We’re back to sleaze digests today with 1951’s They Call Her “Easy” by Gwen Lyons, which is from Ecstasy Novel Magazine with Al Rossi cover art, and posed photos in the interior, as you’ll see below. Lyons tells the story of young Betty Crockett, who leverages her incomparable beauty to make her way from her hometown of Alexandria, Virginia, where she’s a War Department stenographer, to New York City, where she becomes a shoe model, and later to Paris, where she lives on a rich man’s generosity. The rich man sees her more as a daughter, and is actually trying to set her up with his son, who he worries has been hanging with dirty French intellectuals too much and has forgotten family values. The book is light as can be, with only a minor conflict having to do with Betty posing for a few bikini photos only to see her head pasted onto a nude body and sold as a postcard. It costs her her job, but leads to all her later adventures, which struck us as a fair deal. The book was a fair deal too. Only ten dollars for something that may not have been great, but was certainly readable.
Thanks for dropping by. Let me see you to the floor.
Above: a 1954 Australian edition from Star Books for 1953’s excellent smalltown thriller Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams. This uncredited cover isn’t especially wonderful, but we love the scene. Does anyone actually go down a staircase in the story? Well… we wouldn’t want to spoil it, but yeah, someone goes down the stairs and rolls all the way into the living room. But don’t worry. It isn’t the main character. Read more about the book here.
I can't believe the cruel way everyone gossips about me. I didn't invent it. I just perfected it.
You know what they say. If you invent it they will come. We imagine newsstand browsers could barely resist a title as promising as The Girl Who Invented Sex. It was written by Aaron Bell and published by Kozy Books. On the backside you see that Orrie Hitt’s sleazer Nude Doll gets a full advertisement, then, those clever brains at Kozy did the same when Hitt’s book was published, flipping the script, so to speak, with The Girl Who Invented Sex touted on the rear. You see that below. We love this idea. It’s the first time we’ve seen it, but maybe it wasn’t the only time Kozy did it. We’ll keep an eye out. These were published in 1963, and the cover art for both is uncredited.
Somebody call an accountant! That should be the tagline for Robert Dietrich’s (E. Howard Hunt’s) End of a Stripper, second in his series starring Washington, D.C. tax consultant Steve Bentley. In the first book, 1957’s Murder on the Rocks, Hunt made the involvement of an accountant in what turns out to be a criminal enterprise make sense. Here, people just treat him like a cop or private dick. Need someone protected? Call the accountant. Find yourself with a corpse on your hands? Call the accountant. Even the cops treat him like a cop.
In addition to answering poorly the question of how to engineer the participation of a financial manager in deadly intrigue (it happens randomly, by the way), Hunt, considering himself to be a man’s man and working with a character cut from the same cloth, doesn’t hesitate to toss off jarring homophobic comments at pointless moments. Generally that doesn’t occur in vintage fiction because it was considered gauche, but there are exceptions. This is one of them.
And perhaps we’re quibbling, but why did the book have to be titled End of a Stripper? Maybe that wasn’t Hunt’s idea, but it hurt the story because Bentley gets romantically entangled early with the peeler in question Linda Lee (real name Greta Kirsten), but she doesn’t turn up dead until nine chapters into a fifteen chapter novel. Why not avoid giving away that crucial plot point? If she’d been killed a chapter or two in, okay, call it End of a Stripper, no harm done. But it’s hard to care about Bentley’s involvement with Linda/Greta when we know she’s ticketed for oblivion.
Then there are Hunt’s angry digressions. Example: A lovely town to raise a daughter in, I thought as I started the engine. Send her to public school and she gets started with the janitor or a football hero. Put her in private school and she learns perversion from a female gym teacher. Keep her out of school and the corner grocer knocks her off in the back room on a pile of potato sacks. The most you hope for is that she knows about contraceptives and doesn’t grow up a doper. The whole goddam world’s gone crazy.
