adapted into the 1951 movie Saturday’s Hero, starring John Derek and Donna Reed. Back to the subject of Bergey—see some nice covers from him here, here, and here.
We watch certain movies to fill in blanks in our cinematic résumé. Nobody has seen every important film. We hadn’t seen the British made classic Our Man in Havana, and that needed to be remedied, as it’s a title that pops up often in discussions of mid-century film. The movie is based on a famed 1958 Graham Greene novel set during the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Cuba that would be unseated by Fidel Castro and his rebels. The novel was immediately optioned, produced with Carol Reed in the director’s chair and Alec Guinness in the lead role, and premiered in London today in 1959.
What you get is a droll spy spoof that starts out as a low key comedy before evolving toward serious consequences, as Guinness plays a vacuum cleaner salesman in Havana who’s picked out by bureaucrat spy Noël Coward to be the British government’s eyes and ears on the island. Spurred by his daughter’s expensive wishes for a horse, Guinness lies about his activities, ginning up a conspiracy that is—to his chagrin—deemed by the British government to be a global threat. It’s generative AG gone wrong. Only Coward realizes the secret plans Guinness has forwarded to London are in fact drawings of an advanced model of vacuum cleaner.
Anything described as droll is rarely laugh out loud funny, but you’ll crack a few smiles as Guinness, looking a bit stunned throughout, gets in deeper and deeper with both his own government and the Cuban secret police. The moral of the story, that governments see all unexpected developments as threats the same way hammers see all problems as nails, is pretty much baked in from the beginning and is no surprise. But what’s interesting to watch is Guinness, his detached calm being channelled into a somewhat airheaded character, foolish where the iconic Obi-Wan Kenobi he’d later play is so wise.
Another important aspect of the film is that it was made in Havana just after the Cuban Revolution, and its numerous exteriors shot in the center of Habana Vieja, in locations such as the famed Sloppy Joe’s Bar, as well as inside Guinness’s street-view apartment, make it possibly the best pre-embargo document of the City of Columns ever made. Due to that, the Cold War context, and the stupefied Guinness, we very much enjoyed the film. Some may find “droll” to be synonymous with “slow,” and we can understand that. But spy movie aficionados, Guinness fans, and history buffs should confidently proceed.
If trouble is what you really want you'll always find it.
Another book chosen at random, another interesting story. This time, though, the story isn’t by the author, but about him. Joe Rayter was in reality Mary Fuller McChesney, who wrote three novels under pseudonyms, but is remembered as a sculptor. She was a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and became famous enough during her career to receive a New York Times obituary when she died in 2022.
McChesney’s first job was as a welder in the San Francisco shipyards, so the story goes, but before or by 1949, when she married artist Robert McChesney, she had turned her attention to sculpting. She had to pay her bills, so simultaneously she was teaching art in Point Richmond. When the state of California ordered all public employees to sign oaths disavowing politically inconvenient beliefs (a terrible period of American history that seems about to repeat), she refused and was fired. She and her husband moved to Guadalajara, where she kept sculpting.
Asking for Trouble came in 1954, so it seems she turned to literature to earn a bit of money outside of art, writing as Rayter, as well as Melissa Franklin. We should note that, as always, details vary when it comes to life stories. In particular, there’s contradiction over her Mexico period. Some sources say she spent less than a year in Guadalajara, while others say she spent two years in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende. In any case, she and her husband returned to the Bay Area, and she was based there the rest of her life.
Asking for Trouble is set in and around San Francisco and tells of private eye John Powers, who discovers his friend’s shotgunned body and sets out to determine who killed him. The plot follows normal detective yarn forms: he might get blamed for the killing, there are available femmes fatales, etc. The story is enlivened somewhat by a couple of leftfield characters and a trip to Reno, but we never quite developed an affinity for Mr. Powers, and the mystery doesn’t progress in the most engrossing fashion.
Still though, the book is readable and we’re happy to have picked it up. We chose it based on price and cover art alone. Its unknown backstory turned out to be a bonus, and who knows, might even increase the book’s value if its provenance becomes more widely known. It doesn’t hurt that the cover art is by James Meese, who depicted a scene from the story in which a character gets her dressed ripped off. We may try one of Rayter/McChesney’s other crime novels. If we do we’ll report back.
