Vintage Pulp

September 30 2025

CAIRO MANIAC

Stop calling me that. I mean, technically you're right, but I'm from Cairo, Illinois.

We have more globe-trotting fiction for you today (you know we like international thrillers, and we’re always trying to get that David Dodge vibe, but rarely finding it). John Flagg’s Woman of Cairo was published in 1953 in this Gold Medal edition with uncredited cover art. It follows Hart Muldoon, an ex-OSS operative gone freelance, who’s headquartered in the South of France. The previous Flagg novel we read, The Persian Cat, also involved an ex-OSS man, so we were on familiar ground here with Muldoon.

He’s coerced into taking a job looking for the villain behind a missing British bomber that disappeared en route from Sudan to Cairo. Hart steams to Cairo and checks into Shepheard’s Hotel, and at that point we suspected that the climax of this book would involve the fire that destroyed the famed landmark in 1952. We’d already read a book centering that event—Cameron Kaye’s 1953 Cairo-set thriller Thieves Fall Out. Kaye was in reality Gore Vidal, a future storied author tossing off a thriller early in his career for lunch money. We couldn’t help but compare and contrast. Could Flagg top Vidal?

He does well with most aspects of the tale, from action to atmosphere to authenticity, but his hero Muldoon is something of a cad. Why women are attracted him, considering his behavior, is a mystery. Most male authors of the period really didn’t bother to think about their male leads from a feminine point of view. The purpose of women was to fall like tenpins, regardless of whether—in the case of Muldoon’s coterie—they’re ignored, insulted to their faces, or brutally slapped several times. Well, at least Muldoon feels bad about the slapping: I’d have to do a lot of making up for those blows to her lovely face. Oh, really?

Still, though, even if Hart is heartless when it comes to women, the actual adventure works reasonably well, overcoming occasionally blockheaded prose to propel readers into the maze of a Cairo on the knife edge of revolution, through the inferno of the torched hotel (as we suspected), and onward to the unlikely solution to the missing bomber mystery. The book was a little better than Thieves Fall Out, despite Muldoon’s unpalatability. He appears in five adventures, and we assume he meets a grisly end when he’s drawn and quartered by his ex-girlfriends. As it happens we have a copy of book three, Murder in Monaco. We’ll report back.

Egypt, Cairo, Fawcett Publications, Gold Medal Books, John Flagg, John Gearon, Cameron Kaye, Gore Vidal, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

December 25 2022

VIDAL SIGNS

This Cameron Kay fella might just amount to something one day.

Cameron Kay was a pseudonym used by literary leading light Gore Vidal when he was short of cash and needed to publish and get paid fast. He’d used other pseudonyms for this purpose, including Edgar Box and Katherine Everard. It took him about three weeks to produce 1953’s Thieves Fall Out, and he made three grand on the deal. It’s one of those books where a money-seeking rando goes to a foreign country and immediately inserts himself into the biggest caper going for hundreds of miles around—and does it, improbably, with great ease, while seeming to think, irrationally, that it’s a good idea. This character, named Peter Wells, ultimately turns sour on the venture and must figure out a way to flee Egypt with his true love by his side.

Though Vidal is not at the heights he’d reach in his best writing, you already know that going in. In the final analysis he gets the job done, like a good carpenter working on a quick side project. We glanced at a few reviews after finishing the story and they seem to miss the point that Vidal does exactly what adventure fiction requires. Saying the book’s plot is stock is like saying dance music is repetitive. It has to be that way to make you dance. Because of the identity of the author, it feels as if reviewers try to flaunt their intellectual bona fides by trashing the result. We’re not going to do that. The book is satisfactory.

What Vidal does especially well is local color—though refracted through a wealthy Western prism that few Egyptians would appreciate. Yet it’s clear he tries to be egalitarian, if imperfectly, and he crafts a tale with unique characters. There’s a piano playing hunchback who hides behind a wall and looks at his nightclub through a peephole, a beautiful French countess who was once the mistress of Egypt’s top Nazi, and a fresh young beauty who’s the unrequited love of King Farouk of Egypt—who has her followed everywhere by his secret police. Those ideas are unusual, for sure, but they’re not as farfetched as some reviewers would like you to think.

We make that statement confidently because we’ve lived in the wilder world. In Guatemala we met an ex-judge from a proximate country who had fled because of being targeted for death by the new ruling party, but who was a drunk who craved public enjoyment and had shaved his head and grown a beard in order to hang in dive bars unrecognized. Was his story true? Maybe. He had a judicial identification card he eventually showed us that looked real enough. Real enough, in fact, that we gave him a wide berth from then on, thinking that if he was assassinated we didn’t want to be in the line of fire. It may not sound real, but there you go. It happened.

Therefore we don’t agree with reviewers who think Vidal’s characters are intentionally absurd, and that he was pushing the envelope of how bizarre he could make his cast. Such people exist. Vidal would have found them. They make Thieves Fall Out a fascinating read. The book isn’t top of the genre, nor bottom, but it’s unique, and has a fun climax tied into the burgeoning Egyptian revolution and the real-life fire that destroyed one of the most famous hotels in the world. Here’s what Thieves Fall Out is in summation: readable, distracting, and just leftfield enough to let you know the author is someone with a different take on the world, who’d later distill his ideas into fiction that would make him a literary sensation.

