Vintage Pulp

September 14 2025

ALLEN THE FAMILY

The good folks at Horwitz adopt another Hollywood actress.

Valerie Allen was an obscure U.S. actress who started her career in cinema before quickly migrating to television, appearing in shows such as 77 Sunset Strip, Gunsmoke, and Sea Hunt. Probably her most interesting movie for our purposes is 1958’s I Married a Monster from Outer Space, which we watched last year. Her earliest roles were in 1956, but when Sydney, Australia-based Horwitz Publications used her image in 1957 for this cover of Set-Up for a Sinner she had not yet scored a credited screen role. This once again confirms our theory that Horwitz habitually used unlicensed handout photos for its cover art. There was nothing to be gained by using a completely unknown American actress over an Aussie model except not having to pay a modeling fee, so they used whatever film promos came into their publishing offices, and didn’t pay for them. Well, Allen may have been obscure, but this bright cover is the opposite. We think it’s one of Horwitz’s best.

Australia, Horwitz Publications, 77 Sunset Strip, Gunsmoke, Sea Hunt, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, Valerie Allen, Marc Brody, William H. Williams, Bill Williams, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

July 9 2025

TIME FOR A CAREER CHANGE

Maybe your talent isn't in legitimate medicine. I hear there's a good living these days in being a quack.

An angst tinged cover fronts Karen Miller’s 1962 medical drama-romance Hospital Crisis. This is from Horwitz Publications, the Australian imprint we like to focus on because of their celebrity covers. No celeb here, but the work is nice, if uncredited. Miller wrote other medical books such as Flying Doctor, Urgent Diagnosis, Call for the Flying Doctor, and Doctor Off-Track. She was a pseudonym, though there’s confusion over whose. Some say she was in reality Richard Wilkes-Hunter, while others say Ray Slattery. The facts will emerge in time, we’re sure.

Australia, Horwitz Publications, Karen Miller, Richard Wilkes-Hunter, Ray Slattery, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

February 10 2025

MIGRATORY CRAYNE

She traveled to the opposite side of the world and probably never knew.

Above is another celebrity cover from Horwitz Publications of Australia, this one for Marc Brody’s, aka William H. Williams’ 1956 thriller Cover Girl Cries Murder, featuring a front with U.S. actress Dani Crayne. You also see the original shot used by Horwitz, which probably came to them as a handout publicity photo.

Crayne made her first film appearances in 1955, but her roles were small, and she never became well known. That made her perfect for Horwitz. She joined numerous ingenues to grace the company’s covers without prior permission (we suspect), including Joan Collins, Elke Sommer, Bettie Page, and others. Click the company’s keywords below and scroll to discover those examples.

Australia, Horwitz Publications, Dani Crayne, Marc Brody, William H. Williams, Bill Williams, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

October 3 2024

THEY DIDN’T KNOW JAC

For Horwitz Publications any celebrity would do.

Horwitz Publications, an Australian imprint that used celebrities on many of its book fronts during the 1960s, strikes again with this cover for Carter Brown’s 1962 detective caper The Dame. It features British actress Jacqueline Jones, who was in quite a few films, and also modeled nude as Lynn Shaw. We doubt Horwitz had any particular affinity for Jones—the photo was probably just available as a promotional handout and the company used it without permission. Why do we think that? We explain here. This is a nice result, though.

Australia, Britain, Horwitz Publications, Carter Brown, Alan G. Yates, Jacqueline Jones, Lynn Shaw, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

September 18 2023

FARRINGTON ENOUGH

Horwitz Publications perfectly red the paperback market.

For a while we were tracking the possibly unlicensed usage by Australian imprint Horwitz Publications of celebrities on its paperback covers. We fell down on the job a bit. The last one we looked at was two years ago.

The red-haired model used above on Carter Brown’s thriller No Halo for Hedy is Playboy centerfold and nightclub performer Colleen Farrington, who was the mother of actress Diane Lane. The book originally appeared in 1956, and the above reprint came in 1959. This photo used for the cover is rare. We’ve seen no other shot of Farrington in these capri pants. Presumably, at one point multiple frames from the session existed, but time disposes of such items. However, it can’t diminish the beauty of this cover. You can see all of our Horwitz celeb covers by clicking here.

