Pulp International

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

SUN BLINDNESS

How do you defend yourself when you can't see what's coming?

As planned, we followed up Mark Derby’s excellent Womanhunt with more, pretty much anything we could find. It turned out to be this Collins hardback of 1958’s Sun in the Hunter’s Eyes. The title suggests the book is a jungle adventure but it’s mostly a missing persons tale. Struggling dramatist Robert Avery happens to have spent some time in Asia during military service, so he’s sent by his family to Singapore to determine the disposition of a missing relative. Alive or dead, the truth must be ascertained before a sizable estate can be disbursed, but he has virtually no idea where to look.

Derby channels South Asia better than many of the scores of writers who’ve tackled the colonial-in-Asia trope. His main character Avery has specific but limited knowledge of the region. He’s a guy in over his head, trying to do right by his family. He can fight a little, and think on his feet, and those qualities help him immensely. Later we see his skills in the jungle, but again, he’s no magician out there. He credits his Malayan guides from previous years for instructing him, but he’s nowhere near their level. Derby would use this same man-of-limited-experience gimmick again in Womanhunt.

This tale isn’t as good as Womanhunt, but then how could it be? Its main problem, if we want to call it that, is the moments that make you lower the book and go, “Wow,” don’t come until the final fifth. A less important issue is that the primary supporting character—love interest and walking conundrum Nona Nicholas, who was once married to the missing man—is mostly nerves, tears, and cryptic statements. There’s a reason for it, and she changes in that final fifth we mentioned. The question is whether Derby makes the wait worthwhile. We think so. When the puzzle finally fits together, Avery hits the jungle and the story hits great heights.

Some fine authors have an indisputably best book, an apex they never reach again. The subject makes for some of the most passionate debates to be had amongst literature fans. Try it discussing Hemingway, or Vonnegut, or John D. MacDonald, or Cormac McCarthy, and see if everyone makes it out of the room alive. Was Womanhunt that best book for Derby? It was better than Sun in the Hunter’s Eyes, so perhaps he spoiled us. But he’s still two-for-two. We’re encouraged enough to try reading everything we can obtain. At that point we’ll be able to answer the question of which effort sits on top.

Malaysia, Singapore, William Collins Sons & Co., Mark Derby, Harry Wilcox, John Rose, cover art, literature

CRACKER BARREL

This arrangement is temporary. I'm in the process of installing a rainfall shower with steam jets for a spa-like experience.

Allen O’Quinn’s 1956 novel Swamp Brat fits into the hicksploitation silo of mid-century popular fiction. In the story, set in Mississippi, moonshiners and romance combine explosively when two women go after the same guy. It’s a love story, and apparently has plenty of down South cornpone local color. We love books like that, but we didn’t buy this example.

Mississippi, Fawcett Publications, Gold Medal Books, Allen O'Quinn, Barye Phillips, cover art, literature

BAD TWO-TIMING

Unbelievable. I put my trust in you. Give you my heart. And here I find you pawing some red-headed bimbo.

Sometimes it doesn’t matter if the twist in a suspense novel isn’t much of a surprise. There are limits to the misdirections that can be placed into a narrative, so you have to figure one fourth of readers guess correctly what the author is up to no matter what. 1955’s The Passion Murders, written by the prolific Day Keene, aka Gunard Hjerstedt, and originally published as Farewell to Passion in 1951, is a tale well told, so in the end it didn’t matter that we knew from chapter two what the big surprise would be. We still had to read the book to find out if we were correct, which was a type of suspense all its own.

Plotwise a Los Angeles prosecutor discovers that his actress wife has cheated on him to secure a film role, but even so he’s willing to sacrifice his career and savings to protect her when he learns that she was behind the wheel during a deadly hit and run accident. He agrees to pay the victim’s family $50,000 for silence, but the money he cobbles together comes from a notorious gangster in exchange for dropping a case. With his career and marriage now ruined, the prosecutor flees L.A. for his Georgia hometown only to find that, though he was once the pride of the town, his obvious sell-out to organized crime has made him as welcome as plague of locusts. Troubles follow from Los Angeles, as Keene’s tangled web includes a sexpot secretary, the local Klan, a murder, and that looming twist.

Habitual visitors to our website may notice that we’ve dug up this cover from a post in 2017. Back then we discussed the uncredited art, but couldn’t delve into the story because we didn’t have a copy of the book. Then this Avon paperback came to us as part of a group we bought not long ago, so we’ve updated and moved that old post to today after reading the novel. Generally Day Keene is a reliable author and this is another one that goes into the success column. You can read him with confidence. We have another book from him we’ll get to soon.

