vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
We’re circling back to Peter Cheyney’s novel Dark Bahama to show you a couple of Spanish covers from Ediciones G.P. These came in 1953 and 1958 respectively and are, sadly, uncredited. And the bad news keeps coming—there’s no hurricane in the novel, therefore no sharkicane. Sorry. You can read about the book here.
A couple of months back we shared a cover from Spain’s Ediciones G.P. for Franck Marchal’s Natalia enciende la mecha, which we mentioned was part of a series written by French authors Pierre Aspetéguy and Monique Henry. Above is the first entry in that series, simply titled Natalia, featuring the 1959 debut of their part-time fashion model/full-time ass whipping super spy. We’re sharing this today because we’ve dug up some new info on the series—we couldn’t identify the cover artist on the previous example, but we we think this one may have been painted by a Spanish artist who called himself or herself Chaco. That’s all the info we have, but we’ll keep digging. Anyone out there know anything? Drop us a line.
Above, Natalia enciende la mecha, or Natalia Lights the Fuse, from Ediciones G.P. out of Barcelona, 1961. This was one of a series of books about Natalia, a French model who leads a double life as an international spy, with Marchal serving as the shared pen name of French authors Pierre Aspetéguy and Monique Henry. We first saw a front for this paperback over at the blog Spanish Book Covers way back, but this scan comes from a different copy, so we thought we’d share it here. Spanish Books Covers has been on hiatus a long while, but the site is still live and there are numerous interesting fronts there worth viewing. What we’d really like to know is who painted the cover art. Often with these European editions you get art reworked or copied from U.S. paperbacks, but in the case of Ediciones G.P. we think not. Put this one in the unknown file until further notice.
As long as we’re doing Spanish language pulp today, we might as well share this cover for El siniestro Doctor Crippen, or The Sinister Doctor Crippen, written by Enrique Cuenca for Barcelona based Ediciones G.P., and published in 1960 as part of its low cost Enciclopedia Pulga collection. Eventually, about five-hundred books appeared as part of the collection, including translations of Jules Verne, Robert Lewis Stevenson, and other classic authors. This particular novel is of course based on the strange story of Hawley Harvey Crippen, aka H.H. Crippen, the American physician and fugitive who murdered his wife Cora in 1910 and was eventually hanged in London’s HM Pentonville Prison. Many of the covers we’ve seen from Enciclopedia Pulga are nice, so we’ll try to revisit the collection a little bit later.
American film actor Gary Cooper, who harnessed an understated, often stoic style in numerous adventure films and westerns, including Sergeant York, For Whom the Bell Tolls, High Noon, and Alias Jesse James, dies of prostate, intestinal, lung and bone cancer. For his contributions to American cinema Cooper received a plaque on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and is considered one of top movie stars of all time.
German film director and actor Erich von Stroheim, who as an actor was noted for his arrogant Teutonic character parts which led him to become a renowned cinematic villain with the nickname “The Man You Love to Hate”, dies in Maurepas, France at the age of 71.
In Buenos Aires, Argentina, four Israeli Mossad agents abduct fugitive Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who had been living under the assumed name and working for Mercedes-Benz. Eichman is taken to Israel to face trial on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. He is found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962, and is the only person to have been executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian court.
Doris Eaton Travis, who was the last surviving Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl, dies at age 106. The Ziegfeld Follies were a series of elaborate theatrical productions on Broadway in New York City from 1907 through 1931. Inspired by the Folies Bergères of Paris, they enjoyed a successful run on Broadway, became a radio program in 1932 and 1936, and were adapted into a musical motion picture in 1946 starring Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, and Lena Horne.
In the U.S., J. Edgar Hoover is appointed director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a position he retains until his death in 1972. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. But he also used the agency to grind a number of personal axes and far exceeded its legal mandate to amass secret files on political and civil rights leaders. Because of his abuses, FBI directors are now limited to 10-year terms.
American actress Joan Crawford, who began her show business career as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies, but soon became one of Hollywood’s most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, dies of a heart attack at her New York City apartment while ill with pancreatic cancer.