A while back, when we read Holly Roth’s 1954 Cold War novel The Shocking Secret, we said we suspected she’d done better work. Well, we found it. 1955’s The Sleeper is also an anti-communist thriller, but Roth course-corrected after her middling previous effort by making the main communist agent in this story intellectually and tactically brilliant. That’s been a regular complaint of ours, that mid-century writers cheat by making Cold War antagonists too hapless to realistically worry about. They rarely took the easy way out with other types of villains, so we wonder if, considering the anti-commie hysteria of the period, they were afraid of seeming sympathetic. But The Sleeper features an agent who’s smart, charming, and determined to a level nobody else in the story can match.
This spy, an all-American boy type, is introduced to the reader while already in jail. A journalist named Robert Kendall has interviewed him for a profile in a prestigious magazine, but comes to believe—as does the U.S. government—that messages to other spies have been seeded into the article. Quaint ideas about press freedom prevent the Feds from killing the piece. And there’s no proof anyway. Nobody can figure out the embedded message, but time is a factor—the piece is to be published in a few weeks. Drawn into the turbulence is an acquaintance of the jailed spy, Marta Wentwirth. Is she in on the plot? Maybe, but Kendall likes the cut of her jib, and decides she isn’t. How else can he get laid?
As in The Shocking Secret, the protagonist here is just a regular guy and journalist, and Roth is again interested in the Chinese more than the Russians, which is no surprise with the Korean War just ended. She smartly kept her chapters short, and the overall narrative compact. The gimmick of a sleeper agent being able to carefully load an interview with crucial information may seem unlikely, but it ends up believable the way Roth works it. We have a feeling the concept was used previously. If not, it was certainly used afterward. It’s too good not to recycle. We’ll probably try Roth once again at some point. As Cold War focused authors go, this one makes clear that she’s no sleeper.
He's hopelessly outclassed by his prey. And the tiger is a problem too.
Above you see a nice cover by an uncredited illustrator for 1959’s Womanhunt, written by Harry Wilcox posing as his alter ego Mark Derby and published in this Ace paperback edition in 1960. This is interesting visual work. You notice that the femme fatale’s eyes resemble the tiger’s eyes. That comparison is at the crux of the tale Derby tells. In the story a government agent named Dickson (Dix to his friends) is sent upcountry in Malaya to pose as a big game hunter there to kill a deadly tigress, while behind the scenes he’s searching out a communist cabal and determining whether an agent already there is doing her job or has turned.
That agent—Anna Swansey—is someone Dix barely knows but is “miserably and hopelessly in love with.” Under the pressure of his mission, his feelings turn into a consuming obsession. As high concept novels go, the idea of trying to stalk an apex predator, arouse love within a woman, and expose a spy ring all at once is as ripe as it gets. There’s a lot going on at all times, and Derby keeps multiple plates spinning on sticks while treating readers to some nice passages, like this one:
Before her magnificent body, an electric apparition of charcoal, gold, and white, had passed out of sight, he had a second view of her snarl, the haughty sneer that drew mouth and white whiskers high and quivering on each side, the narrowing of the usually rounded eyes, the flash of the ivory teeth.
At one point Dix is alone in the jungle and hears the tigress’s roar. It’s a moment when he realizes, terrifyingly, that his hunt of her may have turned into her hunt of him:
He jumped as if a cannon had gone off. He had got it into his head that she was somewhere over on his right, or behind him, and this growl came from directly ahead. It sounded awesomely near, too. [snip] The roar, a sound which perhaps only one in every million human beings ever hears, and only one in ten million ever hears at close quarters, filled the dark jungle with shock. There was a moment, perhaps of one second, during which Dix did nothing but stiffen; then his arms moved and the beam of the flashlight mounted on the rifle barrel cut a cone of light in the dark clearing.
The title of book registers weird in 2024, but it isn’t misogynist—or not very. A few web pages say the woman of the hunt is, metaphorically, the tigress. No. It’s a metaphor, alright, but not one that simple. The woman of the hunt is actually both the tigress and Anna. That’s made clear because Derby flogs the woman-as-tigress metaphor until it’s welted from nose to tail. But he’s also capable of smirking at it, briefly anyway, such as here:
“My grandfather used to say that a tigress was a woman, a woman who did not wish to be caught. She would hide down trails the hunter didn’t know and, just like a woman, her lies would be more clever than his traps. That’s what he used to say.” ’Che Kadan was fond of quoting his grandfather, who’d been one of the Malayan sultans—an old man of character, it seemed, since his quoted remarks were invariably mere clichés or sentimental platitudes which must have been remembered for the authority with which he’d uttered them.
