I've taught my daughter only about 10% of what I know, erotically speaking, so choose carefully.
Above: an unattributed Lion Books cover for Jim Thompson’s 1954 novel A Hell of a Woman. We read it a while back, and what can we say? It’s Thompson. He’s great. He wrote a lot of books, but we’ve only read five. We’ll add to that number soon.
Thompson's Town is the craziest patch of real estate west of the Potomac River.
Robert Maguire handled the cover work on this edition of Jim Thompson’s Wild Town, which hit book racks in 1957. The pricing on this varies greatly. All we can say is please don’t pay $450.00 for it, like one vendor was recently asking. We got ours—the same edition—for $15.
Set in the fictional boomtown of Ragtown, Texas, the tale’s hard luck ex-con anti-hero Bugs McKenna lands a job as a hotel detective, but he’s been funnelled into the position by the corrupt local deputy, apparently to serve nefarious—though unknown—ends. Is he to spy on the hotel owner? Participate in some shady plot involving a guest? Murder somebody? It could be anything, because the deputy who orchestrated the hiring is none other than Lou Ford, the main character of Thompson’s 1952 tour de force The Killer Inside Me. If you haven’t read it, long story short, he’s a psychopath.
Trouble doubles when Bugs accidentally karate chops the hotel accountant out a window. The death was unwitnessed and is ruled a suicide—for the moment. Ford suspects foul play, but Bugs feels in the clear. Then someone starts to blackmail him, someone who says they were in the closet and saw the killing. Who is the blackmailer? Can Bugs outwit them somehow? He isn’t that bright—a type Thompson specialized at writing—so his efforts to manage his difficulties are haphazard at best.
But maybe Bugs is brighter than he seems. He’ll need to be, pitted as he is against Thompson’s iconic Lou Ford, but in the end a woman may turn out to be his direst foe. That’s not a spoiler—the cover text suggests that a femme fatale is pulling the strings, but even Bugs doesn’t know who because he spends the book troubled by three. All of this makes for plenty of reading fun. Wild Town is no Pop. 1280—our favorite Thompson so far—but it’s diverting enough. Another recommended effort from a deft architect of chaos and criminality.
We’re in reliable literary territory today—Thompson territory. A Hell of a Woman was originally published in 1954, with this Pyramid edition coming in 1962. The story resembles James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, as an amoral opportunist is driven by lust to plan a murder. Who is the “hell of a woman” from the title? There are two candidates. The main character Frank “Dolly” Dillon love-hates his wife, so maybe it’s her. But on the other hand, it’s for his young mistress that he plots to kill an old lady and steal her stash of $100,000, so it’s probably her. $100,000 is an unlikely amount of money ($967,000 in today’s dollars) to be stashed in a spinster’s house, and of course there’s a reason for that, but you’ll have to read the book to find out. That will involve descending into the troubled and self-destructive mind of yet another Thompson anti-hero, but you won’t regret it—this is a nice effort from one of the kings of pulp.
Jim Thompson’s thriller The Getaway was made into a movie twice, the first time in 1972 with Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw, and the second time in 1994 with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. Both versions opted to change the thrust of Thompson’s tale, so if you’ve seen either movie reading the novel might provide an interesting experience. It’s a crime novel with several deeper themes. For example, Thompson expresses social isolation in the starkest terms, such as here, when writing about a group of poor country folk:
Their existence was centered around existing. They had no hope of anything more, no comprehension that there might be anything more. In a sense they were an autonomous body, functioning within a society which was organized to grind them down. The law did not protect them; for them it was merely an instrument of harassment, a means of moving them on when it was against their interest to move, or detaining them when it was to their disadvantage to stay.
Against this hostile backdrop the two main characters, Doc and Carol, are—unlike in the movies—unambiguously amoral people, a couple who are certain only that the world is institutionally corrupt, and that their only hope for survival is each other. What starts as a standard heist-and-flight tale becomes an allegorical descent into hell, complete with images borrowed from various religious myths. This makes the latter third of the novel something far weirder than expected going in, but the ultimate idea of crime as a soul-killer comes across crystal clear.
You really can’t go wrong with Thompson. While The Getaway is perhaps not as top flight as Pop. 1280 or some of his other books, it’s still one to fit into your reading schedule at some point. It was originally published in 1958, and the above edition came from Signet in 1959 and features a nice orange cover from the incomparable Bob Abbett. If you’re interested in seeing him at his best, check the small cover collection we put together here.
