Vintage Pulp

November 27 2025

A BLOCK TO THEIR SYSTEM

Every plan is perfect until it comes in contact with the opposition.

Hillary Waugh wrote the procedural crime thriller Road Block in 1960. This Popular Library edition came in 1965 with great cover work by an unattributed artist, and a cool rear logo for the Crime Club collection. Doubleday & Company launched Crime Club in 1928 and it ran until 1991, at least part of the time in collaboration with Popular Library it seems, and more than 2,400 books ended up in the grouping. Along the way there were some spectacular covers, particularly during the ’60s, such as today’s. We’ll be seeing more from Crime Club in a bit.

In Road Block robbers steal the payroll of the Grafton Tool and Die Company in fictional Stockford, Connecticut, but the job doesn’t go perfectly, leading to the deaths of one robber and two security guards. Later the job’s inside man, also a security guard, is disposed of by the gang, leaving three men being hunted by police chief Fred Fellows (star of a series of novels). The search is centered around real Connecticut towns such as Danbury, Newtown, and Sandy Hook, the latter of which was the site of a 2012 shooting massacre of twenty children and six adults at an elementary school.

Waugh is a good writer and conceptualist. After a couple of chapters setting the scene his story flows frictionlessly from the robbery, to the police response, to a climax in which a femme fatale named Lela Trojan plays a pivotal role. We’ve read three Waughs now, and it seems safe to presume that anything he wrote will be good. Popular Library thought so too—the company offered a money back guarantee to anyone dissatisfied by the book. We doubt many readers took them up on the offer. Road Block is a necessary vintage crime novel.

Connecticut, Newtown, Danbury, Sandy Hook, Doubleday & Company, Popular Library, Hillary Waugh, cover art, literature

Intl. Notebook

March 17 2025

FATHER TIMELESS

Robert McGinnis dies at age ninety-nine.

We don’t know exactly when we became aware that Robert McGinnis had died, but it was sometime during our long trip to Mexico. Someone e-mailed us about it. We’ve mentioned numerous times that we don’t like Pulp Intl. to be a death roll, and we never interrupt our intermissions, but some deaths are more significant than others. Yet we couldn’t make time to write about McGinnis because we were away from our primary computers and art files, and because immediately after Mexico PSGP had two subdural hematomas drained from his brain. Wait! What? Did we hold back details about the trip? Perhaps, but it doesn’t matter because he’s fine now.

In any case, we’re backposting about McGinnis. We’ve placed a small collection here—though we actually did it around a month after the event—so that the many thousands of visitors who come here will find a tribute near the actual day he died. Most vintage cover art aficionados will say McGinnis was the very best. That’s a matter of taste. But there’s no dispute he was indispensable, and his work will always be a reminder of what is lost when art is sidelined in favor of capital. Modern paperback publishers cannot make the anonymous cover designs they produce ever have the impact of a McGinnis, or rationally view them as significant by comparison.

McGinnis is credited with more than twelve hundred book covers and forty or so movie posters. You’ve seen much of his best work on Pulp Intl: his posters for Live and Let Die and Cotton Comes to Harlem, a spectrum of art for Casino Royale, awesome paperback covers for The Girl Who Cried Wolf, If the Shoe Fits, and Death Deep Down, mock-up covers for modern movies, and rare sketches sold at auction. He was even the subject of a documentary. Today we’re looking at his original paintings, clean, with no graphics. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1926, dead in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, today. The man will be missed.

Ohio, Connecticut, Cincinnati, Old Greenwich, Live and Let Die, Casino Royale, Cotton Comes to Harlem, Robert McGinnis, Sean Connery, James Bond, deaths

Vintage Pulp

January 26 2020

ENNUI, MYSELF, AND I

Loyal wife learns that there's nothing like a really good sidepiece.

