vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: a 1954 Australian edition from Star Books for 1953’s excellent smalltown thriller Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams. This uncredited cover isn’t especially wonderful, but we love the scene. Does anyone actually go down a staircase in the story? Well… we wouldn’t want to spoil it, but yeah, someone goes down the stairs and rolls all the way into the living room. But don’t worry. It isn’t the main character. Read more about the book here.
You know what they say. If you invent it they will come. We imagine newsstand browsers could barely resist a title as promising as The Girl Who Invented Sex. It was written by Aaron Bell and published by Kozy Books. On the backside you see that Orrie Hitt’s sleazer Nude Doll gets a full advertisement, then, those clever brains at Kozy did the same when Hitt’s book was published, flipping the script, so to speak, with The Girl Who Invented Sex touted on the rear. You see that below. We love this idea. It’s the first time we’ve seen it, but maybe it wasn’t the only time Kozy did it. We’ll keep an eye out. These were published in 1963, and the cover art for both is uncredited.
Somebody call an accountant! That should be the tagline for Robert Dietrich’s (E. Howard Hunt’s) End of a Stripper, second in his series starring Washington, D.C. tax consultant Steve Bentley. In the first book, 1957’s Murder on the Rocks, Hunt made the involvement of an accountant in what turns out to be a criminal enterprise make sense. Here, people just treat him like a cop or private dick. Need someone protected? Call the accountant. Find yourself with a corpse on your hands? Call the accountant. Even the cops treat him like a cop.
In addition to answering poorly the question of how to engineer the participation of a financial manager in deadly intrigue (it happens randomly, by the way), Hunt, considering himself to be a man’s man and working with a character cut from the same cloth, doesn’t hesitate to toss off jarring homophobic comments at pointless moments. Generally that doesn’t occur in vintage fiction because it was considered gauche, but there are exceptions. This is one of them.
And perhaps we’re quibbling, but why did the book have to be titled End of a Stripper? Maybe that wasn’t Hunt’s idea, but it hurt the story because Bentley gets romantically entangled early with the peeler in question Linda Lee (real name Greta Kirsten), but she doesn’t turn up dead until nine chapters into a fifteen chapter novel. Why not avoid giving away that crucial plot point? If she’d been killed a chapter or two in, okay, call it End of a Stripper, no harm done. But it’s hard to care about Bentley’s involvement with Linda/Greta when we know she’s ticketed for oblivion.
Then there are Hunt’s angry digressions. Example: A lovely town to raise a daughter in, I thought as I started the engine. Send her to public school and she gets started with the janitor or a football hero. Put her in private school and she learns perversion from a female gym teacher. Keep her out of school and the corner grocer knocks her off in the back room on a pile of potato sacks. The most you hope for is that she knows about contraceptives and doesn’t grow up a doper. The whole goddam world’s gone crazy.
This sort of thing was absent from Murder on the Rocks. Maybe Hunt was being careful in the first book, but here cut loose with the polemics because he felt he had an established series on his hands. Well, it isn’t established with us. After such a precipitous drop-off from the debut we’re tempted to move on permanently, but we can’t lie and pretend End of a Stripper is poorly written. It’s just ill-conceived and irritating. We’ll give Hunt another shot. We have Steve Bentley’s Calypso Caper. Let’s see how that goes.
The Italian publisher Grandi Edizioni Internazionali was a great source of paperback art during its existence, employing talents like Benedetto Caroselli, Mario de Bernardinis, and Enzo Nistri for its covers. This one for Van Reynolds’ 1974 novel Un marito per Marta Roses is probably by Caroselli, but it’s actually unattributed. The translator is Luca Martinego, and as we discussed before, since most of the credited authors on Italian crime paperbacks were pseudonyms, that means the translators were usually the authors writing in Italian. Overseas publishers were convinced that their crime novels needed American-sounding authors to entice buyers, so translator credits were a sneaky way to make sure the real writers were credited. Strange but true. We’ll have more from Grandi Edizioni Internazionali, as always. And as a final note, we’re sure we don’t need to point out that American model/actress Vikki Dougan actually wore dresses like this in public, but in case we do, check here.
