Pulp International

vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news

WAYS AND MEANS

Can I not die? No? Then I'll take: in bed, very elderly, after earth shattering sex with my 25-year-old boytoy.

This Pocket Books edition of John Ross MacDonald’s The Way Some People Die features the first cover we’ve acquired by British illustrator Charles Binger, and quite a nice one it is. It reminds us of Ernest Chiriacka’s work, this one for instance. This is a Lew Archer thriller, third of eighteen, and as we mentioned before, this series is said to improve as it goes. We’ll see about that. This one is a standard caper that starts when a mother hires Archer to find her missing daughter, who’s gotten mixed up with the proverbial bad crowd. We’re talking the worst of the worst—hustlers, gangsters, heroin addicts, and, most terrifying of all, failed actors. Archer beats down a few tough guys, gets hit over the head in classic detective novel fashion, has beautiful women express their romantic interest, and in the end is shotgunned in the face, dismembered, and incinerated in an industrial kiln. Oh, wait—that’s not correct. Actually, he comes out on top again, bruised but triumphant. Not bad, but not great yet. Onward to book four.

Britain, Pocket Books, John Ross MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, Charles Binger, cover art, literature

GUN TO HIS HEAD

I'm not worried. I know something you don't. I'm the star of an entire series.

Above: a 1959 cover painted by James Meese for John Ross MacDonald’s 1950 thriller The Drowning Pool. We looked at a 1951 cover for this a while back, but rather than talk about the story made some dumb jokes and called it a day. So about the book. The novel features franchise detective Lew Archer trying to solve a drowning murder while dealing with a family torn apart over an inheritance. Liking the book is a matter of liking the character. Archer is cynical, quippy, and pretty rude most of the time—in short, a typical mid-century fictional detective. And therein lies the issue. He’s standard, which means the mystery needs to be unique, but instead it’s a drop-off from the series debut The Moving Target. It’s not bad, though, and consensus is the eighteen Archer adventures improve as they progress. We’ll see, because we plan to keep reading them. Hopefully Archer will make us glad he survived this gun to his head. 

Pocket Books, John Ross MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, James Meese, cover art, literature

TARGET ACQUIRED

L.A. stands for Lew Archer in John MacDonald's tinseltown thriller.


We love this cover art by Harvey Kidder for John MacDonald’s, aka Ross MacDonald’s first Lew Archer novel The Moving Target. The way the figures are placed at such a remove from the viewer and the text is stretched across the underside of the pier is strikingly different. The book was originally published in 1949 with this Pocket Books paperback coming in 1950, and it stars MacDonald’s franchise detective trying to locate a philandering millionaire who’s gone missing. The man’s wife is more concerned about the possibility of her spouse being on a bender and sharing the family money than she is about foul play, but Archer soon decides that the situation is a kidnapping.

We’d been meaning to read MacDonald for a while. We’d heard that his prose has a Dashiell Hammett vibe and that certainly turned out to be true. Set in and around Los Angeles, it weaves summer heat, wacky mysticism, outsize ambition, and broken dreams together into a tale with great Southern California flavor. And Archer is appropriately road worn: “I believed that evil was a quality some people were born with, like a harelip. But it isn’t that simple. Everybody has it in him, and whether it comes out in his actions depends on a number of things. Environment, opportunity, economic pressure, a piece of bad luck, a wrong friend.”

In this world that he’s accepted as more complex than he’d like it to be, he navigates using a solid personal code and a very hard skull—both severely tested multiple times. We gather the story is considered unremarkable compared to later Archer novels, but for us it was entirely satisfactory. It satisfied Hollywood too, which made it into a star vehicle for Paul Newman called Harper. Why the name of the detective was changed we can’t even begin to guess, but we saw the movie a couple of years ago and it was enjoyable. Below you see a 1959 Pocket Books edition of The Moving Target with Jerry Allison art. More from MacDonald later.
John MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, John Ross MacDonald, Kenneth Millar, Harvey Kidder, Jerry Allison, cover art, literature

SEX AND THE SINGLE FISH

Give a girl a light? You’ll have to lean down here, though. If I come up there I’ll start flopping around something awful.

We love this Ray App cover for John Ross MacDonald’s, aka Kenneth Millar’s mystery The Drowning Pool because it’s incredibly bizarre. Plot of the book aside (it’s the second Lew Archer novel), there can be only two reasons for the female figure to be positioned as she is—she’s either standing in a rowboat, presumably for the pure pleasure of it, or she’s trying to conceal her mermaid half. She shouldn’t worry about hiding, though—generally guys don’t hang around the docks unless they’re at least a little interested in seafood. 1950 original copyright, and 1951 on the paperback. 

Pocket Books, The Drowning Pool, John Ross MacDonald, Ross MacDonald, Kenneth Millar, Ray App, cover art, literature
Femme Fatale Image

ABOUT

EMAIL

LEGAL

  • CATEGORIES

SEARCH PULP INTERNATIONAL

PULP INTL.
HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1941—Japanese Attack Pearl Harbor

The Imperial Japanese Navy sends aircraft to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet and its defending air forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. While the U.S. lost battleships and other vessels, its aircraft carriers were not at Pearl Harbor and survived intact, robbing the Japanese of the total destruction of the Pacific Fleet they had hoped to achieve.

1989—Anti-Feminist Gunman Kills 14

In Montreal, Canada, at the École Polytechnique, a gunman shoots twenty-eight young women with a semi-automatic rifle, killing fourteen. The gunman claimed to be fighting feminism, which he believed had ruined his life. After the killings he turns the gun on himself and commits suicide.

1933—Prohibition Ends in United States

Utah becomes the 36th U.S. state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the United States Constitution, thus establishing the required 75% of states needed to overturn the 18th Amendment which had made the sale of alcohol illegal. But the criminal gangs that had gained power during Prohibition are now firmly established, and maintain an influence that continues unabated for decades.

1945—Flight 19 Vanishes without a Trace

During an overwater navigation training flight from Fort Lauderdale, five U.S. Navy TBM Avenger torpedo-bombers lose radio contact with their base and vanish. The disappearance takes place in what is popularly known as the Bermuda Triangle.

1918—Wilson Goes to Europe

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sails to Europe for the World War I peace talks in Versailles, France, becoming the first U.S. president to travel to Europe while in office.

1921—Arbuckle Manslaughter Trial Ends

In the U.S., a manslaughter trial against actor/director Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle ends with the jury deadlocked as to whether he had killed aspiring actress Virginia Rappe during rape and sodomy. Arbuckle was finally cleared of all wrongdoing after two more trials, but the scandal ruined his career and personal life.

  • FEATUREd PULP

WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT

Cover art by the great Sandro Symeoni for Peter Cheyney's mystery He Walked in her Sleep, from Ace Books in 1949.

PARIS BLEUS

The mysterious artist who signed his or her work as F. Harf produced this beautiful cover in 1956 for the French publisher S.E.P.I.A.

RAISE EM UP

Aslan art was borrowed for many covers by Dutch publisher Uitgeverij A.B.C. for its Collection Vamp. The piece used on Mike Splane's Nachtkatje is a good example.

VINTAGE ADVERTISING

Things you'd love to buy but can't anymore

Vintage Ad Image

Around the web