Pulp International

vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news

REYNOLDS UNWRAP

Part man, part bear, all star.

In 1972, movie icon Burt Reynolds became one of the few male celebrities to pose nude when the above photo was published as a centerfold by Cosmopolitan magazine. The shot was a sensation, the back-then equivalent of a viral internet phenomenon. Everyone wanted to see it, and people who’d never seen it had an opinion about it. We gather that Reynolds eventually became embarrassed by the image, not because of how he looked—because he looks good, if ursine—but because of what he thought it indicated about his ego. The photo has never been forgotten, as evidenced by our cursory image search revealing its presence on at least 1,500 web pages. It appeared during the height of the women’s liberation movement in the U.S., and Cosmo was a leading feminist magazine, so when editors splashed a smiling Burt across its centerspread, they did so with subversive intent. It’s funny how Reynolds always talked about the centerfold like it was a one-off. We guess he forgot all about his 1972 fan letter paperback, below. Maybe he was narcissistic, maybe not, but—along with guys like Fred Williamson and Helmut Berger—he was certainly ahead of his time.

Cosmopolitan, Signet Books, Burt Reynolds

BAREFOOT AMBITION

I can't wait until I can afford a good pair of high heels—then when I walk all over these chumps it'll actually hurt them.

Above is the cover for the 1952 Lion Library paperback edition of Ward Greene’s Cora Potts, which was originally published in 1929 as Cora Potts: A Pilgrim’s Progress. An illiterate country girl robs her father’s store, runs away barefooted to the big city, eventually commits murder, and ends up a respectable, nouveau riche society wife. Greene was saying that the U.S. was a country that rewarded greed and ruthlessness, while respect for the rules was peddled to the lower classes to keep them in line. Some critics found this formulation unpalatable, and many thought the part where Potts burns through $100,000 in one year was just impossible. As that’s only about $1.3 million in today’s money we find their protests bizarre, but in any case Greene had based his character on an actual femme fatale with the amazing name of Kitty Queen.

Catherine Queen, as she had been born, indeed progressed from barefoot Georgia bumpkin to bejeweled society dame. She became public knowledge briefly in 1929 when her dupe of a husband, a prominent banker, was nabbed for embezzlement and the facts of his lavish expenditures on Queen came out at trial. How much had he spent on her in a year? $147,000. And like Cora Potts’ hapless first husband, Queen’s husband still loved her, wrote heartrending letters from prison, and sent her the few meager dollars he still collected via various means. And yet Queen never visited him once, same as Potts never visits her imprisoned spouse. The Manhattan critics who doubted the novel’s verisimilitude knew nothing about Kitty Queen, but Greene had lived and worked in Atlanta and down there her story had been big news.
 
The cover at top is by Mal Singer, and the art from Lion’s 1955 re-issue at right was painted by Robert Maguire. Greene’s book is surprisingly obscure today, but its general message that in a corrupt society vice is virtue resonates more than ever. His genius was also in having a female character behave in a way typically ascribed to successful men, and having her go unpunished for breaking both the rule of law and of gender. Greene touched on similar themes more than once, but also wrote upbeat material. One of those pieces was a short story called, “Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog,” which appeared in Cosmopolitan and became a primary inspiration for one of the most beloved screen romances of all time—the animated feature Lady and the Tramp.
 
And just to dig as deeply into this subject as we can, there is some confusion online about when Greene wrote that dog story. Nearly every website says 1943, but then again nearly every website copies from other websites. A couple of sources say the story is from 1924, while a French page says 1937. We don’t know when he wrote it, but we’re inclined to believe the 1924 date. Greene was already in his mid-thirties by then, and had been writing for Cosmo since at least 1923, publishing a piece on F. Scott Fitzgerald that year. We think Walt Disney probably read the Happy Dan story in 1943 in an old Cosmo, and at that point contacted the now respected literary figure Greene about buying the property and adapting it. But we don’t know for sure. Someone in the real world of actual libraries with actual paper info will have to sort this one out.

Atlanta, Walt Disney Productions, Lion Books, Cosmopolitan, Lady and the Tramp, Ward Greene, Robert Maguire, Walt Disney, cover art, literature, cinema

BERMUDA TRIANGLE

Coconut rum, ma'am? But I only brought two straws, so I'm afraid your husband will have to bugger off.


John P. Marquand won a 1938 Pulitzer Prize for The Late George Apley, so the above effort may seem a bit lightweight for him, but Marquand started out in genre fiction before becoming a leading literary figure. In his prime he specialized in satire of the upper classes, and Sun, Sea and Sand follows in that tradition, telling the tale of Epsom Felch, a problematic member of the snobbish Mulligatawny Club, which is located in the Bahamas. Epsom is a bit of a prankster, and the stuffy club membership are increasingly fed up with him, even though—as his main defender Spike constantly points out—pretty much every fun or memorable event that ever took place at the club was Epsom’s doing. Everything comes to a head at the annual Pirate Night ball.

