The cover of Ray Damon’s 1961 novel Sinful Wife is dynamic, but uncredited. We suspect it’s culled, like yesterday’s cover, from another piece, particularly because nothing like this pistol-whipping moment occurs in the book. There isn’t even a gun in the tale. But we can’t track down any clarifying info, so uncredited this artist shall remain. The novel is a Double Indemnity scenario in which a door-to-door salesman gets involved with a supposedly lonely wife, and is enticed to knock off her husband—literally, with a hammer. Damon brings nothing innovative to the concept but writes competently, and we liked that the main character Joe Lang is an inexperienced guy who’s never been loved, or even properly laid. He knows he’s risking the death chair but feels that his life without femme fatale Stella Norwood would be worse than dying. The moron. There’s minimalist characterization within a constrained narrative, and it works. The book is an improvement over Damon’s 1959 novel Broadway Bait, so it’s also a nice example of authorial growth. We’d read him again if we came across another book on sale cheap. That’s a sound endorsement.
Above: an unknown artist’s work fronts 1960’s Vampier of Vlinder by Conald Lueger, from Antwerp based Uitgeverij A.B.C., part of its Faun collection. Many of the company’s covers were borrowed wholly or in part from U.S. paperbacks, but if so in this case, we don’t know which book it was. Lueger, or Leüger, as he’s sometimes credited, authored numerous mysteries for Dutch and Belgian publishers, but little seems to be known about him. You can see a bit more of his output by clicking his keywords below.
We meant to get back David Markson’s private dick Harry Fannin sooner than today, but you know how it goes. We finally read this 1961 Dell edition of Epitaph for a Dead Beat with Robert McGinnis cover art, in which Markson brings back the former college halfback turned private detective from 1959’s Epitaph for a Tramp. This time Fannin becomes involved in what seems to be a case of family members successively knocked off for a $13 million inheritance. He descends into New York City’s beat counterculture of writers, poets, and general seekers of thrills and enlightenment.
As we noted before, Markson goes full bore on hard-boiled metaphorical language. Sometimes he hits the mark so perfectly you marvel:
You could have buried bones in the dirt under her fingernails.
She gave me a smile that could have paid the rent for a year.
He’d evaporated like Marley’s ghost.
Then there are the misses:
The elevator made as much noise coming down as a wounded moth.
These swings and misses are simply part of the Markson package. He compensates by bringing unique elements to the private eye milieu, among them centering his story in the real world by utilizing pop culture references, name dropping everyone from jazzist Miles Davis to baseballers Ducky Medwick and Stan Musial. Meanwhile the mystery Fannin is unraveling drops him hard a couple of times, the sweet beat thing he’s saved from a nasty situation in the first pages keeps popping up for reasons he learns later, and he eventually finds that the same base motives drive the Greenwich Village hipsters as drive the hated squares uptown.
We liked the first half of Epitaph for a Dead Beat quite a bit, but the vocal quips and internal banter, as well as Fannin’s superior attitude, wear a little thin as the pages pile up. We think Epitaph for a Tramp is a little better, though for a different take on the private eye genre either book has the potential to entertain. But considering the cool ingredients and Markson’s superior writing skill—later demonstrated with forays into acclaimed experimental fiction—both books could have been classics, either acknowledged or overlooked. Neither reaches that level, but still, they’re better than most.
Since you started as my secretary you've learned to handle booze so well it doesn't even affect you anymore. You're fired.
Here’s yet another entry in our ever expanding collection of office titles—Coast to Coast by Walter Ross. This one isn’t a sleaze novel, but the cover illustration makes it look that way. We couldn’t figure out who painted it at first, but then we saw a signature under the “electricity” in the blurb. It says “Meese,” as in James Meese. Feel free to compare the signature here or here.
Trust me, these outfits will pay off. A lot of men are just looking for young, pretty versions of their moms.
Prostitution was an obsession with mid-century publishers and moviemakers. We keyword for it on Pulp Intl., and if you click that link you’ll be directed to interminable diversion. This low-rent cover for Jan Bennett’s sleazer Night Women adds to the always growing subject. It came from Magenta Books in 1965, with art by an unknown. A few of our favorite prostie paperback covers are (yes, we’re going to link yet again to both Avenue of Pimps and Street of Ho’s) here, here, and here.
They don’t write ’em like this anymore. Peter Viertel’s White Hunter, Black Heart was originally published in 1953, with this Panther edition coming in 1960, fronted by uncredited cover art. The book is a tale of Hollywood filmmaking, African big game hunting, and personal conflict.
Viertel writes in first person about a central character named John Wilson, who is a thinly disguised stand-in for real life director John Huston. Viertel and Huston had met in the film industry and been friends for years, but during the making of the classic Humphrey Bogart/Katherine Hepburn adventure The African Queen their friendship disintegrated. The book describes the way and how of that split, but also discusses Viertel’s longstanding reservations about someone he called a friend. He describes his Wilson invention this way:
Things that happened to me always simmered down and became mild little adventures, hardly worth remembering. Things that happened to Wilson exploded. [snip] Some of my friends … ascribed his wild, troubled life directly to his personal mania for destruction and disaster, but these generalizations always seemed inaccurate to me, for although he certainly contributed to the trouble that always sprang up around him, I cannot believe that he caused it all. Violent, irresponsible personalities seem to attract similar personalities and very often it is hard to put your finger on who is cause and who is effect.