This cover for Dominique Napier’s 1961 novel House Party, a striking piece of art, was painted by Edward Moritz. We think the woman depicted looks a ~~little like~~ exactly like Diana Dors. The main character Betsy is actually a brunette, but this may be one of those paintings that was made independently of the book. Said book is a pretty well written sexual awakening tale about a woman whose husband doesn’t ring her bell, and who blames herself. But during a weekend mansion party on the tony Connecticut seashore a longtime crush makes her ladyparts tingle, and she realizes she’s not as cold as she thought. She has misgivings about cheating, of course, but for various reasons the idea of getting a piece of side action starts to sound good. Napier’s aspirations are F. Scott Fiztgerald-ish, but the literary heft is lacking. If the erotic amperage had been doubled or tripled we think it would have been a much better book, but still, it was reasonably fun.

Edit: Correction, this looks a lot like Diana Dors. Check the second photo here. Moritz made his painting’s nose thinner, but it’s undoubtedly Dors. We had the photo in our website all along, but forgot. That’s what happens when you have many thousands of posts.

Connecticut, Beacon Signal, Dominique Napier, Edward Moritz, cover art, literature

Hollywoodland

February 21 2017

PURE DYNAMITE

New tabloid explodes onto the gossip scene.

When we describe Dynamite as a new tabloid, it’s only partly true. It was a new imprint. But its publisher, the Modern Living Council of Connecticut, Inc., was headquartered at the Charlton Building in Derby, Connecticut, which is where Top Secret and Hush-Hush based operations. When you see that Dynamite carried the same cover font as Top Secret and Hush-Hush, and that those two magazines advertised in Dynamite, it seems clear that all three had the same provenance. But unlike Top Secret and Hush-Hush, it doesn’t seem as if Dynamite lasted long. The issue above, which appeared this month in 1956, is the second. We are unable to confirm whether there was a third. But if Dynamite was short-lived it wasn’t because of any deficiencies in the publication. It’s identical in style to other tabloids, and its stories are equally interesting.

One of those deals with Henry von Thyssen, the Dutch born, German descended heir to an industrial fortune, and his wife, Nina Dyer, heiress to a tea plantation in Sri Lanka, back then called Ceylon. The von Thyssen family manufactured steel in Germany, including for Hitler’s Third Reich, and came out of World War II unscathed, as big companies that profit from war always do. Dyer was a dilettante famed for making bikinis popular on the French Riveria. According to Dynamite, von Thyssen was so desperate to marry Dyer that he allowed her to keep her boyfriend, the French actor Christian Marquand. Society gossips whispered,

but both spouses were fine with the set-up until von Thyssen accidentally ran into Dyer and Marquand in Carrol’s nightclub in Paris and was forced to save face by starting a fight. The couple soon divorced, but not because of infidelity, as many accounts claim. What finally broke the couple up was that Dyer dropped Marquand. Dynamite tells readers: “[von Thyssen] has ditched his sloe-eyed Baroness because now she’s decided she loves him.”

Interesting, but there are many similar stories about open high society marriages. What interested us, really, was the portrayal of Dyer. Apparently she had at some point been strongly influenced by Asian women. Her husband described her as “soft and feminine and oriental looking.” Dynamite painted this word picture: “She walks as though she has a water pot balanced on her head, her dark, slanting eyes are inscrutable, and her movements are so languorous and cat-like that von Thyssen gave her a baby panther as a companion.” Dyer eventually had two panthers, and was often seen walking them on the Croisette in Cannes. After her marriage to von Thyssen ended she quickly married Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, but that marriage ended in divorce. Over the years she had been given many gifts. Besides the panthers there were cars, jewels, and a Caribbean island. But the one thing money never bought for her was happiness. She committed suicide at age thirty-five.

There’s a lot more to learn about Nina Dyer—her modeling career, her adventures in the south of France, her free-spirited ways in the Caribbean, her 1962 E-Type Jaguar Roadster that was found in Jamaica in 2015 and restored for a November 2016 auction, and more. So we’ll be getting back to her a little later. We still have about fifty tabloids from the mid-1950s and we’re betting she appears in more than a few. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Dynamite is a story tracking Marilyn Monroe’s movements around Fire Island during a summer 1955 vacation, a report about Frank Sinatra being barred from the Milroy Club in London, an exposé on prostitution in Rome, a breakdown of the breakdown of Gene Tierney’s engagement to Aly Khan (Sadruddin Aga Khan’s brother), and a couple of beautiful photos of Diana Dors. We have about thirty scans below for your enjoyment. Odds are we’ll never find another issue of Dynamite, but we’re happy to own even one. It’s great reading.