Australia, Horwitz Publications, Playboy, Carter Brown, Alan G. Yates, Colleen Farrington, Diane Lane, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

December 16 2021

SOMMER IN AUSTRALIA

Hi, this is Elke calling from Down Under. Can I speak to my agent? There's been a trademark infringement.

As usual the Aussie publishing company Horwitz has used a film star on one of its book covers—this time German goddess Elke Sommer on the front of 1959’s Terror Comes Creeping. She was a favorite of theirs—we’ve seen her on four covers, including this one, and we’ve speculated that they’re all unlicensed, for reasons discussed here.

This one stars Carter Brown’s, aka Alan G. Yates’s franchise sleuth Danny Boyd, who’s hired by a woman named Martha Hazelton who thinks her father is killing off his children—with her next in line—in order to avoid losing his dead wife’s inheritance. The father, when confronted by Boyd, says that insanity runs in the family and his daughter is paranoid and probably nuts. It certainly seems that way when Boyd meets his client’s loopy, danger obsessed little sister, but of course matters soon begin to look far more complicated than they seemed at first.

On one level it’s amazing Carter Brown sold something like 120,000,000 books, because his work is not special. But on the other hand it’s fast, sometimes funny, and hits the right notes for detective novels. So maybe his success isn’t so strange after all. We’ll probably read another, because we have a few.

Australia, Germany, Horwitz Publications, Carter Brown, Alan G. Yates, Elke Sommer, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

November 12 2021

NIGHTS IN RED SATIN

What happens next could be great or terrible, depending on how well you distinguish subtle shades of color.

Since we just saw Cleo Moore why not bring her right back? Here she is on the front of Carter Brown’s Slaughter in Satin, 1954, from the Australian publisher Horwitz. We’ve long documented this publisher’s usage of minor celebrities on its covers, and pondered whether it was copyright infringement. What caught our eye about this example, besides Moore, was the typesetting. Notice how the “s” in the title disappears into Moore’s red jammies, so at first glance it reads as, “Laughter in Satin,” which is almost an opposite outcome from slaughter, like the difference between being lain or slain. Probably when the book was first printed the two shades of red stood out from each other more. Or maybe this visual trick was intentional. Or maybe it was a miscalculation that couldn’t be repaired. We’ll never know. See the other Moore here, and see the celeb Horwitz covers by clicking here and scrolling.

Australia, Horwitz Publications, Carter Brown, Alan G. Yates, Cleo Moore, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

February 23 2021

LAY OUT MY LANSING

Horwitz Publications puts a Hollywood starlet to bed.

Above is a cover from Australian imprint Horwitz Publications for Marc Brody’s thriller Lay Out My Lady, published in 1956. We’ve long featured Horwitz covers because they used photo-illustrations of famous or soon-to-be-famous actresses. This time the company chose U.S. actress and beneficiary of lucky genes Joi Lansing, clad in the sort of extravagant bedtime wear that was popular during the era, and whose time-defying beauty we’ve marveled over here and here. And here too. The face in the background is also an altered photo, though not of Lansing. We can’t identify her. If you have any ideas feel free to inform us.

Moving on to Marc Brody, he was both the author and star of these yarns, and claimed to be an intrepid crime reporter. That would be fascinating if it were true, but it wasn’t. He was actually author William H. Williams, aka Bill Williams, and he wrote novels while sitting in a shed in his garden, which is about as far from the mean streets as anyone can get. But you have to give him credit—he churned out something like eighty of these books. We’ll be revisiting him later. In the meantime you can see a bit more from him—including photo-illustrations of another beautiful actress—at this link.

Australia, Horwitz Publications, Marc Brody, William H. Williams, Bill Williams, Joi Lansing, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

January 27 2020

MARC IMPROVEMENT

American star adds pizzazz to a pair of Aussie thrillers.