We really like Marquand. Always have. He’s a funny and subtle writer, at least in his literary guise, and here you get that classic sense of the upper class cutting off its nose to spite its face, as club members conspire to boot a non-conformist though he’s the only person bringing adventure and joy into their circle. Sun, Sea and Sand is novella length, and indeed its entirety first appeared in the May 1950 issue of Cosmopolitan, at right. The compact paperback edition, which is really little more than a pamphlet, comes from Dell, and the amusing cover art is by S.B. Jones. 

Bahamas, Dell Publications, Cosmopolitan, Pulitzer Prize, John P. Marquand, S.B. Jones, cover art, literature

TOUCHY SITUATION

But I've been super tense, and my masseur—his name is Pablo, by the way—he offered to make a house call, and…

Above is a Victor Kalin cover for the John D. MacDonald thriller Soft Touch, a book that originally appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine as Taint of the Tiger in March 1958, back when Cosmo used to print abridged novels.

It’s the story of a man whose old war buddy approaches him with an offer to commit a seven-figure heist. The idea is to rob a courier of cash he’s shuttling from Latin America. The lead character is willing to do the job because his work sucks, he misses military action, and his wife is a cheating lush. Basically, he sees the crime as a way out, but of course he actually ends up getting way in—everything goes wrong.

Taint of the Tiger was published in hardback as Soft Touch shortly after its Cosmo debut, and appeared in August the same year as a Dell paperback edition, above, with Kalin’s art. This is MacDonald before he invented Travis McGee, which, as we’ve mentioned before, is where we—and consensus concurs—he did his best work. This one isn’t perfect, but it’s well worth a read.

Dell Publications, Cosmopolitan, John D. MacDonald, Victor Kalin, cover art, literature

INVITATION DECLINED

No, seriously. I said come and get me. Don't just stand there. Or... did I interrupt something?


Above is a cover for Johnny Laredo’s Come and Get Me, copyright 1956 from Popular Library. Think Laredo is a pseudonym? You think correctly. The publishers make a big deal out of keeping his real identity secret, writing a blurb inside the book calling Laredo, “the pseudonym of a young fiction writer whose stories have appeared in Argosy, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Cosmopolitan, and Bluebook.” Why an extensively published author wanted no credit for this book is a mystery, but the gig is up—he was Gene Caesar, a writer who had an affinity for westerns, but here crafted a crime drama about a man bent on avenging the murder of his girlfriend. The art, which we love because it can be interpreted a couple of ways, is by Raymond Johnson. 

Popular Library, Argosy, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Cosmopolitan, Bluebook, Johnny Laredo, Gene Caesar, cover art, literature
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1916—Richard Harding Davis Dies

American journalist, playwright, and author Richard Harding Davis dies of a heart attack at home in Philadelphia. Not widely known now, Davis was one of the most important and influential war correspondents ever, establishing his reputation by reporting on the Spanish-American War, the Second Boer War, and World War I, as well as his general travels to exotic lands.

1919—Zapata Is Killed

In Mexico, revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata is shot dead by government forces in the state of Morelos, after a carefully planned ambush. Following the killing, Zapata’s revolutionary movement and his Liberation Army of the South slowly fall apart, but his political influence lasts in Mexico to the present day.

1925—Great Gatsby Is Published

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is published in New York City by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Though Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s best known book today, it was not a success upon publication, and at the time of his death in 1940, Fitzgerald was mostly forgotten as a writer and considered himself to be a failure.

1968—Martin Luther King Buried

American clergyman and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., is buried five days after being shot dead on a Memphis, Tennessee motel balcony. April 7th had been declared a national day of mourning by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and King’s funeral on the 9th is attended by thousands of supporters, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

1953—Jomo Kenyatta Convicted

In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta is sentenced to seven years in prison by the nation’s British rulers for being a member of the Mau Mau Society, an anti-colonial movement. Kenyatta would a decade later become independent Kenya’s first prime minister, and still later its first president.

1974—Hank Aaron Becomes Home Run King

Major League Baseball player Hank Aaron hits his 715th career home run, surpassing Babe Ruth’s 39-year-old record. The record-breaking homer is hit off Al Downing of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and with that swing Aaron puts an exclamation mark on a twenty-four year journey that had begun with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro League, and would end with his selection to Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame.

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BRAZIL UNDERGROUND

Edições de Ouro and Editora Tecnoprint published U.S. crime novels for the Brazilian market, with excellent reworked cover art to appeal to local sensibilities. We have a small collection worth seeing.

FLUENT IN VIOLENCE

Walter Popp cover art for Richard Powell's 1954 crime novel Say It with Bullets.

IN HOT WATER

There have been some serious injuries on pulp covers. This one is probably the most severe—at least in our imagination. It was painted for Stanley Morton's 1952 novel Yankee Trader.

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