Dr. Randolph! I think someone should check your blood pressure!
We’re pulp hypochondriacs—always in the doctor’s office. Above is another medical sleaze cover. Our most recent examples are here and here. If you believe mid-century sleaze literature, general practitioners generally practiced molesting and groping. Of course, mid-century novels also taught readers that all defense lawyers were corrupt, women in the workplace were just looking for husbands, and whiskey every day was sophisticated. Lesson: don’t believe popular literature. Thomas Stone’s 1952 sleazer Doctor Randolph’s Women came from Intimate Novels and features a cover expressively posed by two models. It was originally published in 1943 as Baby Doctor. And you probably won’t be surprised to learn this by now, but Stone was in reality the prolific Florence Stonebraker, who we’ve enjoyed often. Click her keywords to see.
I'm going to recommend that I hold you overnight for observation.
On this lovely Wednesday it’s once again time for your regular visit to the doctor—the sleaze doctor. Above you see a cover for Florenz Branch’s 1960 romp Intimate Physician, about a specialist in “female disorders.” The book is a re-issue of 1953’s Dr. Breyton’s Wife. You have ob/gyn Dr. Paul Breyton, haunted that one of his patients died when she received a backroom abortion he feels he could have prevented. You have the doctor’s wife Cathy, who is a 100% terror, openly entertaining various men, and who invites one to live with her and Breyton. And you have the illegal abortionist’s beautiful daughter Maggie, with whom Breyton falls in love. Add these ingredients and you get one of the darker sleaze novels, though not one of the better ones. But Branch—aka Florence Stonebraker—wrote so many books that they varied greatly in quality. This one you can skip. We’ve featured more medical sleaze novels than we can count, and you can rest assured that we’ll have another doctor’s appointment again soon.
French toast, French doors, French kissing, and now French nursing. You people make an art out of everything.
Above: a very nice cover plus textless original art painted by Lou Marchetti for Florence Stonebraker’s 1954 sleaze digest Intimate Affairs of a French Nurse. There’s a lot of Stonebraker out there on the auction sites (and in Pulp Intl.), but we consider all the ones that interest us to be a little too expensive. Fortunately, she wrote more than eighty novels, which means that, inevitably, something will turn up at a good price.
Above is another digest novel from Florence Stonebraker, this time writing as Tom Stone to produce Stolen Love. It was originally published in 1937 as Too Much Love, with this Griffin Books re-issue arriving in 1946 fronted by a cover painted by Glenn Cravath, with his preliminary study below. The book deals with popular New York City radio personality Kay Brinkley—better known as the Voice of Romance—who hosts a lonely hearts call-in show, but is actually cynical about love and thinks her job is a high paying joke.
Her boyfriend asks her to head out to San Francisco to close a business deal for him, and she develops a case of wandering eye before the train even reaches the Rocky Mountains. Once out west she’s smitten with the man who’s supposed to provide her with important papers, while a couple of other guys, in turn, are seriously smitten by her. Complications arise when her NYC boyfriend unexpectedly flies to San Fran, putting him in direct romantic competition with his business acquaintance.
Kay gets laid with a total of three men as required by most of these digests, and attacked by one, definitely not a requirement, before finally returning to her original boyfriend, a forbearing sort who doesn’t begrudge Kay her carnal explorations. The story is a tangled web, written in the usual Stonebraker style, already well in evidence though this was one of her first books. It’s no wonder she became such a popular author. She’s no Jane Austen, but in the realm of sleazy romance she’s about as good as it gets.
Above: a cover for Love Life of a Hollywood Mistress by Florence Stonebraker, 1950. The artist is uncredited. There’s interior imagery in the form of photos of models posing scenes from the story, and as usual when these digests contain such pages, they’re difficult to scan without destroying the book. Besides the front, we were able to scan the inside of the front cover and five of the fourteen interior photos. Stonebraker tells the story of Wanda Russell, who one fateful night tries to resist being forcibly taken by a date and accidentally pushes him out a high window to his death. Good on her, but remember, these were the days when a single woman in a man’s hotel room could not have claimed self defense, so Wanda goes on the run.
She can’t hide without help, so she turns to her acquaintance Chet, who, when he finds out Wanda is a virgin, decides he can make a fortune by pimping her out to a rich acquaintance. Yeah, it’s a little flimsy as a method for cop avoidance goes, but this is mid-century sleaze, so you follow where the author leads. Wanda is to become mistress to Shelby Stevens, big time romantic actor, who would love to have a virgin. But wanting to thwart these creepy men in the one way she can, she gives her virginity to her friend Danny, who has always loved her. Danny is crushed when she leaves him and goes to live in Shelby Stevens’ beach house for the summer. These triangles are, you know by now, the rocket fuel that powers digest romances.
So Wanda lives with Stevens, but Stevens turns out to be a rat, and Wanda decides to flee. Stevens won’t let her go, but Danny, who has sat by in silent suffering as Wanda has been used as a plaything, shows up to beat Stevens within an inch of his life. He doesn’t do it because of Wanda. He does it because it turns out his younger sister Thelma had been an earlier plaything for Stevens, and had ended up dead. In one fell swoop Danny gets revenge for his sister, sort of, and rescues his true love Wanda. Oh, and Chet the pimp ends up dead, shot by his girlfriend Bertie, who considers Wanda a rival. We won’t even go into all that. And the guy Wanda pushed out a window? That’s never truly resolved.
