vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: an unattributed front cover plus the backside for Frenzy by Jonathan Craig, originally titled Junkie and published in 1952 by Falcon Books. This edition from Lancer Books came in 1962. We read it a few years ago and can’t remember what the “one thing she wouldn’t do” was, as teased on the cover, but we’re not curious enough to look back. Craig is generally a decent writer and this, while not his best, is still entertaining.
Do you have a friend who always complains, maybe even to the extent that it seems like nobody can please them? We don’t mean complaints that need to be aired, like about the environment or racism, but little things. Basically insignificant things. Like it’s cruel to throw lobsters in boiling water. And you’re like, “Yeah, probably, but who the fuck cares? They’re lobsters. They eat their own kind.” Anyway, we had a friend who complained in this way often, and one evening our group had gotten together and had done something he thought needed to be complained about, and he proceeded to do that, but another one of our friends turned to him and went, “Shhh… let people have fun.”
Ted Mark’s farcical novel The Nude Who Never made us feel like that complaining friend. The book is moronic from start to finish, the tale of a virgin runaway named Llona Mayper who becomes a high priced call girl, but has her first liaison interrupted in comedic fashion, then finds herself stuck in a fancy hotel without her clothes. Pursued throughout the night by the hotel detective, she sneaks from room to room, through halls and up stairwells, getting stuck in a bass drum, having a new—though always abortive—sexual adventure at each stop. We could complain about the book’s sheer ridiculousness, but it’s probably better to just let people have fun. Copyright 1967, with Stanley Borack on the cover chores.
Above: a cover for Harry Whittington’s Love Cult, published in 1962 by Lancer Books. This is an unusual case in mid-century fiction. The book is a reprint of the 1953 novel of the same name by William Vaneer, which was written under a pseudonym by James W. Lampp. Somehow the folks at Lancer got mixed up about that and attributed the book to Whittington. Embarrassing. We wonder if Lancer had to compensate Whittington in any way. You might assume the compensation would be to remove his name from this piece of low rent sleaze, but Whittington wrote plenty of books of this type this himself, so Love Cult definitely didn’t hurt his reputation. Interested in what it’s about? We tell you here.
Red-Headed Sinners was originally published in 1953, with the above edition coming from Lancer Books in 1963 fronted by uncredited art. Jonathan Craig, aka Frank E. Smith, writes simply, without much in the way of flourishes, but his stories hit hard. Sinners features a detective drummed off the King City police force for beating a female witness. The cop hopes he can redeem himself and be reinstated, but he has a drinking problem which under certain circumstances unlocks a childhood trauma that sends him into a red haze of violence. This trauma thing is handled by Craig in a hamfisted way, but the book is a gripping thriller starring a cop on the edge of self destruction—and the destruction of others. It’s definitely one for pulp fans to read.
We don’t generally like photo covers on paperbacks but this double from Lancer Books of the Day Keene novels Who Has Wilma Lathrop? and Murder on the Side is rather nice, with pretty colors and eye catching fonts. Murder on the Side deals with an ordinary guy who, when he tries to help his hot young secretary out of a sticky situation, gets involved in troubles more serious than he planned on. He goes from being bored with his life to risking it at every turn. As for the other book Wilma Lathrop, we already talked about it. You can read our bit on that here.
You’d never guess from the art, but The Big Kiss-Off deals with an Air Force pilot named Cade Cain who, after twelve years in Korea, returns to a life of boating around the Louisiana bayou and comes across the bodies of six Chinese men on an isolated mud flat. And on his first day back, too, which is pretty bad luck, even for a guy who got shot down and spent two years in a prison camp. He wants nothing to do with the bodies or whoever was responsible for putting them there, but somehow his old local nemesis learns of the find and before he knows it he’s beaten, threatened, and told to leave town again—this time for good. Two fisted loners in mid-century fiction rarely take that sort of treatment laying down. When Cain learns that his wife has sold off his family’s land, divorced him in absentia, and found comfort in his enemy’s bed, something simply has to be done.
Before he gets his vengeful ducks in a row, a near-naked fugitive swims aboard his boat and the mystery deepens. Her name is Mimi Moran, because the alliteration is strong with this book. She’s looking for her husband, who it happens is a pilot who flies illegal aliens into the U.S. for the bad guys. Cade Cain decides to help Mimi Moran and that’s when the real trouble starts. The Big Kiss-Off is a solid yarn from Day Keene. It has the usual issues common to fiction of the 1950s, for example the hero having to constantly resist forcing himself on his beautiful passenger because he’s “only human, after all.” Fortunately, even though “her flesh constantly attracted his hands like a magnet,” he contains himself—mostly. Not someone you’d want near your sister. Or any woman, really. But as a fictional hero he serves his purpose just fine.
With a setting in the endlessly fertile (for genre fiction) Louisiana bayou, and a narrative that wastes no time putting Cain in hot water, The Big Kiss-Off keeps the pages turning. It originally appeared in 1954 but the above edition was published in 1972 by Triphammer Books in Britain, with nice art by Ron Lesser borrowed from Robert Dietrich’s (E. Howard Hunt’s) 1962 Lancer Books thriller Curtains for a Lover.
Notice how Triphammer erased part of Lesser’s distinctive signature. That was obviously to keep the figure on their cropped art from looking crowded by the lettering, but we imagine it still annoyed Lesser. You can see a U.S. cover for The Big Kiss-Off in this collection of Day Keene novels we put together back in 2009.
Eunice Sudak was a prolific author, but one whose bibliography is padded by numerous film novelizations, including X—The Man with the X-Ray Eyes and The Raven, after Roger Corman’s tongue-in-cheek version of the Poe tale. One of her original pieces of fiction was 1966’s The Ice Pick in Ollie Birk, a comedic romp about a widow forced to become a prostitute to survive. That concept is just ripe for humor, right? Almost writes itself. Anyway, the widow discovers the eponymous Ollie Birk dead on her living room sofa with her ice pick in his ear, and of course must extricate herself from this sticky situation. Who did it? Perhaps the rowdy Russians down the hall. The novel is notable for its beat slang, if not its technical merit, and the Lancer Books paperback is notable for its unusual cover art of the lead character Leona Trafalgar dancing with an ice pick in her mouth. We love this image, but it’s uncredited, sadly.
A day after being captured, Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara is executed in Bolivia. In an attempt to make it appear as though he had been killed resisting Bolivian troops, the executioner shoots Guevara with a machine gun, wounding him nine times in the legs, arm, shoulder, throat, and chest.
During World War I, in the Argonne Forest in France, America Corporal Alvin C. York leads an attack on a German machine gun nest that kills 25 and captures 132. He is a corporal during the event, but is promoted to sergeant as a result. He also earns Medal of Honor from the U.S., the Croix de Guerre from the French Republic, and the Croce di Guerra from Italy and Montenegro. Stateside, he is celebrated as a hero, and Hollywood even makes a movie entitled Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper.
The New York Yankees’ Don Larsen pitches a perfect game in the World Series against hated rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers. It is the only perfect game in World Series history, as well as the only no-hitter.
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).
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.