Avon Publications, Day Keene, Gunard Hjerstedt, cover art, literature

PHOTO FINNISH

Death in the cold white north.

Above is a rare Finnish photo cover for Carter Brown’s Rahaa kuin roskaa, which translates to “money like garbage,” but is actually 1956’s Model of No Virtue. The publisher is Valpas-Mainos, which reprinted dozens of Carter Brown titles throughout the 1960s and into the early ’70s. This one is from 1960.

Finland, Valpas-Mainos, Carter Brown, Alan G. Yates, cover art, literature

UNTEMPTATION ISLAND

That looks really bad. Maybe I should have gone to Cancun.

When there are skulls in the clouds you’ve chosen the wrong destination. This dust jacket, which is signed but not decipherably, was painted for Canadian author Hulbert Footner’s The Island of Fear. It’s a murder mystery dealing with an anthropological survey of Native American descendants on Diseree Island in Chesapeake Bay, and a pirate named Rafi the Blood, who may have buried a treasure there. We didn’t buy this one, so we don’t know how it turns out. No matter how bad it gets, though, the folks involved can count themselves lucky they ended up on Diseree Island instead of, for example, here. The Island of Fear was published in 1936.

Canada, Harper & Brothers, Hulbert Footner, cover art, literature

IDLE MODE

I gotta hand it to my husband. I really understand why he usually sits around like this doing fuck-all every day.

Above: a classic cover for James Clayford’s 1950 tale Illicit Wife, from Quarter Books. The author here was actually Peggy Gaddis, but she used the Clayford pseudonym more than a dozen times. We’ve read several Gaddis novels, but no Clayfords. Are they identical in style? You never know—authors occasionally used pseudonyms to experiment. We’ll get to Clayford eventually and find out.

Quarter Books, James Clayford, Peggy Gaddis, Peggy Dern, cover art, literature

PLEASURE PRINCIPLES

There's only one rule: if it feels good do it.

Norman Bligh’s 1951 novel Strictly for Pleasure, which has excellent but uncredited cover art, tells a story we can sum up in relatively few words. Barbara Hedwig, a Special Investigator for the Welfare Department in fictional Endicott City, openly has two lovers and doesn’t worry much about the feelings of either. Both want to marry her, and these are notions she’s willing to pretend to entertain until she meets a third guy and throws over the others, thinking she’s finally met the one. There you go, pretty much. Needless to say, things don’t develop as Barbara hopes.

For a subplot, Bligh throws in a rich woman named Marcia Hiton, and bubbling labor unrest in the Hiton business empire. This is how, though Strictly for Pleasure is a typical love novel, you get lines like this: “It happens to be the right of Americans, Marcia, to organize a union whenever they feel they want to. It’s a right even big business recognizes in the spirit of fair play.”

Those were the days, right? Back then 35% of private sector workers were in unions. Today that figure is about 10%. That’s a reason—though not by any means the only one—why the U.S. is headed to dark places. But while the economic subplot is interesting—it’s interesting to us, anyway—overall we thought Strictly for Pleasure was pretty blah from Bligh. He authored other digests with cover art likely to tempt us, but we’ll have to seriously ponder whether we want to give his prose another go-round.

Original Novels, Norman Bligh, William Arthur Neubauer, cover art, literature, prostitution

SATYR DAY

It's always a memorable occasion when the old goat comes around.

Above: an alternate cover from Bantam Books for W. Somerset Maugham’s set-in-Italy society thriller Up at the Villa. The art by Charles Andres depicts the central event in the story without giving away what actually happens. We won’t either. This showed up in 1947, as did the other, but we suspect this one came first. You can see our original write-up here.

Italy, Bantam Books, W. Somerset Maugham, cover art, literature

PRIORITY DELIVERY

Orders are guaranteed hot or your money back.

Yes, it’s another book called Hot Cargo. What are the odds? Well, pretty good. We picked them both up precisely because the titles were identical. Also, we were into the Doug Weaver art here. We were sure this novel, like yesterday’s, would be about shipgoing difficulties between one woman and a large male crew, but surprise—it’s almost the opposite. It’s about a pilot—not of a ship but a cargo plane named Nelly—and multiple hookers he’s been hired by a mobster to fly from L.A. to San Francisco, Boise, and other locales for bacchanalian parties.

The pilot is named Barry Davis, and among the women he meets are two that aren’t cargo to be winged around the West Coast: cheesecake photographer and self-confessed sex addict Joan Verril, and mobster’s wife Ann Cummings. He’s drawn to both, of course, but it’s Ann who asks for help. She wants to leave her mobster boyfriend Blacky Jenson, and wants Barry to use his plane to fly her far away. Trouble is sure to follow.