This sort of thing was absent from Murder on the Rocks. Maybe Hunt was being careful in the first book, but here cut loose with the polemics because he felt he had an established series on his hands. Well, it isn’t established with us. After such a precipitous drop-off from the debut we’re tempted to move on permanently, but we can’t lie and pretend End of a Stripper is poorly written. It’s just ill-conceived and irritating. We’ll give Hunt another shot. We have Steve Bentley’s Calypso Caper. Let’s see how that goes.
She's a lady in the front, and a plumber in the rear.
The Italian publisher Grandi Edizioni Internazionali was a great source of paperback art during its existence, employing talents like Benedetto Caroselli, Mario de Bernardinis, and Enzo Nistri for its covers. This one for Van Reynolds’ 1974 novel Un marito per Marta Roses is probably by Caroselli, but it’s actually unattributed. The translator is Luca Martinego, and as we discussed before, since most of the credited authors on Italian crime paperbacks were pseudonyms, that means the translators were usually the authors writing in Italian. Overseas publishers were convinced that their crime novels needed American-sounding authors to entice buyers, so translator credits were a sneaky way to make sure the real writers were credited. Strange but true. We’ll have more from Grandi Edizioni Internazionali, as always. And as a final note, we’re sure we don’t need to point out that American model/actress Vikki Dougan actually wore dresses like this in public, but in case we do, check here.
Well? Don't just stand there staring. Undo something!
1960’s So Willing is credited to Sheldon Lord and Alan Marshall, but they were pseudonyms used by Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake. According to Block, the two wrote this, their second collaboration as Lord and Marshall, by trading chapters through the mail. They would occasionally try to trip each other up with unexpected plot twists, and we can only imagine it must have been a hell of a lot of fun. They tell the tongue-in-cheek tale of a seventeen-year old upstate New York horndog named Vince who’s so successful with girls he decides for variety to hunt up a virgin. He fails a couple of times, ends up running away to New York City with a nineteen-year old married nymphomaniac (their term, not ours), and eventually hooks up with an heiress. Good sleaze novels are diamonds in the rough. You have to dig through a lot of filth to find one. So Willing is better than average because it’s so obviously a lark, but even with Westlake and Block behind the typewriter it’s no gem. We think erotica is the most challenging of all genres for writers. The cover art on this Midwood edition is nice, but uncredited.
Guess he never heard the old saying about bringing a knife to a gunfight.
In so many instances an author’s first novel is their best, but in 1951’s The Perfect Frame William Ard had not yet fully harnessed the wordcraft that would serve him in composing sparkling crime thrillers like Club 17, Wanted: Danny Fontaine, and When She Was Bad. The seeds are there, but in this debut outing for both him and his franchise character Timothy Dane, he hasn’t yet reached the elevation of subsequent work. The story deals with Dane being hired under false pretenses by a beautiful woman in danger, and leads to a New York City insurance brokerage called Oceanic where things are not quite as they seem. It doesn’t work as well as it could, but as Dane’s origin story it’s probably obligatory. Ard would later become one of the top talents in crime fiction and, later, even westerns.
The breezy Robert McGinnis (so say several online sources) cover art of a femme fatale sexily shedding a commander’s jacket belies the fact that Peter Baker’s 1967 novel Cruise is a deadly serious ensemble drama featuring seriously flawed characters that wear on the nerves from the moment they board. It’s only a rule of thumb that you must create a likeable character or two for your novel, but only the best writers can ignore it and succeed. Lolita, Gone Girl, and American Psycho might be examples. Baker is no Nabokov or Ellis, and when writers of lesser ability break rules of thumb they can break entire books. You won’t quite want the 33,500 ton cruise ship Queen Dee to sink, but you’ll wish a few people tumbled overboard.