Sounds like someone we know very well. Such a person can be a challenge to know, even more so to call a friend, but you get something in return, which is adventures normal people can’t dream of. It’s here that we’d like to go into one or two of our many unbelievable Guatemala stories, but we’ll spare you this time. Our point is that Viertel comes across as a bit of a killjoy. Huston was older than him by fourteen years, so an equal relationship was probably never in the cards. Viertel sounds reasonable in his criticisms, but also just a smidge jealous:
There have been a great many imitations of his style of living. Actors, writers, and even producers have occasionally tried what he did day in and day out and they have all ended badly: in jail or in hock or as recipients of the Motion Picture Relief Fund. Perhaps they lacked his talent, but I don’t think that is it. I think they lacked the magic, almost divine ability he had to land on his feet.
Huston didn’t address White Hunter, Black Heart directly (the Clint Eastwood film adaptation came out after he died), but in his 1980 tell-all An Open Book he mentions an unnamed biography and calls it largely untrue. Huston was one of the first Hollywood figures we ever admired, so we’re predisposed to believe him over Viertel. But it doesn’t matter. Few of these wild stories and bitter recriminations are ever sorted out to the extent that the facts are definitively known. In the end, White Hunter, Black Heart is an excellent book, and its lesson may be this: never piss off a writer.
I tell my friends you're a gentle soul inside, but they keep judging you by the terrible things you do on the outside.
Above: a cover painted by Ray Pease for Lucy Herndon Crockett’s 1954 novel The Magnificent Bastards, a war drama set in New Caledonia, dealing largely with a war widow’s hook-up with a colonel who degrades and mistreats her. It was well reviewed. David Dempsey of the New York Times wrote: I know of no novel to come out of the war that so honestly illuminates the relationship between men in combat and the women who are sent out to bolster their morale. This is a tragedy for which Red Cross coffee and doughnuts are no balm. Miss Crockett has caught its essence with honesty and compassion. Crockett was a Red Cross veteran, so when it came to war and human relations she knew what she was writing about. War novels are the least enticing type of books out there for us, so we won’t be reading this, but it sounds interesting.
Geoffrey Household takes readers to the farthest frontiers of fear.
As we’ve said before, we rarely read reviews before buying books (as if you couldn’t tell from some of the lemons we pick up) because we think they usually give away too many plot points. But we do sometimes unavoidably run across them. We saw a review of Geoffrey Household’s 1964 novel Arabesque that was so rapturous we took to the auction sites. How could we not read this guy? We found a pair of Households, of which we considered The Adversary the throw-in, the one you must buy to get the other. We placed him in line behind books we already planned to read, and later when his turn came mistakenly thought it was The Adversary we were eagerly anticipating instead of Arabesque. The eye-catching cover art you see above (uncredited) probably had something to do with the error. So into The Adversary we plunged, and if Arabesque is a better book we’ll be surprised.
Originally published in 1968 under the poor title Dance of the Dwarfs, with this retitled edition from Dell coming in 1970, The Adversary is basically a game hunting novel, but a step above. It’s told in epistolary form, fronted by a prologue telling readers that the author protagonist, field agronomist Dr. Owen Dawnay, was found dead in his compound in the desolate Colombian jungle, murdered by communist guerrillas. As a prologue it’s Lovecraftian in spirit. Then we get to read Dawnay’s diary, which tells about local legends of frightening forest dwarves glimpsed dancing in the darkness by farmers and Indians. Nobody has ever investigated—the common wisdom is to lock one’s doors and windows at night. Dawnay takes an interest, and during numerous increasingly dangerous excursions on horseback and foot into the jungle, learns what’s behind the legend.
Colombia had been an independent country since the early 1800s, so while Household’s tale has the feel of colonialist fiction, it has few of the key aspects, particularly the misplaced assumption of ownership over others’ lands. Dawnay is a foreigner, never truly to belong, and understands that. With his scientific mind, he’s a potential upsetter of local ways, but in other areas embraces them. He takes on a young female companion, Chucha, and their relationship, both sexual and intellectual, grows important in the narrative. John Donne wrote that no man is an island. Household gives you this beautiful gem: What islands we are! I doubt if any woman understands the deep loneliness to which men condemn themselves. They think it a moroseness and that our silence in some way disparages them as inferior creatures. We are merely away. The business of the island is briskly proceeding, but all around it is sea and no boat. Women cannot ever accept that there is no boat.