It’s a comparison that’s probably insulting to most modern women, but don’t let it fool you. The tale is steeped in debilitating male emotion, lustful obsession, existential terror, and a desperate loneliness. It reads tragically at times, as Dix tries but fails to keep Anna from slowly taking over his thoughts. And that’s another unusual aspect of the book: Dix is increasingly driven by jealousy. At first it’s directed only against Anna’s boss Charlton Lang, who also wants her badly and uses his authority to constantly keep her near him in a work capacity. Then Anna’s ex-lover shows up. Dix is driven near to madness by this event.
Derby deals in high emotion. For example, big cats generally kill humans when they’re the only obtainable prey. Usually the animal is hurt, or very old. Dix sympathizes with the tigress, doesn’t consider her to be in any way at fault, but people keep getting eaten, so he has no choice about killing her—not merely as matter of his cover, but as a matter of saving lives. His conflict over this is wrenching, symbolic of terrible choices forced on us all. To add an extra ingredient, he isn’t an experienced hunter. He can shoot—but he isn’t expert. His pursuit of the tigress is ridiculously dangerous.
This is a great book. However, the usual warnings apply to colonialist fiction. In addition, within the communist plotlines Dix’s quarries are all fools, monsters, or victims of coercion. Capitalism wasn’t then—and isn’t now—turning the world into a fruit laden banquet table overflowing with goodness for all, and Derby was surely smart enough to understand that. But despite the millions upon millions killed to establish and maintain his preferred global order, he never touches the reasons why alternative political philosophies take hold. In his mind, resistance comes from the deluded, from dolts who—for inexplicable reasons—believe colonials have no right to steal foreign lands. That may annoy the more politically astute readers.
But while more character depth on that front would have made Womanhunt perfect, and its total and rather smug one-sidedness means it has to be partly classified as propaganda, Derby can really construct and deliver an adventure. How do you wrap up a communist spy caper, Malayan big game hunt, and heart-hurting love story all at once? Those spinning plates never wobble. The hunt’s spectacular end flows immediately into the climax of the spy tale, and within that chaotic resolution the love story concludes with fireworks. We’ll be revisiting Derby soon.
Cross country train thriller never quite reaches its destination.
Our interest in Peking Express was wholly due to Corinne Calvet, who we’ve seen in promo images, but never speaking and moving. The movie, which was an update of 1932’s Shanghai Express, is an overcooked spy adventure with cheesy, anti-commie filling, making for a creation that’s hard to swallow. Joseph Cotten arrives in Shanghai as a World Health Organization specialist on a mission to operate on some bigwig general. On a Peking bound train he encounters two complications—his ex-flame Calvet, and attempted murder. The latter has to do with the smuggling of contraband inside WHO crates. Soon both Cotten and Calvet are held prisoner by ringleader Marvin Miller (playing a Chinese military officer named Kwon) who wants to engineer a hostage exchange.
The movie ultimately portrays Miller as a money-grubbing bandit willing to betray wife, party, and country for personal gain. Threats and torture are his methods of persuasion, along with a hefty dose of general sneakiness. He spouts some of the worst dialogue ever, often starting with, “We Chinese…” But he doesn’t get the worst line. We just about upchucked on this, spoken about Miller by a saintly priest played by Edmund Gwenn: “If only he had as much devotion to God’s cause we would never have to worry about the world.” Really? Is that so? History says otherwise. To add insult to cognitive dissonance, the soundtrack contains some of the worst villain music imaginable. Composer Dimitri Tiomkin must have worn out an entire brass section recording it.
