vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
This uncredited cover was painted for the digest novel Forgotten Passion by John Saxon, from Knickerbocker Books in 1946. Saxon was in reality James Noble Gifford, a prolific author who produced Army Widow, Pleasure Girl, Passionate Tigress, aka The Tigress, A Touch of Passion, Summer Interlude, Love Laughs Gaily, and many other efforts that all sound pretty fun. We’ll run across him again, we’re sure.
About fifty percent of the time we choose books by the cover art, and about twenty-five percent of the time the author draws us. The other twenty-five percent? Those are books that are bundled in lots. We end up with them because we have no choice if want the other books in the group. Gail Jordan’s, aka Peggy Gaddis’s Once a Sinner is one of those. The cover art is blah, and we don’t seek out Jordan especially. But we dutifully read it.
It’s a melodrama about a war veteran who gets married overseas in England, much to the chagrin of his longtime sweetheart waiting back home. When the vet shows up with his new bride Heather, the other woman, Drusilla, sets about trying to ruin the marriage by any means necessary. Dru is stubborn, spoiled, arrogant, and sneaky, yet we liked her more than any of the other characters. That’s probably not what Jordan intended, and is definitely a symptom of a book not executed to the highest level. But for all that, it isn’t bad. Maybe we’ll try another effort from her down the line. Then again, maybe not.
Above: the cover of Studio Lovers by Lee Jaquin for Knickerbocker Publications’ imprint Regular Books, 1946. In general we’ve found that women enjoy being kissed on the ear, but digging for truffles is a whole different ballgame. Remember guys, never go down the ear canal unless explicitly asked.
Tropical night, sea shore, full moon, convertible roadster, and sneaky adultery. This is a pretty nice cover for Perry Lindsay’s, aka Peggy Gaddis’s digest paperback Shameless Woman, which was published in 1948 for Knickerbocker Books’ sub-set Regular Books. It originally appeared as Sin Cinderella, which is maybe a better title. It’s about a divorcée who wants to get back at the millionaire husband who cast her aside, so she recruits an unsuspecting sixteen-year-old, teaches her how to be alluring, and sends her to ruin the ex. Of course, with a ’48 copyright date you know this doesn’t get too crazy, but that didn’t stop us from buying five other digests from the same period. We’ll give them careful reads and report back in more detail a bit later. The art on this, by the way, is uncredited.
We like this pretty cover for Loose Ladies, a “Love Novel” written by Wright Williams, aka Watkins E. Wright, for Knickerbocker Books. Williams also wrote Bar-Fly Wives, Borrowed Ecstasy, Carnival Girl, Cheaters at Love, and a bunch of other books of this ilk. Loose Ladies was number forty-eight in Knickerbocker’s Love Novels series and appeared in 1946. You’ll often see these referred to online as sleaze, but they’re chaste by today’s standards, though this one actually touches on the idea of test tube babies, weirdly. The uncredited cover painting is in a style seen on true pulp novels of the 1930s and 1940s, before good girl art took over. Maybe we’ll put together a Knickerbocker collection later. Keep an eye out.
In the U.S., eleven thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car company’s offices in Boston, Massachusetts. The skillful execution of the crime, with only a bare minimum of clues left at the scene, results in the robbery being billed as “the crime of the century.” Despite this, all the members of the gang are later arrested.
Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by a firing squad in Utah, ending a ten-year moratorium on Capital punishment in the United States. Gilmore’s story is later turned into a 1979 novel entitled The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and the book wins the Pulitzer Prize for literature.
American actress Carole Lombard, who was the highest paid star in Hollywood during the late 1930s, dies in the crash of TWA Flight 3, on which she was flying from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after headlining a war bond rally in support of America’s military efforts. She was thirty-three years old.
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps. Freikorps was a term applied to various paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. Members of these groups would later become prominent members of the SS.
The Human Be-In takes place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with between 20,000 to 30,000 people in attendance, their purpose being to promote their ideals of personal empowerment, cultural and political decentralization, communal living, ecological preservation, and higher consciousness. The event is considered the beginning of the famed counterculture Summer of Love.