Purely by coincidence, we also read a novel that’s the dark twin of Never Say No to a Killer. The book was Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280, and in this one the main character is a self-described moron, and so is everyone else. At least it seems that way at first. Or maybe it’s kinder to say they’re simply unpretentious and earthy. Check out this exchange between two lawmen from adjacent counties:
“Pre-zactly!” Ken said. “So I’ll tell you what to do about them pimps. The next time they even look like they’re goin’ to sass you, you just kick ’em in the balls as hard as you can.”
“Huh? But don’t that hurt awful bad?”
“Pshaw. ‘Course it don’t hurt. Not if you’re wearing a good pair o’ boots.”
“I mean, wouldn’t it hurt the pimps?”
Once we’re immersed in this chaw-and-cornbread milieu, one character emerges to be considerably more cunning than the others. The aphorism applies again. Though he doesn’t consider himself to be smart, somehow he’s more than up to the task of conniving his way through multiple nefarious schemes to reach his ultimate goals, which consist of getting laid and not working too hard as sheriff.
The book is set during the Great Depression and its portrait of man-woman and white-black relations is both horrifying and hilarious. Thompson’s approach is partly satirical, but the actual ideas espoused by his characters are deadly serious, as well as historically grounded, such as in a conversation about whether the county’s black residents have souls. The consensus is they don’t. Why? Because they aren’t really people.
It’s a pointed commentary on the distant Jim Crow south, yet the very same question of black humanness festers at the core of America’s 2017 problems. If you doubt it ask yourself how the same observers who have limitless sympathy for a white rancher shot after initiating a standoff with federal lawmen somehow have none for unarmed black men shot in the back, or why rich white ranchers who refuse to pay their federal grazing fees are perceived as persecuted, while a poor black man trying to survive by selling loose cigarettes is not.
Critic Stephen Marche once described Pop. 1280 as “preposterously upsetting,” which is as apt a description as we can imagine. The idea of who’s really human, what is sexual consent, what are the obligations of lawmen, and what is evil are played for laughs by Thompson, but always with an incisive twist that lets you know where
his sympathies lie. Yet as shocking as the book is to read, it’s addictive and consistently entertaining, particularly when various characters dispense their tabacky soaked wisdom…
… about women: “I’d been chasing females all my life, not paying no mind to the fact that whatever’s got tail at one end has teeth at the other, and now I was getting chomped on.”
… about the mentally challenged: “You probably ain’t got as long a dingle-dangle as him—they tell me them idjits are hung like a stud hoss.”
… about learning: “I mean I caught him reading a book, that’s what! Yes sir, I caught him red-handed. Oh, he claimed he was only lookin’ at the pitchers, but I knew he was lyin’.”
We recommend Pop. 1280 highly. The Gold Medal paperback you see above with its Robert McGinnis cover art is expensive, but numerous later printings are available at reasonable prices. Just go into the reading with your psyche girded. You’ll root for the main character Nick Corey, but he’s merely one of the most charming bad apples in a town that’s rife with rot. That rot leads to the reliable pulp staples of adultery, betrayal, and murder many times over, but in the most unique and enjoyable way.
Let's trade. You give me what's in your hand and I'll give you what's in my pants.
The cover for this Lion Books edition of Jim Thompson’s The Golden Gizmo is as quirky as Thompson’s prose. The title of the book has a double meaning. A gizmo is a special ability, a gift. If you had a sense for knowing when someone was bluffing at poker, you’d say, “My gizmo told me he had nothing.” Or if you had a knack for meeting beautiful women, you’d say, “My gizmo kicked in as soon as I walked into the party.” The main character’s gizmo is the ability to sniff out scenarios that lead to profit, which comes in handy in his work as a freelance gold buyer. But there’s a literal gizmo here as well—a priceless gold watch that he steals by accident. In the end both gizmos cause him no end of trouble, and the question is whether he can get out with his hide intact. The story is enlivened by the main character’s fiery alcoholic femme fatale wife Elaine. Strange, but pretty good. The strikingly pretty cover art is uncredited, sadly.
A suitcase and a sense of adventure will take you anyplace you want to go (and some places you don't).