Vintage Pulp

February 17 2016

YOUR PLACE OR MINE

I know, but we're not going upriver. We're going to my shack down by the industrial canal. Should do us just fine.

Brian Harwin’s novel Home Is Upriver appeared in 1952, with this Signet paperback arriving in 1955, and concerns the coming of age along the Mississippi River of the orphaned Kip, who finds a home with married couple Buck and Martha, but promptly screws it up by deciding to screw their daughter Storm. The book may be better known these days by its 1959 title Touch Me Not. Brian Harwin was a pen name for author Le Grand Henderson. We know. Why would you change your name from Le Grand Henderson, when that’s as writerly a name as can be, whereas Brian Harwin sounds like a guy from high school who ran a hardware store for a few years then you heard he maybe moved back east? Well, it turns out Henderson actually did make use of his amazing name. He published children’s books as simply Le Grand, and many of those too take place along the Mississippi River. He was actually born in Connecticut, but his love of the Mississippi blossomed after he undertook a yearlong houseboat journey from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. This would have been during the Great Depression and we can only imagine that the adventure was le grand. Home Is Upriver was the only book he wrote as Harwin. If you want to see its Touch Me Not incarnation, which has excellent Robert Maguire art, we suggest looking at our collection of swamp, bayou, and river paperbacks here.

Signet Books, Minnesota, Connecticut, Le Grand Henderson, Le Grand, Brian Harwin, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

September 30 2015

BOILED HOT DOG

You know, you’re really quite a lovely little… GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!

Above: we see the instant before the main character on the cover of Yankee Trader realizes boiling water has been poured atop his wiener. Okay, that’s not what really happens, though he would deserve it. The story is set in colonial Connecticut and Africa, and he’s a slave trader and all around scoundrel who will stop at nothing to get rich. We checked a review from 1947, when the book was originally published, and critic W.E. Hall admitted that, yes, it’s true early American colonists were guilty of “misdemeanors” against Africans. Misdemeanors? Slavery, murder, and rape? Oh, what a lovely dream world where these are mere lapses of decorum. Maybe it’s Hall who needed to have his wiener parboiled. 1952 on this Pyramid paperback, with uncredited art.

Connecticut, Pyramid Books, Stanley Morton, W.E. Hall, cover art, literature

Intl. Notebook

December 30 2011

FACTS OF LIFE

Sometimes it seems Life is such a fragile thing.

Paris Life, of which you see a cover above, was a quarterly magazine published not in France, but in Derby, Connecticut, yet which nonetheless purported to give readers the scoop on Parisian nightlife. Connecticut is not exactly the nerve center of international reporting, but the magazine seems to have had someone working for them across the pond, because there are scores of photos—far too many to be simple handouts. Probably the Connecticut base was only in name—for tax reasons—and the actual mag was headquartered in NYC. But that’s only a guess.

Anyway, the cover star here is French-Canadian actress/model/singer Simone Auger, the centerfold is German dancer Dorothea Schneider, aka Dodo, and besides those two you get all kinds of showgirl photos, printed poorly on cheap paper, which is why our scans are a bit rough. We’re certain there’s a way to avoid those Moiré patterns you’ll see on the images, but whatever that method is, we aren’t going to explore it on on a Friday, when a bottle of fine red wine is breathing in the other room. Maybe we’ll re-scan this one down the line, though that may prove difficult, considering the magazine partially disintegrated as we handled it. Just for the sake of preserving as much of this pile of brittle paper as we could, we made twenty-five scans instead of the usual five or six.

France, Canada, Germany, Connecticut, Paris, Paris Life, Simone Auger, Dorothea Schneider, burlesque

Hollywoodland

February 1 2010

RIP OFF HIS ROCKER

Does this look like a guy who’s responsible for his actions?