1960’s So Willing is credited to Sheldon Lord and Alan Marshall, but they were pseudonyms used by Lawrence Block and Donald E. Westlake. According to Block, the two wrote this, their second collaboration as Lord and Marshall, by trading chapters through the mail. They would occasionally try to trip each other up with unexpected plot twists, and we can only imagine it must have been a hell of a lot of fun. They tell the tongue-in-cheek tale of a seventeen-year old upstate New York horndog named Vince who’s so successful with girls he decides for variety to hunt up a virgin. He fails a couple of times, ends up running away to New York City with a nineteen-year old married nymphomaniac (their term, not ours), and eventually hooks up with an heiress. Good sleaze novels are diamonds in the rough. You have to dig through a lot of filth to find one. So Willing is better than average because it’s so obviously a lark, but even with Westlake and Block behind the typewriter it’s no gem. We think erotica is the most challenging of all genres for writers. The cover art on this Midwood edition is nice, but uncredited.
In so many instances an author’s first novel is their best, but in 1951’s The Perfect Frame William Ard had not yet fully harnessed the wordcraft that would serve him in composing sparkling crime thrillers like Club 17, Wanted: Danny Fontaine, and When She Was Bad. The seeds are there, but in this debut outing for both him and his franchise character Timothy Dane, he hasn’t yet reached the elevation of subsequent work. The story deals with Dane being hired under false pretenses by a beautiful woman in danger, and leads to a New York City insurance brokerage called Oceanic where things are not quite as they seem. It doesn’t work as well as it could, but as Dane’s origin story it’s probably obligatory. Ard would later become one of the top talents in crime fiction and, later, even westerns.
The breezy Robert McGinnis (so say several online sources) cover art of a femme fatale sexily shedding a commander’s jacket belies the fact that Peter Baker’s 1967 novel Cruise is a deadly serious ensemble drama featuring seriously flawed characters that wear on the nerves from the moment they board. It’s only a rule of thumb that you must create a likeable character or two for your novel, but only the best writers can ignore it and succeed. Lolita, Gone Girl, and American Psycho might be examples. Baker is no Nabokov or Ellis, and when writers of lesser ability break rules of thumb they can break entire books. You won’t quite want the 33,500 ton cruise ship Queen Dee to sink, but you’ll wish a few people tumbled overboard.
Baker is actually a better writer than many. And his characters aren’t accidentally intolerable—there was a plan: Highsmithesque portraiture of upper class discontent and relational disfunction. His most palatable creations are Pamela Westcott and her son Richard, thirty-eight and eighteen respectively, widow and naïf, both seeking something they can’t quite define among more resolute and worldly passengers, on a Mediterranean pleasure voyage from Southampton to Beirut and back. Pamela hooks up with Chief Officer David Welch (who’s so terrible that for pleasure he brutally beats a hippie stowaway), while Richard has, first, a gay flirtation with an American theater student, then a crush on a French beauty named Simone, then a fling with a rich older lady.
Most of the action is aboard ship, but some of it happens in the ports of call—Southampton, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Athens, Izmir, Beirut, Rhodes, Naples—in that order. That would have been a scintillating real-life cruise at the time, but as a piece of fiction, the selfish, mean, and entitled passengers give the book the feel of a seagoing season of The White Lotus sans humor. Yet after a slow and taxing start, a funny thing happens on the way across the Med—the story starts to click, but only in pieces. By the end we were invested in learning how it all would turn out because the characters of Pamela, Richard, and his crush John grew on us.
We’d wager that Cruise is probably too ponderous for most readers. About one third of its omniscient interior musings could have been jettisoned. Patience is often rewarded in fiction. But time is precious. For those not impressed by its story the book may still have value—and that would be as travelogue. It’s enjoyably detailed on that score. If you’ve visited any of Queen Dee‘s stops you’ll be fascinated by Baker’s depiction of them from a lifetime ago. Maybe that isn’t the strongest endorsement for a novel, but it’s something. Baker is a good writer without an innate sense of conciseness, nor an editor cruel enough to do the job for him. But we’re glad to have gone on the trip.
Charles Williams strikes again with 1958’s find-the-real-killer novel Man on the Run, also known as Man in Motion, and motion is the operative word, as his protagonist Russell Foley is about to leap from a moving train in the tale’s first sentence. We soon learn he’d had a fistfight with a man who’d been bedding his wife, and the ruckus had caused neighbors to call the police. Somehow his romantic rival was murdered by an unknown in the few minutes after Foley fled and before the cops arrived. Maybe it was even someone inside the apartment the entire time. That would make them someone that didn’t want to be seen by Foley—the first clue. But how do you solve a crime when the police are searching for you? Foley manages to acquire an unlikely and lovely ally, but he’ll need more than random help to survive.