Today we have two more paperbacks from Australia’s Horwitz Publications, a company that, as we’ve documented often, opportunistically used numerous Hollywood celebs on its covers. This time it’s Jan Sterling, who appears on 1955’s Blueprints for Murder and 1956’s The Bride Wore Black, both written by the prolific Marc Brody. Sterling was never a top tier actress but she was in a lot of good movies and earned an Oscar nomination for The High and the Mighty. She also posed for some stunning photos, including the two at this link. These book scans float around online, which means we don’t know where they originate, but if we had to guess we’d say Flickr, so thanks to the first uploader.

Australia, Horwitz Publications, Academy Award, The High and the Mighty, Marc Brody, William H. Williams, Bill Williams, Jan Sterling, cover art, literature, cinema

Vintage Pulp

December 24 2019

LAFFIN MATTERS

Lee provides the style, Laffin provides the substance.

We’re back to Horwitz Publications and its appropriation of Hollywood stars for its covers. If you haven’t seen those they’re all worth a look because of their usage of rare images. On the above cover from 1957’s Hired To Kill, the face belongs to Belinda Lee, and as always the taste of Horwitz editors is impeccable. But Lee wasn’t long for this world. She was just establishing herself as one of Britain’s best exports when she became a road casualty during an ill-fated 1961 drive from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.

Moving on to John Laffin, he was one of those authors whose brand was being a real-life adventurer. He was supposedly an ex-commando who was an expert with rifles, martial arts, and throwing knives, and who also spoke five languages. He’d visited thirty-two countries at the time of publication of this novel and was busy adding to the number, according to the rear cover text. And apparently he had been published in fourteen countries and five languages, which makes it a bit embarrassing we’d never heard of him.

We checked out his bibliography and sure enough, the guy wrote a pile of books. Many of them were war biographies and political analyses. He mainly focused on the British experience in World War I, but wrote everything from adventure fiction to an “expert”—i.e white guy’s—analysis of the Arab mind. He sounds like an interesting fella, so we may look what’s out there that we can acquire for a reasonable price and see what his fiction is like. If we do we’ll report back.

Australia, Britain, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Horwitz Publications, John Laffin, Belinda Lee, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

December 11

1962—Canada Has Last Execution

The last executions in Canada occur when Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin, both of whom are Americans who had been extradited north after committing separate murders in Canada, are hanged at Don Jail in Toronto. When Turpin is told that he and Lucas will probably be the last people hanged in Canada, he replies, â€œSome consolation.â€

December 11

1964—Guevara Speaks at U.N.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara, representing the nation of Cuba, speaks at the 19th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York City. His speech calls for wholesale changes in policies between rich nations and poor ones, as well as five demands of the United States, none of which are met.

December 11

2008—Legendary Pin-Up Bettie Page Dies

After suffering a heart attack several days before, erotic model Bettie Page, who in the 1950s became known as the Queen of Pin-ups, dies when she is removed from life support machinery. Thanks to the unique style she displayed in thousands of photos and film loops, Page is considered one of the most influential beauties who ever lived.

December 10

1935—Downtown Athletic Club Awards First Trophy

The Downtown Athletic Club in New York City awards its first trophy for athletic achievement to University of Chicago halfback Jay Berwanger. The prize is later renamed the Heisman Trophy, and becomes the most prestigious award in college athletics.

December 10

1968—Japan's Biggest Heist Occurs

300 million yen is stolen from four employees of the Nihon Shintaku Ginko bank in Tokyo when a man dressed as a police officer blocks traffic due to a bomb threat, makes them exit their bank car while he checks it for a bomb, then drives away in it. Under Japanese statute of limitations laws, the thief could come forward today with no repercussions, but nobody has ever taken credit for the crime.

December 9

1965—UFO Reported by Thousands of Witnesses

A large, brilliant fireball is seen by thousands in at least six U.S. states and Ontario, Canada as it streaks across the sky, reportedly dropping hot metal debris, starting grass fires, and causing sonic booms. It is generally assumed and reported by the press to be a meteor, however some witnesses claim to have approached the fallen object and seen an alien craft.

December 8

1980—John Lennon Killed

Ex-Beatle John Lennon is shot four times in the back and killed by Mark David Chapman in front of The Dakota apartment building in New York City. Chapman had been stalking Lennon since October, and earlier that evening Lennon had autographed a copy of his album Double Fantasy for him.