DECEPTIVE CALM

I know I look under control right now. They weren't expecting the French Revolution either.

Above: another nice cover for The Revolt of Mamie Stover. The femme fatale, painted by an uncredited artist, looks like she’s hiding something behind her back. Could it be destruction of the ruling class? This is a book we discussed in exhaustive detail a while back.

Sure, she's pretty, but you should reconsider. She works on the midway billed as the Incredible Bearded Lady, if you catch my drift.

Sometimes book covers force you to quip against your own preferences. Personally, we love bushes. We’ve highlighted more of them than can we can count and they’re all awesome. Eleonora Georgi and Kuroki Kaoru even had bushes in their armpits, which is also fine, as far as we’re concerned. And of course there’s the immortal Sophia Loren. Anyway, this cover is a really brilliant effort, with a very interesting deep field view, including lights, tents, and even tiny people in the distance below the hemline of the femme fatale’s skirt. The artist behind this great piece is, unsurprisingly, George Gross. We’d love to add the book to our collection, but on principle we can’t go above twenty dollars for these coveted covers because the actual fiction is often terrible. We don’t know anything about George L. Bottari. Maybe he’d be worth the risk, but c’est la vie. So many books, so little shelf space. The copyright on this is 1953.

There's never been a shortage of it and there probably never will.

Above: the interesting parts of an issue of Male, published this month in 1967, with a cover by Mort Kunstler, and inside art by him, Gil Cohen, Bruce Minney, and Earl Norem. The magazine launched in 1950, and though nobody knew it at the time, by 1967 the days of painted covers were numbered. By the early seventies photo covers would be routine, and in another few years the interior photo content of the magazine would shift away from cheesecake and toward pure erotica. Next stop: dissolution. But we’ll have more from Male later.

I'm sorry, but he hasn't come yet this morning. Would you care to call back after he has?

Oh, the inanity! “Eve knew she would be taking more than dictation.” It seems like an obvious direction to go for a cover tagline, but nobody ever said the editorial staff at Midwood Books were always clever. And no wonder. They put together thousands of paperbacks—literally—in eleven short years. The well tends to run dry. Resort Secretary by Arnold English came in 1962 with art by Jack Faragasso, which he signed “Giac.”

Grrrr! Grrrr! Is it just me or—grrrr!—is this not nearly as—grrrr!—macho as either of us expected?

We haven’t read Curt Carroll’s 1952 western The Golden Herd and have no plans to, but this scene on the cover is irresistible for comment. It’s obviously a duel, and we’re going to guess that if one of the combatants unclenches his teeth and just stabs the shit out of the other he’ll have lost the fight, and his honor. Guess we aren’t terribly honorable—we’d unclench and start stabbing d-block style, as fast as we could, everywhere we could. But maybe afterward a bunch of outraged cowpokes would break out a noose. Maybe that’s what happened to this guy. Well, then we’d not fight and be shunned. Shunning we can handle. We’re a little shunned now anyway.

This idea may have originated in Max Kruger’s 1930 autobiography Pioneer Life in Texas, in which he says men were tied together by their left wrists. We’re not sure there are any corroborating accounts, but it’s certainly possible, since the realm of stupid shit men did is a virtual bottomless pit. We presume Carroll wanted to make the idea even more macho for his novel, except in the realm of stupid shit men did, this seems impossible. We feel like these guys’ half-rotten frontier teeth would be snatched out mere instants into this ill-considered duel. What we like, though, is the thought that the man more diligent about oral care had an advantage. Brush often. The art here is by George Mayers.

You thought you'd gotten away from me, but the cheaper furs shed, my dear. Your trail was easy to follow.

This uncredited art of a woman wearing only a fur fronts Sax Rohmer’s exotic adventure Nude in Mink, also known as The Sins of Sumuru. Rohmer created the character of Sumuru for a BBC radio serial that ran in 1945 and 1946, after having already turned the occult-tinged pulp villain Fu Manchu into an international brand. He redeveloped Sumuru from radio into novel form, and the above result came in 1950, treating readers to the dark tale of a mysterious woman with mystical powers heading a secret organization called the Order of Our Lady. The core goal of this order is to institute matriarchal global rule and do away with war and deprivation, which are the result of men screwing up the world for millennia. And she’s the villain. Can you believe that? We were incredulous.