Baker is actually a better writer than many. And his characters aren’t accidentally intolerable—there was a plan: Highsmithesque portraiture of upper class discontent and relational disfunction. His most palatable creations are Pamela Westcott and her son Richard, thirty-eight and eighteen respectively, widow and naïf, both seeking something they can’t quite define among more resolute and worldly passengers, on a Mediterranean pleasure voyage from Southampton to Beirut and back. Pamela hooks up with Chief Officer David Welch (who’s so terrible that for pleasure he brutally beats a hippie stowaway), while Richard has, first, a gay flirtation with an American theater student, then a crush on a French beauty named Simone, then a fling with a rich older lady.
Most of the action is aboard ship, but some of it happens in the ports of call—Southampton, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Athens, Izmir, Beirut, Rhodes, Naples—in that order. That would have been a scintillating real-life cruise at the time, but as a piece of fiction, the selfish, mean, and entitled passengers give the book the feel of a seagoing season of The White Lotus sans humor. Yet after a slow and taxing start, a funny thing happens on the way across the Med—the story starts to click, but only in pieces. By the end we were invested in learning how it all would turn out because the characters of Pamela, Richard, and his crush John grew on us.
We’d wager that Cruise is probably too ponderous for most readers. About one third of its omniscient interior musings could have been jettisoned. Patience is often rewarded in fiction. But time is precious. For those not impressed by its story the book may still have value—and that would be as travelogue. It’s enjoyably detailed on that score. If you’ve visited any of Queen Dee‘s stops you’ll be fascinated by Baker’s depiction of them from a lifetime ago. Maybe that isn’t the strongest endorsement for a novel, but it’s something. Baker is a good writer without an innate sense of conciseness, nor an editor cruel enough to do the job for him. But we’re glad to have gone on the trip.
I have nothing left to prove as one of the world's worst women. Maybe I can move up to the men's division.
Again with this book of incredibly mean women? You betcha. Bernard O’Donnell’s The World’s Worst Women had three paperback printings, which has given us three opportunities to riff on it. This one came in 1956 with Lou Marchetti art of someone who almost seems to be pondering whether she wants to continue on her terrible path. Baby, don’t change a thing. Find out what the book is about here and here.
Honey, just go watch tv or something. I really need to get through these quarterly financial reconciliations.
Marriage has its ups and downs, and those downs can range in pulp literature from deadly to downright bizarre. Above and below is a collection of vintage covers reflecting the sometimes unpredictable give and take between fictional spouses. If we wanted to we could make this set two-hundred covers long, if not longer, but today we’ll settle for a mere thirty examples. In addition, we’ve shared a lot of husband/wife covers in the past, so many that we can’t point to them all. But a few of our favorites are here, here, here, and here.
Two squatters find a container of radioactive cesium chloride in an abandoned hospital in Goiânia, Brazil. When the shielding window is opened, the bright blue cesium becomes visible, which lures many people to handle the object. In the end forty-six people are contaminated, resulting in illnesses, amputations, and deaths, including that of a 6-year-old girl whose body is so toxic it is buried in a lead coffin sealed in concrete.
1994—White House Hit by Airplane
Frank Eugene Corder tries to crash a stolen Cessna 150 into the White House, but strikes the lawn before skidding into the building. The incident causes minor damage to the White House, but the plane is totaled and Corder is killed.
1973—Allende Ousted in Chile
With the help of the CIA, General Augusto Pinochet topples democratically elected President Salvador Allende in Chile. Pinochet’s regime serves as a testing ground for Chicago School of Economics radical pro-business policies that later are applied to other countries, including the United States.
2001—New York and Washington D.C. Attacked
The attacks that would become known as 9-11 take place in the United States. Airplane hijackings lead to catastrophic crashes resulting in the collapse of the World Trade Center in New York City, the destruction of a portion of The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and a passenger airliner crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Approximately 36% of Americans doubt the official 9-11 story.
1935—Huey Long Assassinated
Governor of Louisiana Huey Long, one of the few truly leftist politicians in American history, is shot by Carl Austin Weiss in Baton Rouge. Long dies after two days in the hospital.