Actor Rip Torn, best known for his role as Zed in the sci-fi blockbuster Men in Black, was found Friday inside Lichfield Bancorp, a Connecticut bank, drunk and carrying a loaded handgun. Police arrested the 78-year-old and charged him with first-degree burglary, third-degree criminal mischief, carrying a firearm while intoxicated, first-degree trespassing, and possession of a firearm without a permit. Quite a laundry list. The mug shot here is actually from a previous arrest, but we’ll just assume he looked more or less the same Friday. Anyway, we laid out the rules for American justice in yesterday’s post—the richest person or entity wins. Torn is, one would assume, reasonably well off, which means he’d walk from this crime if he broke into, say, your house. But since he broke into a bank, he’s basically screwed. His only chance is to blame it on alcohol. That’s a lot like shooting someone, then rubbing the gun’s nose in the victim’s blood and screaming, “Bad weapon!” But for some reason, it seems to work for celebs.

Connecticut, Men in Black, Rip Torn, robbery, mugshots

Mondo Bizarro

December 11 2009

MAKER’S MARK

Moses the calf is either a sign from God or proof of evolution.

A calf was born this yuletide season—but not just any calf. This one has a cross on its head. It was born in Connecticut on the farm of Brad Davis and Megan Johnson. At first, the newborn’s cruciform marking was obscured because his mother Fuzzy had rearranged it by licking the fur on his head. But when the calf dried, his owners beheld the cross and they were amazed. “It was really quite a sight,” Davis told his local newspaper. “The first night that he was here, when we shut the lights out late at night, the only thing you could see in here was that cross showing in the dark. It was really quite a feeling. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, actually.” Co-owner Johnson says Moses will never see the inside of a slaughterhouse. “We’re going to make sure he gets a good life and doesn’t get eaten,” she promised.

Over on the opposite side of the cultural chasm, an evolutionary scientist would suggest that Moses is not a sign from God but rather a textbook example of natural selection. Because of a pattern that randomly appeared on the calf’s head, he gets to live to a ripe old age rather than end up as a Big Kahuna Burger, which means the likelihood he’ll one day sire an offspring with a cross on its head is fractionally higher. Each time a similar pattern appears, there’s a chance that cow will likewise be spared the abbatoir and will in turn reproduce, which means, given thousands of years, an entire species of untouchable cows might be roaming the American landscape with crosses on their heads. So is Moses an example of divine intervention or Darwinian science? Let the debate begin.

Connecticut

Intl. Notebook

July 6 2009

CINDER THE CLOWNS

The day the laughter died.

Above: photos of a fire that engulfed the world’s largest bigtop at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut, today in 1944. One hundred and sixty-eight people were killed, but amazingly, no animals.

Connecticut, Hartford, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

January 18

1967—Boston Strangler Convicted

Albert DeSalvo, the serial killer who became known as the Boston Strangler, is convicted of murder and other crimes and sentenced to life in prison. He serves initially in Bridgewater State Hospital, but he escapes and is recaptured. Afterward he is transferred to federal prison where six years later he is killed by an inmate or inmates unknown.

January 17

1950—The Great Brinks Robbery Occurs

In the U.S., eleven thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car company’s offices in Boston, Massachusetts. The skillful execution of the crime, with only a bare minimum of clues left at the scene, results in the robbery being billed as “the crime of the century.” Despite this, all the members of the gang are later arrested.

January 17

1977—Gary Gilmore Is Executed

Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by a firing squad in Utah, ending a ten-year moratorium on Capital punishment in the United States. Gilmore’s story is later turned into a 1979 novel entitled The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and the book wins the Pulitzer Prize for literature.

January 16

1942—Carole Lombard Dies in Plane Crash

American actress Carole Lombard, who was the highest paid star in Hollywood during the late 1930s, dies in the crash of TWA Flight 3, on which she was flying from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after headlining a war bond rally in support of America’s military efforts. She was thirty-three years old.

January 15

1919—Luxemburg and Liebknecht Are Killed

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps. Freikorps was a term applied to various paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. Members of these groups would later become prominent members of the SS.

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.

WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT