vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
We enjoyed an excellent tale not long ago in John and Ward Hawkins’ natural disaster thriller A Man, a River, and a Girl, which was also published as The Floods of Fear by Corgi Books, as you see above. The striking art on this edition is by John Richards. You can read more about the book here.
Above: a cover for Michael Underwood’s 1961 novel Cause of Death, part of a series starring franchise character Detective-Superintendent Simon Manton. Underwood, who was in reality John Michael Evelyn, wrote more than fifty novels during his literary career, with Det. Manton starring in more than a dozen. This cover was painted by Josh Kirby, an interesting artist we don’t encounter often, but who we’ve managed to highlight three times. You can see those here, here, and here. This one would have fit nicely with our collection of covers featuring couples caught in the act of cheating. Check here for that.
This is a lovely cover for The Package, aka The Package Deal, by Willis T. Ballard. It’s a book we talked about and shared a cover for a few years ago. We don’t know which art we like better. Probably the above example. Both illustrations are uncredited, but this one could be by John Richards. His work was appearing on Corgi fronts around this time, 1959 in this case.
On this cover for Lauran Paine’s novel The Farthest Frontier, illustrator Roger Hall depicts how even in the midst of tectonic historical upheavals there are moments of interpersonal drama. Like this knife fight, which started over confusion about whether trade talks were dressy casual, or just casual. 1957 copyright.
Above: a striking cover for Gilbert Miller’s novelization of the 1957 movie The Flesh Is Weak, which is about how a ring of sex traffickers trick naive women into street prostitution. It stars Milly Vitale, and the painting here by John Richards is a very good likeness of her, despite its cartoonish style. We also like the fur. She must have borrowed it from her pimp. To see our other material on this film just click its keywords below and scroll.
Above, an alternate cover for Whit Masterson’s 1956 L.A. mystery Dead, She Was Beautiful. This edition from Corgi Books appeared in 1957, and the art is by Jack M. Faulks, a new name to us. He took an interesting route with this. The art could be depicting the same woman alive and dead (note the blurb: “more dangerous dead than alive”), or it could be depicting two different women of similar appearance. Either works, in terms of the story. Which is to say, yes, a character is shot in the back with an arrow, and yes, that character later turns out to have a twin. Spoiler alert. So you have a cool cover that’s more clever than it seems at first. We’ll keep an eye out for more from Faulks. And let’s all keep an eye out for stray arrows.
The Soviet space probe Luna 3 transmits the first photographs of the far side of the moon. The photos generate great interest, and scientists are surprised to see mountainous terrain, very different from the near side, and only two seas, which the Soviets name Mare Moscovrae (Sea of Moscow) and Mare Desiderii (Sea of Desire).
LSD, which was originally synthesized by a Swiss doctor and was later secretly used by the CIA on military personnel, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and members of the general public in a project code named MKULTRA, is designated a controlled substance in the United States.
A six month strike by Hollywood set decorators becomes a riot at the gates of Warner Brothers Studios when strikers and replacement workers clash. The event helps bring about the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, prohibits unions from contributing to political campaigns and requires union leaders to affirm they are not supporters of the Communist Party.
The Soviet Union launches the satellite Sputnik I, which becomes the first artificial object to orbit the Earth. It orbits for two months and provides valuable information about the density of the upper atmosphere. It also panics the United States into a space race that eventually culminates in the U.S. moon landing.
American blues singer Janis Joplin is found dead on the floor of her motel room in Los Angeles. The cause of death is determined to be an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.