What sets Man on the Run apart is the ubiquity of the police. They’re everywhere. In most novels and movies of this type the fugitive pulls down his hat, pushes up his collar, and sneaks around mostly unmolested, though perhaps scared or paranoid. Here, none of that works. The cops are all over Foley, all the time. Bartenders recognize him. Clerks. People on the street. He spends much of the book sprinting—thus the title. He’s safe nowhere except in his confederate’s apartment. The ratcheted up desperation helps carry the story through its unlikely sections, and in the end Williams hits hard again. It’s more like a sliding triple than a grand slam, but he’s just too good to whiff. French television producers agreed, and in 1989 made the book into the television movie Mieux vaut courir, which means, “better to run.” The cover art on this Gold Medal edition is uncredited.
Above: a cover for One More Unfortunate, written by British author Edgar Lustgarten and published in hardback in 1947, before this Bantam paperback followed in 1949. Lustgarten, who was also a broadcast personality, generally wrote true crime. He also hosted the British series of film shorts known as Scotland Yard, which were shown in cinemas before the main features. Later he hosted a true crime television series called The Scales of Justice. Altogether he wrote five novels and numerous true crime books. One More Unfortunate, grim fiction about an unjustly accused man ramrodded to the gallows, was his debut.
Cleve F. Adams’ The Private Eye was originally published in 1942 with this Signet edition fronted by a Lu Kimmel action scene appearing in 1951. Adams sets a story in fictional Las Cruces, Arizona featuring two rival mining concerns, a current mayor and a former, a sheriff and a former, a femme fatale who the hero desires but whose husband’s suicide he’s investigating as a possible murder, which he does by first inventing a fake investigation as cover, but is sought for hire by three rival parties, accepts an offer, but with the understanding he’ll pretend to be working for his employer’s enemy, and somehow does all this while supervising a less than brilliant partner, and navigating the surprise appearance in town of his longtime flirtation who uses his cases as inspiration for her popular crime novels.
That’s just a mini summary. There’s plenty more we could add to that run-on sentence. Excellent writing is useful in helping readers keep complex mystery novels straight. Read this passage where the main character John Shannon muses on his next move and see if you think it’s excellent: Also there was the matter of a certain hunk of dynamite thrown at a man named John J. Shannon. He decided that whatever Giles MacLeish chose to tell him, and regardless of the motivation behind the telling, he, Shannon, could not lose by listening.
That’s tortured. It’s almost as if Adams had trouble keeping things straight himself. We can envision his agent and Signet editors suggesting that his plot would lose many readers, and we can imagine him assuring them that people would follow it fine. He’d have been correct if he’d been better at his job, but his style and approach aren’t what you’d call riveting, so the complexity of the story will be a problem for some. Still, we can’t knock him for treating his readers like attentive adults. We can knock him for straining credulity in numerous instances. Can someone really snap-draw a pistol and shoot someone else’s gun out of their hand? We seriously doubt it, but maybe Adams figured if it’s a good enough gimmick for Old West gunslingers it’s good enough for modern detectives. Despite its problems, though, The Private Eye is probably worth a try for hardcore vintage mystery fans.
Governor of Louisiana Huey Long, one of the few truly leftist politicians in American history, is shot by Carl Austin Weiss in Baton Rouge. Long dies after two days in the hospital.
Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, performing his hit song “Don’t Be Cruel.” Ironically, a car accident prevented Sullivan from being present that night, and the show was guest-hosted by British actor Charles Laughton.
Star Trek, an American television series set in the twenty-third century and promoting socialist utopian ideals, premieres on NBC. The series is cancelled after three seasons without much fanfare, but in syndication becomes one of the most beloved television shows of all time.
U.S. President Gerald Ford pardons former President Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office, which coincidentally happen to include all those associated with the Watergate scandal.
Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov is assassinated in a scene right out of a spy novel. As he’s waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge in London, he’s jabbed in the calf with an umbrella. The man holding the umbrella apologizes and walks away, but he is in reality a Bulgarian hired killer who has just injected a ricin pellet into Markov, who develops a high fever and dies three days later.