As noted in the above post, we’ve gotten a trip together for this summer, so we thought we’d inspire ourselves by collecting a set of paperback covers featuring characters with suitcases. Just about anything can happen once you leave the comfy confines of home and we’re hoping several of the scenes depicted here come true for us. See if you can guess which. Hint: not the one above—we already did that last year when we got caught in a monsoonal downpour that shut the airport on the day we were supposed to fly. No, we’re thinking we want something more like the below cover to happen. And actually, that’s a guarantee because the Pulp Intl. girlfriends are coming with us. Anyway, this group of covers serves as a companion set to our hitchhiker collection from last year. Art is by Robert McGinnis, Mitchell Hooks, George Gross, and others.
For Men Only was launched in New York City by Canam Publishers Sales Corp., but changed ownership several times over the years, and was even acquired at one point by pulp kingpin Martin Goodman. This particular issue is from September 1956 and contains art from Rudolph Belarski, Frank Cozzarrelli, Elliot Means, Ben Thomas, Victor Olson, and Ken Crook. Actually, it’s a miracle all the art is credited. It doesn’t happen as often as it should in these magazines. The stories accompanying those art pieces range from espionage to wilderness adventure, including non-fiction from Jim Thompson about “America’s first murderer,” a man named John Billington who came to the New World on the Mayflower. After making trouble for years in Plymouth Colony, he was finally hanged for the slaying of John Newcomen. We checked, and Billington did in fact exist. His execution in September 1630 was the first of a colonist—but certainly not the last.
And another story caught our eye. It discusses an incident on the set of an Italian movie in which a wolf got loose and tried to attackactressSilvana Mangano. According to For Men Only, co-star Guido Celano rushed the wolf, grabbed it and threw it into the air, whereupon a rifle-toting crew member nailed it like he was skeet shooting. We’re calling bullshit on that one. A while back we wrote an article about guaranteed hunt farms and were able to see some rescued gray wolves up close. They’re big—about three feet high. European wolves are even bigger. No movie production would use one. Also, we don’t picture fifty-two-year-old, five foot three Guido Celano heaving a wolf into the air like a sack of laundry. No, it was just a dog—a German Shepherd, looks like. But it’s a good story, appropriate publicity for a movie—Uomini e lupi, aka Men and Wolves—that was still months from its premiere. We have about twenty scans below and an inexhaustible supply of magazines still to share.
In pulp and sleaze fiction there are many types of bad women—vamps, golddiggers, black widows, you name it—but women who wear jeans, or even jean shorts, are destined for a special brand of trouble. Some of these women are already corrupt while others are merely at the gateway, but they all end up in the same place—Calamity City, daddy-o.
This rare promo piece for Steve McQueen’s 1972 thriller The Getaway was produced for the film’s run in Japan in 1973. Based on a novel by Jim Thompson, co-starring Ali McGraw, directed by Sam Peckinpah, written for the screen by Walter Hill, and scored by Quincy Jones, The Getaway delivers on multiple levels, as does this poster.
After two months of evading police and federal authorities, Angela Davis is arrested in New York City by the FBI. She had been sought in connection with a kidnapping and murder because one of the guns used in the crime had been bought under her name. But after a trial a jury agreed that owning the weapon did not automatically make her complicit in the crimes.
1978—Sid Vicious Arrested for Murder
Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious is arrested on suspicion of murder after the body of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen is found in their room at New York City’s Chelsea Hotel. Vicious and Spungen had a famously stormy relationship, but Vicious proclaims he is innocent. He is released on bail and dies of a heroin overdose before a trial takes place.
1979—Adams Publishes First Hitchhiker's Book
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first of five books in a series, is published by Douglas Adams. The novels follow on the heels of the tremendously successful British television series of the same name.
1976—China Coup Thwarted
The new head of the Chinese Communist Party, Hua Goufeng, snuffs out a coup led by Chairman Mao’s widow Jiang Qing and three other party members. They become known as the Gang of Four, and are tried, found guilty of treason, and receive death sentences that are later commuted to lengthy prison terms.
1987—Loch Ness Expedition Ends
A sonar exploration of Scotland’s Loch Ness, called Operation Deepscan, ends after a week without finding evidence that the legendary Loch Ness Monster exists. While the flotilla of boats had picked up three sonar contacts indicating something large in the waters, these are considered to be detections of salmon schools or possibly seals.
1971—London Bridge Goes Up
After being sold, dismantled and moved to the United States, London Bridge reopens in the resort town of Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
1975—Burton and Taylor Marry Again
British actor Richard Burton and American screen star Elizabeth Taylor secretly remarry sixteen months after their divorce, then jet away to a second honeymoon in Chobe Game Park in Botswana.