The book’s rear cover blurbs use phrases like “almost painful to read,” and “ultimate horror.” We would say instead that The Adversary is highly suspenseful and relentlessly builds a sense of encroaching danger. Often in horror novels dread derives from something that’s first unknown or formless, then as the shape of the threat becomes understood, the dread tends to diminish. The best authors are able to compensate. In Household’s hands, the question of what brought about Dawnay’s end—guerrillas or some other thing—seems solved when the identity of the dwarves becomes known. The dread dips for a bit, but returns strongly when we see that solutions may actually be impossible. It doesn’t truly qualify as a horror novel, in our view, but it’s very nice work (made into a terrible 1983 movie starring Peter Fonda and Deborah Raffin). Now on to Arabesque.
The first rule of Junior Swap Club is: You do not talk about Junior Swap Club.
This cover is by Robert Bonfils for pseudonymous author Wysteria Lee’s Junior Swap Club, published by prolific sleaze imprint Greenleaf Classics in 1970. Thank you, Tyler Durden, for reminding us of the first rule of Junior Swap Club. Let’s also go through rules two to five.
Second rule of Junior Swap Club is: you do NOT TALK ABOUT JUNIOR SWAP CLUB. (For emphasis, he repeats rule one).
Third rule of Junior Swap Club is: someone yells stop, goes limp, taps out, the swap is over.
Fourth rule: Only two guys to a swap.
Fifth rule: One swap at a time, fellas.
We have a feeling those last two will tend to be violated from time to time. After all, swappers are an unruly bunch.
If this dress doesn't get me a ride I might as well start walking.
Above is a beautiful but uncredited cover for David Wade’s, aka Norman A. Daniels’, 1952 novel She Walks by Night. We can round up the usual suspects trying to guess who painted it—digest specialists Howell Dodd, Rudy Nappi, George Gross, et al—but we can prove nothing. It was probably painted by Dodd or Nappi, but that’s just our opinion. Other vintage book diggers have had years to ponder the question. If they don’t know who produced this piece, we can’t help. The art is surely a reason the book can be expensive, but luckily we didn’t pay much for it—which is good because we’ve found Daniels’ prose to be mediocre and didn’t want to go overboard.
Usually digest novels are in the categories of romance and erotica, but Daniels published murder mysteries in this format. She Walks by Night is about a drugstore pharmacist named Bill Webster whose ex-wife Elinor turns up slain and dumped in a river. Webster gives the cops a hard time about finding the killer, and when dissatisfied with their response sets out to do it himself. He learns that after a bad second marriage and a run of bad luck his ex became a prostitute. He zeroes in on the family of her second husband, and a sweltering hothouse meeting with their corrupt patriarch that’s lifted whole from The Big Sleep cements his suspicions. But is he right?
Daniels is no wizard of mystery construction. Webster handles the few suspects bull-in-china-shop style and narrows them down to the person who was the most obvious malefactor all along. We’re stopping with Daniels. Time and money are too precious to keep giving mediocre writers chances. But the cover art makes She Walks by Night a worthy library addition anyway. Sometimes digests have photo art in which models act out moments from the narrative. Here all you get is an ad page for Val Munroe’s Carnival of Passion, which happens to be one of the better ’50s digest novels we’ve read. Our advice: buy that one instead of this one.
The Blaine Act, a congressional bill sponsored by Wisconsin senator John J. Blaine, is passed by the U.S. Senate and officially repeals the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution, aka the Volstead Act, aka Prohibition. The repeal is formally adopted as the 21st Amendment to the Constitution on December 5, 1933.
1947—Voice of America Begins Broadcasting into U.S.S.R.
The state radio channel known as Voice of America and controlled by the U.S. State Department, begins broadcasting into the Soviet Union in Russian with the intent of countering Soviet radio programming directed against American leaders and policies. The Soviet Union responds by initiating electronic jamming of VOA broadcasts.
1937—Carothers Patents Nylon
Wallace H. Carothers, an American chemist, inventor and the leader of organic chemistry at DuPont Corporation, receives a patent for a silk substitute fabric called nylon. Carothers was a depressive who for years carried a cyanide capsule on a watch chain in case he wanted to commit suicide, but his genius helped produce other polymers such as neoprene and polyester. He eventually did take cyanide—not in pill form, but dissolved in lemon juice—resulting in his death in late 1937.
In Miami, Florida, Giuseppe Zangara attempts to shoot President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, but is restrained by a crowd and, in the course of firing five wild shots, hits five people, including Chicago, Illinois Mayor Anton J. Cermak, who dies of his wounds three weeks later. Zangara is quickly tried and sentenced to eighty years in jail for attempted murder, but is later convicted of murder when Cermak dies. Zangara is sentenced to death and executed in Florida’s electric chair.
1929—Seven Men Shot Dead in Chicago
Seven people, six of them gangster rivals of Al Capone’s South Side gang, are machine gunned to death in Chicago, Illinois, in an event that would become known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Because two of the shooters were dressed as police officers, it was initially thought that police might have been responsible, but an investigation soon proved the killings were gang related. The slaughter exceeded anything yet seen in the United States at that time.