We’re fine, in principle, with the main plotline. The seemingly contradictory idea of a villain driven by a mix of entrepreneurial greed and communist doctrine is fertile. The crosscurrent of the WHO trying to save lives in a country where many are suspicious of its mandate struck us as relevant. But the operatic dimensions of the characters backfire to infantilise the movie’s messages. We suspect that the average Christian would find Gwenn’s missionary priest a pompous cardboard cut-out. The average communist would laugh the entire enterprise off as delusional b-grade propaganda. And the typical thief would judge Miller to be an incompetent boob. What would the typical Chinese person think? We can’t say, but our special consulting critic Angela the sunbear, whose native habitat includes China, might be able to enlighten us. And finally, what do fans of Corinne Calvet think? We thought: What a waste. Thanks for throwing that China question my way, boys. I disliked the movie, and I extend an invitation to any who want to understand the complicated reasons why to discuss it with me over grubs and beetles.
Mambo, rumba, merengue—you're great at them all. Have you by chance ever done a lap dance?
James Meese was responsible for this nice front for David C. Holmes’ 1958 thriller The Velvet Ape. The art features the alpha pose we’ve highlighted before, where the main subject is straddled by a-shaped legs. Here, the woman dances in the foreground, the man observes from an easy chair, and a gun-wielding shadow creeps toward them beyond the background doorway. Is the woman in league with the shadow? Or are both man woman and man in big trouble? Whatever the answers, Meese has taken an oft used motif and produced a nice example of it. You can see our alpha collection here.
The book tells the story of former naval aviator Buck Tankersley, who after disgrace and a lost career has fetched up in Panama, where he mainly drinks. When another aviator working for a company called Gulf Export takes a fatal header off a balcony into an empty pool, the local CIA chief, who’s concerned about communist incursions in Central America, enlists Tankersley to apply for the dead flyer’s vacancy and be eyes and ears inside the company. Tankersley soon meets Marley Kentner, sister of the dead aviator, who’s looking for answers. Those answers, somehow or other, hinge upon a set of Indian ape dolls made from velvet, gourds, and monkey fur.
Overall, we’d say The Velvet Ape falls into the strictly average category. For one thing, the Panamanian setting isn’t exploited as well as it could be. In fact, in an effort to establish that setting, Holmes mangles the first Spanish phrase he tries to use. That isn’t entirely his fault. His editors were supposed to catch such errors. But it encapsulates the issues with the book, which feels a little lazy. Its plot is from the anti-commie handbook and its characters aren’t compelling. But on the plus side, the climax involves Tankersley flying a Grumman Mallard seaplane directly into a hurricane. Points for that.
The Venetian Affair, which premiered today in 1966, has a rather interesting promo poster. It was painted by U.S. artist Frank McCarthy, who was big in paperback covers early in his career, moved into high-budget movie promos such as James Bond posters, and finally made a mark in realist fine art. We love this piece from him. There’s a lot going on. If you check out his effort for You Only Live Twicehere you’ll see how dense and chaotic his work could be, same as above, where he has people falling off the bridge, off the gondola, and guns being brandished everywhere. In addition, his likenesses of the movie’s stars are good. He was a major talent.
The first observation you might make while watching The Venetian Affair is that it would be impossible to make a similar movie in that city today. Nearly four million tourists visited Venice in 2022, making nearly every street—and certainly every site of special historical note—like the mass exodus from a just-completed football game. With that level of humanity about, closing parts of the city or main squares—while maybe possible—would not be practical or economical.
But The Venetian Affair was made back when quiet streets and dark corners existed. Old world architecture always makes for a good spy movie backdrop. That’s exactly what you get in this adventure about a mind control drug being used to foment conflict between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. Robert Vaughn stars as a former CIA agent who was fired after he married Elke Sommer, who was suspected of being a double agent. Vaughn never found out whether that was true because he and Sommer were torn apart by turbulent events. But when a bomb blows up a Venice political conference and Sommer is thought to be involved, the CIA drags Vaughn back into its clutches to find Sommer, as well as the crucial clue that might explain the bombing.
Vaughn is a cool and composed actor, any movie with Sommer is one we’ll watch, and co-stars Felicia Farr, Luciana Paluzzi, Ed Asner, and the venerable Boris Karloff are all enticements, but we can’t say The Venetian Affair is a scintillating example of a Cold War spy flick. It’s such a fertile sub-genre, one that produced some of the best movies of 1950s through 1970s. Even against the beautiful Venice backdrop it mostly falls flat due to a screenplay that never hits any highs. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch it. Though it lacks highs, it also lack any serious lows. You can spend your time worse ways. Plus—Sommer. What more do you need?
Chinese communists try to whip Americans in the nuclear race.