Hot Cargo (2), like Hot Cargo (1), is not well written, though it tries for a different stylistic approach: By the time he got back he was beginning to really feel higher than the space satellites. His brain cells were spinning orbital things that rammed against each other, sending beautiful, colored stars exploding crazily before his eyes. That last drink had done it!

We said different, not good. Unfortunately, Davidson is repetitive. That helps him push his page count to 192, but if editors had deleted its unilluminating interior musings—especially fretful Joan’s—the book would be more readable. We did like the final plane ride, that long sought escape, which is complicated by the fact that Jenson chooses that trip to tag along, but otherwise Hot Cargo (2) is blah. You win some and lose some. Advice: maybe don’t pick books because their titles are identical.

Epic Books, John Davidson, Doug Weaver, cover art, literature

A LOAD OF SEAMEN

If she isn't careful her situation will get very messy.

Remember we mentioned the unofficial sub-genre of women alone at sea with men? This is one of novels we had in mind. Hot Cargo, written by G.H. Otis (Otis Hemingway Gaylord) and published in 1953 by Lion Books with Robert Maguire cover art, deals with tough guy Ed Brody, who signs onto a ship as third officer in order to escape trouble on land. His new problem becomes that he’s at sea with smugglers who plan to rendezvous mid-ocean with another ship and transfer a load of contraband oil, guns, and two airplanes, then kill the crew and escape. Brody, after understanding his precarious situation, befriends crewmembers in order to organize them for a fightback when the fateful moment arrives.

Along for the ride is eighteen-year old Sheba Ringle, married to one of the smugglers but amenable to a change of martial status, at least unofficially. She’s one of those improbable sexpots from low rent mid-century fiction—can’t help herself performing erotic dances in front of the desperate crew, can’t dress to cover the majority of her skin, that sort of thing. She serves almost no narrative purpose at all, except as an object of concern and occasional rescue for Brody. In fact, she’s unrealistic to the point of being an annoyance to the reader, providing virtually no personality, nor enough eroticism to justify her femme fatale role in the narrative.

Anyway, that pitched ocean battle Brody has been preparing for finally arrives and goes on for many pages, with machine gun fire, hand to hand combat, and the constant threat that the ship will either be blown up by pursuers, or detonated by ignited oil fumes. It sounds fun, but the action, like Sheba Ringle, generates less excitement than you’d anticipate. We did, however, like the part where Brody killed a man and wedged his body in a porthole to keep people from shooting at him. A nicely brutal move. The rest of the book? We weren’t impressed. But maybe our expectations were too high.

Lion Books, G.H. Otis, Otis Hemingway Gaylord, Robert Maguire, cover art, literature
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1940—The Battle of Britain Begins

The German Air Force, aka the Luftwaffe, attacks shipping convoys off the coast of England, touching off what Prime Minister Winston Churchill describes as The Battle of Britain.

1948—Paige Takes Mound in the Majors

Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.

1965—Biggs Escapes the Big House

Ronald Biggs, a member of the gang that carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963, escapes from Wandsworth Prison by scaling a 30-foot wall with three other prisoners, using a ladder thrown in from the outside. Biggs remained at large, mostly living in Brazil, for more than forty-five years before returning to the UK—and arrest—in 2001.

1949—Dragnet Premiers

NBC radio broadcasts the cop drama Dragnet for the first time. It was created by, produced by, and starred Jack Webb as Joe Friday. The show would later go on to become a successful television program, also starring Webb.

1973—Lake Dies Destitute

Veronica Lake, beautiful blonde icon of 1940s Hollywood and one of film noir’s most beloved fatales, dies in Burlington, Vermont of hepatitis and renal failure due to long term alcoholism. After Hollywood, she had drifted between cheap hotels in Brooklyn and New York City and was arrested several times for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. A New York Post article briefly revived interest in her, but at the time of her death she was broke and forgotten.

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DON’T RIDE THE WHITE HORSE

Rafael DeSoto painted this excellent cover for David Hulburd's 1954 drug scare novel H Is for Heroin. We also have the original art without text.

BARN GIRLS

Two Spanish language digest novels from Argentine publishers Malinca Debora and Malinca Nueva Pandora.
Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.

LOVES OF A BLONDE

Uncredited cover art for Orrie Hitt's 1954 novel Tawny. Hitt was a master of sleazy literature and published more than one hundred fifty novels.

INSATIABLE APPETITE

George Gross art for Joan Sherman’s, aka Peggy Gaddis Dern’s 1950 novel Suzy Needs a Man.

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