vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above, another winner from Greenleaf Classics, Don Holliday’s The Lust Pigs, 1962, for the Midnight Reader line. The real author behind this one was David Case, who wrote ten books total for Greenleaf, including Lust Circuit and Luster’s Lane. Clearly he had a thing about lust. As do we all. The art is unattributed.
Above, a cover of the 1959 sleaze paperback Sin School, brought to us by Midwood and its house pseudonym Don Holliday. This was actually written by Hal Dresner, according to Vintage Sleaze, and if you want to see an alternate cover check their website here.
Above is a cover scan of Victor Jay’s 1964 novel The Affairs of Gloria, a book that is significant because it’s the first from the LGBT author whose real name is Victor J. Banis. He happens to be the person who, writing under Leisure Books’ communal pseudonym Don Holliday, gave the world the mystery series The Man from C.A.M.P., as well as many other books that are classics in the gay pulp genre. Some of those unforgettable and decidedly un-PC titles include Blow the Man Down, Man into Boy, Homo Farm, and Rally Round the Fag.
Gloria isn’t what you’d call a gay pulp. Banis hadn’t yet taken that direction with his fiction (which was all short stories up to that point), but he was literarily bi-curious, you could say, so what he did was create a protagonist whose sexual appetite allowed him to experiment with lesbian themes. The book sold well, and despite an obscenity indictment in Sioux City, Iowa, Banis came away from the experience more convinced than ever that an untapped gay market was waiting. In 1966 Greenleaf Classics published Banis’s first gay mystery The Why Not, which resulted in the go-ahead for similar novels.
Banis is still churning out books today, and is well reviewed by entities as middle of the road as Publisher’s Weekly, who, according to the author’s website, called him a literary icon who made a difference. All of that began to take shape with his first novel, The Affairs of Gloria. You can read Banis’s own account of writing Gloria and get the skinny on that obscenity trial here.
Don Holliday was yet another 1960s sleaze author who existed only as a pseudonym. This one was inhabited by Hal Dresner, Lawrence Block, John Jakes, Victor Banis and other sometime sexploitation writers. We don’t know which one wrote The Sin Conspirators for Greenleaf Classics’ sleaze imprint Leisure Books, but with a cover this brutal, it’s probably good he distanced himself. Unless the man is only demonstrating how in high school the other kids used to give him swirlies, it isn’t going to be just a bad hair day for his companion, but a bad air day. We’re working up a more comprehensive post on these Greenleaf paperbacks, so keep an eye out.
After being sold, dismantled and moved to the United States, London Bridge reopens in the resort town of Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
British actor Richard Burton and American screen star Elizabeth Taylor secretly remarry sixteen months after their divorce, then jet away to a second honeymoon in Chobe Game Park in Botswana.
A day after being captured, Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara is executed in Bolivia. In an attempt to make it appear as though he had been killed resisting Bolivian troops, the executioner shoots Guevara with a machine gun, wounding him nine times in the legs, arm, shoulder, throat, and chest.
During World War I, in the Argonne Forest in France, America Corporal Alvin C. York leads an attack on a German machine gun nest that kills 25 and captures 132. He is a corporal during the event, but is promoted to sergeant as a result. He also earns Medal of Honor from the U.S., the Croix de Guerre from the French Republic, and the Croce di Guerra from Italy and Montenegro. Stateside, he is celebrated as a hero, and Hollywood even makes a movie entitled Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper.
The New York Yankees’ Don Larsen pitches a perfect game in the World Series against hated rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers. It is the only perfect game in World Series history, as well as the only no-hitter.
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).