Fawcett Publications, Gold Medal Books, Egypt, Cairo, Luxor, Cameron Kay, Gore Vidal, Edgar Box, Katherine Everard, Barye Phillips, Farouk I, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

July 14 2016

LULLABY AND GOODNIGHT

I could screw my way to the top but this method is so much more satisfying.

Above you see the covers for the 1958 and 1954 Signet editions of Death Before Bedtime, by Edgar Box, who was in reality literary legend Gore Vidal. This novel is the middle entry of a trilogy—the first is Death in the Fifth Position and the third is Death Likes It Hot. All feature public relations exec/amateur detective Peter Sargeant II, and the story in this one takes place in Washington, D.C., and involves a murdered senator, his promiscuous daughter, his widow, and various figures ranging from pure to corrupt. It owes plenty to Agatha Christie in that the murder—via dynamite, by the way—occurs in a house and everyone who was on the premises is a suspect. Unsurprisingly, there’s almost as much sex as sleuthing, but there’s also plenty of Vidalian wit. The top cover was painted by Robert Maguire and the second was the work of Clark Hulings.

Washington D.C., Signet Books, Gore Vidal, Edgar Box, Clark Hulings, Robert Maguire, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

May 17 2016

GORE DETAILS

Oh, that Katherine Everard. On second thought, maybe the book isn't so bad after all.

“A first novel that holds little promise of a future.” Thus concluded one 1949 review of Katherine Everard’s Cry Shame!, aka A Star’s Progress. This assessment is funny because Everard was a pseudonym used by American literary treasure Gore Vidal, who’ll be remembered far longer than any of his critics. Cry Shame! tells the story of a girl who becomes a stripper in New Orleans at age thirteen, a wife for a much older man at age fourteen, a Hollywood starlet as an adult, and finally—thanks to romantic misfortune—a broken woman. Today’s critics claim they can see touches of Vidalian genius in various details of the book. Of course they can. This Pyramid edition comes complete and unabridged—except for the bottom half inch of the cover cut off by some shoddy work at the printer—with art by Harry Bennett.

New Orleans, Pyramid Books, Cry Shame!, A Star's Progress, Katherine Everard, Gore Vidal, Harry Bennett, cover art, literature

Hollywoodland, Sex Files

February 17 2012

SECRET SERVICE

New memoir outs pretty much everyone in 1940s Hollywood.

Every year, a raft of Hollywood tell-alls hits the newsstands, all claiming to be filled with juicy revelations, with only a scant few actually delivering on that promise. Scotty Bowers’ newly published Tinseltown memoir Full Service falls into the latter group. We think it’s destined to be one of the most remembered show business memoirs ever written.

Bowers was a World War II vet-turned-bartender who arrived in Hollywood in 1946 and quickly found that his striking looks opened doors for him. Those doors allegedly led to the bedrooms of such varied personages as Edith Piaf, Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, Vivien Leigh, and the Duke of Windsor.

Bowers soon became known on the Hollywood fast track as a guy who could arrange trysts for stars too cautious or too shy to manage it themselves, and located sexual partners for Vincent Price, Katherine Hepburn, Rock Hudson and scores of others. Some of his claims are just jawdropping. Among them: he says he procured about 150 women for Katherine Hepburn, had threesomes with Cary Grant and Randolph Scott, and learned Spencer Tracy was bi-sexual only when, in a drunken stupor, the star “began nibbling on my foreskin.”

There’s always a degree of scepticism aroused by books like these, but Full Service dovetails with rumors that have been floating around Hollywood for decades, and has been endorsed by Gore Vidal, who claims to have been privvy to much of what Bowers describes and has called the book “as revelation filled as Hollywood Babylon.” Predictably, the relatives of some of the stars mentioned in the book are not happy with its content, but Bowers steers clear of any true libel and probably can’t be sued. As to why it took him so long to reveal his many secrets, he said in an interview with the New York Times, “I’m not getting any younger and all my famous tricks are dead by now. The truth can’t hurt them anymore.”

Los Angeles, Hollywood, Scotty Bowers, Cary Grant, Edith Piaf, Katherine Hepburn, Vivien Leigh, Rock Hudson, Randolph Scott, Vincent Price, Gore Vidal, lgbt

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 11

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

February 10

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

February 9

1960—Woodward Gets First Star on Walk of Fame

Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains more than 2,800 stars.

February 9

1971—Paige Enters Baseball Hall of Fame

Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.

February 8

1969—Allende Meteorite Falls in Mexico

The Allende Meteorite, the largest object of its type ever found, falls in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The original stone, traveling at more than ten miles per second and leaving a brilliant streak across the sky, is believed to have been approximately the size of an automobile. But by the time it hit the Earth it had broken into hundreds of fragments.