Vintage Pulp

September 23 2024

DANCE OF DEATH

Murder to the beat of a different drummer.

You could be forgiven for thinking the front of Robert Dietrich’s, aka E. Howard Hunt’s, 1961 novel Steve Bentley’s Calypso Caper was painted by Robert McGinnis, but it’s actually the work of Tom Miller. So sayeth the rear cover, otherwise we’d have guessed McGinnis and had little doubt.

What’s truly doubtless, though, is that Hunt rescued the Steve Bentley adventures from an ignoble death by toning down the invective. In this episode, the seventh Hunt wrote and the third we’ve read, Bentley is sent down to the steamy island of St. Thomas to help with a tricky tax case and arrives in time to see his client jailed on suspicion of murder. What’s an accountant to do at that point? He launches his own investigation.

It’s all very unlikely, but it works this time around, and Hunt manages to do well with island flavor (though he’s not particularly kind to island inhabitants). There’s plenty of action, drinking, sexual intrigue, and repartee. This is well above average work from Mr. Watergate. So, after a success, a failure, and today’s success, what next? We’ll leave on a high note. E. Howard, we barely knew ye.

Virgin Islands, St. Thomas, Dell Publications, Robert Dietrich, E. Howard Hunt, Howard Hunt, Tom Miller, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

July 28 2024

ROCKS AND A HARD PLACE

If diamonds are a girl's best friend, emeralds are a girl's dodgy acquaintance.

This will come as a shock to those who don’t already know, but Robert Dietrich was a pseudonym used by E. Howard Hunt, before his stint as Richard M. Nixon’s hotel breaching black bag operative. 1957’s Murder on the Rocks is the first entry in his nine-part franchise about a Washington, D.C. based accountant, lawyer, and ex-military tough guy named Steve Bentley. Here he’s entangled in the search for a priceless emerald called the Madagascar Green, which he somehow needs to locate and exchange with the fake in order to save the owner the embrassement of knowing he was ever robbed. Quite a task.

Hunt makes the title character Bentley a cunning, smart-mouthed upsetter of applecarts and damager of delicate sensibilities. He seems to particularly dislike dishonesty and insiderism. You can’t be more dishonest or inside than breaking the law for the president the way Hunt did, so it goes to show that fictional characters are not always analogous to their authors. But Hunt certainly wasn’t the first or last writer to morph into a destructive political tool. The past is prologue, and all that. In any case, though Murder on the Rocks loses some momentum toward the end, for the most part it’s not unlike the Madagascar Green—colorful, multi-faceted, and hard-edged. We have a feeling the Bentley series is good.

Washington D.C., Dell Publications, Robert Dietrich, E. Howard Hunt, Howard Hunt, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

September 3 2022

MIGHT MAKES ALRIGHT

And this stretch is great for the shoulders. We violent ones know how to take care of bodies in more ways than one.

Above is a Barye Phillips cover for Howard Hunt’s 1950 novel The Violent Ones, about World War II vet Paul Cameron, summoned by his buddy Phil Thorne back to Paris, where they spent part of the war. Thorne needs help with an unspecified jam, but he’s killed not long after Cameron arrives, who then vows revenge against any and all. There’s nothing subtle here. He turns bull-in-china-shop, knocks heads, gets knocked, uncovers commies, and manhandles various women—who fall for him anyway. The murder has to do with the smuggling of gold to Hanoi. Cameron mocks the head smuggler at one point, “So now you’re sending gold to your cousins in Indo-China so the Little Brown Man can come into his own?” Hunt couldn’t imagine Vietnam escaping the western orbit, but it happened anyway. That’s irony. He’s an intriguing author and a uniquely interesting man, which means he may appear here again.

France, Vietnam, Paris, Hanoi, Howard Hunt, E. Howard Hunt, Barye Phillips, cover art, literature

Intl. Notebook

September 25 2010

POLICE TECHNIQUES

When is a fluff piece not a fluff piece? When the Police Gazette publishes it.

In this September 1972 issue of The National Police Gazette editors tell us all about the hidden horrors of vasectomies, how to make money playing craps in Las Vegas, and how to get rich in the nudist camp business. But of particular interest, to us at least, is the article on H.R. Haldeman, who is referred to as Richard Nixon’s hatchet man on the White House staff. It’s a curious designation timing-wise, because the general public was by now aware that several men connected to Nixon’s staff had broken into Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. The first set of indictments against the five burglars, as well as G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, would come down from a grand jury two weeks after The Gazette hit newsstands.

Their Haldeman profile amounts to a sort of fluff piece, wherein his meanness is extolled as a virtue, but the story also has the effect of telling the Gazette’s vast readership that Haldeman is the man to point fingers at for Nixon’s mounting difficulties. Example: “You may not see him [snip] but Harry Robert Haldeman is there, behind the scenes, pulling the strings…” And later: “Organization is Haldeman’s talent and he knows how to use that talent. President Nixon will be its beneficiary.” Haldeman describes himself thusly: “I guess the term ‘sonofabitch’ fits me.” Never in the annals of 20-20 hindsight has someone looked so much like a fall guy. Haldeman, of course, was a major player in Watergate, but the timing of such an article, in America’s oldest magazine, in which Haldeman paints a target on his own back, is curious to say the least.

By the beginning of 1973 the strings were unraveling at the White House and Nixon was in full ass-coverage mode. In April he asked for and received H.R. Haldeman’s resignation, along with that of John Erlichman. Eventually, Haldeman went to prison, where he served eighteen months for obstruction of justice and conspiracy. Richard Nixon managed to ride out the scandal for two years, but finally resigned in August 1974. Haldeman of course wrote a book about Watergate, and in it he shed some light on what had happened, and who had failed. But he also made it clear that he had few regrets: “There is absolutely no doubt in my mind today that if I were back at the starting point, faced with the decision of whether to join up, even knowing what the ultimate outcome would be, I would unhesitatingly do it.”

Watergate, Police Gazette, Richard Nixon, H. R. Haldeman, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt, Howard Hunt, John Erlichman, tabloid

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

October 7

1959—Dark Side of Moon Revealed

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).

October 6

1966—LSD Declared Illegal in U.S.

LSD, which was originally synthesized by a Swiss doctor and was later secretly used by the CIA on military personnel, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and members of the general public in a project code named MKULTRA, is designated a controlled substance in the United States.

October 5

1945—Hollywood Black Friday

A six month strike by Hollywood set decorators becomes a riot at the gates of Warner Brothers Studios when strikers and replacement workers clash. The event helps bring about the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, prohibits unions from contributing to political campaigns and requires union leaders to affirm they are not supporters of the Communist Party.

October 4

1957—Sputnik Circles Earth

The Soviet Union launches the satellite Sputnik I, which becomes the first artificial object to orbit the Earth. It orbits for two months and provides valuable information about the density of the upper atmosphere. It also panics the United States into a space race that eventually culminates in the U.S. moon landing.

October 4

1970—Janis Joplin Overdoses

American blues singer Janis Joplin is found dead on the floor of her motel room in Los Angeles. The cause of death is determined to be an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.