Stonebraker churned out a lot of these books, some under the names Florenz Branch and Thomas Stone. Thirteen were published in 1950 alone. She would eventually write more than eighty, and she didn’t even start until she was forty-one. All of which is to say Love Life of a Hollywood Mistress feels rushed, with its pat ending and central concept that barely hangs together. But Stonebraker, despite her full work schedule, has done well in other tales, so she can have a mulligan on this one as far as we’re concerned. After all, she’s a sleaze and romance author—expectations need to be kept in check. We have a couple more of her novels lined up, and we’ll see how she does.
*sigh* All the gluttony, drunkenness, and lust have been fun, but I need variety. You know—reviling, unholiness. Really esoteric ones.
Above: a cover by Bernard Safran for Sin Cruise, Croydon Books sleaze from the typewriter of Florence Stonebraker, 1954, about a virgin named Maggie Thompson who has a boatborne sexual adventure on a cruise out of New York City. As we’ve mentioned before, it was pro forma to have the female protagonist of these tales laid by a minimum of two different men, often three, though one time is often by accident (we won’t even get into that), and in this case they’re Jeff, John, and—atypically—Carlos Cardoza, latin lover. Atypical because we haven’t seen anything but WASPs populate the male ranks of these books. It must have been a little risqué for 1954, but we doubt he’s the last man standing. We’ll see when we read it, which we can’t do now because we have more than fifty vintage books waiting. With luck, we’ll get to them all.
A funny thing—someone was selling a shit-quality black-and-white postcard of the cover of Sin Cruise for almost as much the book vendor was selling the novel. Just look at that thing. Did they make it by hand? Is that white-out on the top right? Even for a postcard this is really lame, but hey, everybody’s gotta hustle. If they can sell this terrible merch, well, that’s fine. But they surely will never sell it to us.
And speaking of buying and selling, we’ve been buying a lot of sleaze digests (you may have noticed our write-ups on some of them over the past couple of years, such as here, here, here, and here), and if you plan to purchase any, note that pricing can be all over the place. We don’t recommend spending more than twenty dollars per book. Almost without fail, the digest you see asking fifty or sixty bucks will turn up months later, offered by a different vendor for a pittance. Patience is needed, but it’ll be rewarded.
I'm not only beautiful. I'm expensive, inconvenient, and unreliable. You'll spend years explaining all this to your therapist.
We have another paperback collection for you today, and this one is a no-brainer for a pulp site. There are hundreds of covers featuring women in bars, many of which we’ve already shared, such as here, here (scroll down), and here. Above and below are more, and as soon as we uploaded them we went to do exactly what the art depicts. Have a happy Friday, everyone.
Since you're standing there, refill me, would ya? And if the chauffeur's union asks, tell them you drove me to drink.
Above: fun Bernard Safran art for Florence Stonebraker’s 1954 sleazer Confessions of a Ladies’ Chauffeur, for Croydon Books. We have other Stonebrakers, so we passed on this for $65. If it ever goes down we’ll buy it and update this post. You have noticed we sometimes do that, right? Like this Stonebraker we updated not long ago.
A nipple scope? Alright, blouse and bra coming off. I thought it was a stethoscope, but I'm no doctor.
The doctor sleaze keeps on coming. Here’s another to add to our vast collection—Dr. Breyton’s Wife by Florenz Branch, aka Florence Stonebraker, for Intimate Novels, 1953. You see this around the internet a lot, but it originally came from Sleazy Digest Books. We haven’t read it, but we own two of Branch’s other novels, which means you will hear from her a little later.
Despite my reputation the odds are very much against you.
Above is a cover for 50-50 Girl by Thomas Stone for Chicago’s Merit Books, published in 1952. The title refers not to the odds of getting the lead character in bed, but the fact that she’s forced to share her favors with two men. It isn’t a consensual agreement, technically, because she gives herself to man number two—a rich playboy—as the price of freeing her sister from her former manager, an amoral hustler named Eddie. The author Thomas Stone was actually none other than Florence Stonebraker, the brain behind more than eighty novels. Which is quite a feat, considering she didn’t get published until she was forty-one. We have plenty from her in the website but our favorite is this one.
While serving time in prison for his role in a failed coup, Adolf Hitler dictaes and publishes volume 1 of his manifesto Mein Kampf (in English My Struggle or My Battle), the book that outlines his theories of racial purity, his belief in a Jewish conspiracy to control the world, and his plans to lead Germany to militarily acquire more land at the expense of Russia via eastward expansion.
1955—Disneyland Begins Operations
The amusement park Disneyland opens in Orange County, California for 6,000 invitation-only guests, before opening to the general public the following day.
1959—Holiday Dies Broke
Legendary singer Billie Holiday, who possessed one of the most unique voices in the history of jazz, dies in the hospital of cirrhosis of the liver. She had lost her earnings to swindlers over the years, and upon her death her bank account contains seventy cents.
1941—DiMaggio Hit Streak Reaches 56
New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio gets a hit in his fifty-sixth consecutive game. The streak would end the next game, against the Cleveland Indians, but the mark DiMaggio set still stands, and in fact has never been seriously threatened. It is generally thought to be one of the few truly unbreakable baseball records.
1939—Adams Completes Around-the-World Air Journey
American Clara Adams becomes the first woman passenger to complete an around the world air journey. Her voyage began and ended in New York City, with stops in Lisbon, Marseilles, Leipzig, Athens, Basra, Jodhpur, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Wake Island, Honolulu, and San Francisco.
1955—Nobel Prize Winners Unite Against Nukes
Eighteen Nobel laureates sign the Mainau Declaration against nuclear weapons, which reads in part: “We think it is a delusion if governments believe that they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of [nuclear] weapons. Fear and tension have often engendered wars. Similarly it seems to us a delusion to believe that small conflicts could in the future always be decided by traditional weapons. In extreme danger no nation will deny itself the use of any weapon that scientific technology can produce.”
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.