The Chinese Keyhole, Richard Himmel’s second novel starring his creation Johnny Maguire, finds the ass kicking lawyer immersed in intrigue in Chicago’s Chinatown district, where a mission to deliver a coded message reveals a conspiracy centered in a strip bar. Turns out communists, including a whip wielding psycho, are trying to steal nuclear secrets. Maguire is no longer just a lawyer, but a government agent with his law practice as a front. We don’t remember that from the first book, but maybe we missed it.
As in the debut outing Maguire is a guy who takes what he wants, never really asking permission before laying his lips on a nearby woman, and always, of course, he’s correct in his assumption that he’s sexually desired. Faithful Tina from book one returns to be shabbily treated again, and as before the romantic subplots blossom into full-blown melodrama that would fit perfectly in a Harlequin novel.
We probably don’t need to mention that any mid-century book with Asian characters is going to cross some lines, and Maguire doesn’t defy expectations on that front, nor does he miss an opportunity to disparage homosexuality. If you haven’t read many of these old thrillers you might think that was the norm, but actually it’s rare because gay characters don’t figure in most of the books. When they did, well, the language got baroque, to say the least. Culturally we’ve arrived at a better—though still imperfect—place in time.
Flaws aside, we thought The Chinese Keyhole was better written than Himmel’s first Maguire novel I’ll Find You. Even with this mostly hackneyed commie conspiracy potboiler, he’s intrigued us enough to take another ride with his interesting lawyer/lothario/secret agent, so we’ll read the third book I Have Gloria Kirby and see where that leaves us. The art on this Gold Medal edition is by Barye Phillips and it dates from 1951.
That bimbo has no idea she can't get hair dye here. When her roots grow out we'll see if men still think she's so amazing.
We have other Wade Miller books to read, but we picked up this copy of 1960’s Jungle Heat and moved it to the head of the line because the story is set in Malaya (now Malaysia), and the last book we read that the authors (Bob Wade and Bill Miller writing together under a pseudonym) set in an exotic country was phenomenal. Jungle Heat was originally published in 1954 under the name Dale Wilmer, with this reattributed Pyramid edition coming a bit later, and it finds Miller taking on the unexpected challenge of writing in first person from a woman’s point-of-view. The lead character is Hollywood b-actress Roxy Powell, who is sent to Malaya with a small crew to shoot background footage for an upcoming jungle adventure. Never mind that a communist revolution is brewing. What Hollywood wants, Hollywood gets.
Plantation boss Llewelyn Kirk, under whose roof Roxy and the crew are residing, is one of those characters who’s colonial through-and-through but thinks that because he’s been in Malaya for twenty years he isn’t an invader and knows what’s best for locals. Since the authors agree with this paternalistic sentiment, the narrative is steered—to an almost ludicrous extent—toward Kirk being correct. We won’t get into any of it except to say that, generally, anti-communist fiction from the mid-century era was unavoidably propagandist. In this case the authors are basically correct in their regional political analysis, but gloss over important details and whiff on overarching points. For example, there’s an interesting scene where a Malayan tells Kirk that he’d heard blacks in America are unjustly killed by whites. Kirk assures him it isn’t true. We almost did a spit-take on that one.
Roxy first hates, then by a circuitous path, comes to adore Kirk. She’s initially driven by her need for “respect,” which here doesn’t mean respect as normally understood, but is instead code for sexual desirability. Because Kirk ignores her, she hates him. Therefore she embarks on a campaign to discover his humanity—i.e. his sexual attraction to her. Even if you didn’t know the author, that’s when you might suspect a guy—or two—was in the driver seat. Okay, so if the politics take liberties and the justification for romance is male fantasy in disguise, is the book any good? Well, sure. There’s a nice jungle setting, a fun Hollywood sidebar, a backdrop of war in which enemies circle ever closer, a traitor hiding in the fold, and love blossoming amid chaos. With all that going for it, the book has to be good. But that said, Wade/Miller definitely wrote better.
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 more than 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.
1969—Allende Meteorite Falls in Mexico
The Allende Meteorite, the largest object of its type ever found, falls in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The original stone, traveling at more than ten miles per second and leaving a brilliant streak across the sky, is believed to have been approximately the size of an automobile. But by the time it hit the Earth it had broken into hundreds of fragments.