Anyway, since women are able to easily manipulate men and advance the Order’s aims, Sumuru utilizes great beauties exclusively, including herself—because sometimes you have to send in the first team. Nude in Mink opens with main character Mark Donovan meeting and being smitten with the lovely Claudette Duquesne, who shows up at his London flat one night dressed as in the cover art. She’s being pursued by the Order, who plan to indoctrinate her. When she disappears Donovan investigates and quickly uncovers traces of Sumuru. He teams up with his secret agent pal Steel Maitland and soon they’re trying to thwart a plot to remove, “as by the surgeon’s knife,” specific men of power, or anyone who may pose a threat to the future matriarchy. Sumuru’s main tool, aside from boner-inducing hotties, is rigor Kubus, a sort of infection that induces total and fatal rigidity. The medusan aspect of it is clear.

Nude in Mink is fine. In order to be better than fine—to be excellent—it would need to have been published twenty years earlier, which is to say Rohmer is behind the times in approach and style. The narrative mainly comprises set-piece conversations that make for broken flow, and truncated bursts of action that aren’t put across visually as well as they should be, considering the kinetic advancements in fiction that had taken place since his first book in 1913. However he’s one of the kings of atmosphere, and he makes London dark, mysterious, and laden with uncertainty. The book was a smash hit, which is why there were several sequels. While we don’t fully endorse it, we think it’s worth reading, and because of the “villain” Sumuru we may graduate to installment two if we can locate it for cheap.

Thinking back, I probably phrased the request wrong. I should have said I wanted a big juicy part in a show.

This is nice cover work for Nick Quarry’s 1960 crime caper Till It Hurts. It was painted by Barye Phillips, and clues in readers that there’s a show business backdrop to the tale. It’s not Hollywood, though—it’s New York City’s television industry, with a double dip into the jazz music scene. The story follows private eye Jake Barrow as he wanders into an alley where a man is being brutally beaten by three organized crime thugs. It turns out the victim is a private eye too, and he was being warned off a case. He takes the message to heart, and basically leaves his client in Barrow’s lap.

The client is Loretta Smith, who wants to prove that her musician husband was framed for murder, then in turn murdered by cops to cover up the frame. Despite the professional beating he witnessed, Barrow gets talked into the case and immediately focuses his attention on one cop in particular who lives in implausible luxury on a yacht. It’s a dangerous gambit to try to prove a cop is a killer, and those perils quickly mount to untenable levels. Barrow has a little help though—his pal and sometime lover is an undercover cop named Sandy, who’s separately investigatng drug connections in the Manhattan jazz scene. Maybe there’s a link between her case and Barrow’s.

This was a good book. It moves fast and has a nice cast of characters, including a now-grown child actress Barrow was in love with when he was a kid. It becomes clear early that the bad cop angle isn’t a red herring, but that’s fine. The yacht-ensconced villain is so mean and deadly that no subterfuge is needed to keep reader interest, as strategic maneuvering between opposite sides and bursts of action lead up to a kinetic climax. We learned that Till It Hurts is entry four in a Jake Barrow series, so we’ve got the first book winging its way here via international mail. But this one stood alone just fine.

Don't be so dramatic. It's not evil. Overpriced for this area, yes. Evil, no.

You see here the front and rear covers for House of Evil, a thriller published in 1954 and written by the wife/husband team of Clayre and Michel Lipman (you’ll see them as Clayre and Michael on some sites, but that’s an incorrect spelling of his name). It’s a crime novel, but horror-adjacent as the plot develops. Basically, it deals with an everyman named Roman Laird who gets tangled up in a macabre mystery when he walks into a murder scene in his girlfriend’s San Francisco apartment. His girlfriend is out of town, so the initial elements of the puzzle are: why kill in her apartment, and did the killer get who he was really after?

When the body seems to vanish, only to reappear, the puzzle deepens. As Laird begins to feel observed and the killer goes after another woman, answers continue to be in short supply. The few uncertain eyewitnesses are unhelpful with identification. Later Laird and the police uncover a set of oil paintings depicting terrors such as women hung upside down on hooks and strange beasts assaulting terrified victims. The Lipmans don’t make direct comparisons to existing artists, so the choice of what the art looks like is up to the reader’s imagination. People often go to Bosch or Goya when it comes to dark art, but we decided the paintings probably looked like those of Francis Bacon. In any case, the riddle in the story is what they might mean.

House of Evil is bold, and it’s well written and interesting, however because iterations of the book’s central gimmick have appeared quite a bit since 1954 (click only if you want to find out about a book—and movie—with an identical twist), you may guess what’s happening a few chapters in. That’s no fault of the Lipmans, but it means for modern readers that the mystery may not scintillate, the ending may feel too drawn out, and the final shocker may not hold sufficient impact. But even so, it’s a deft, dark, deeply psychological, outside-the-box thriller. We had to appreciate it.

You take instruction remarkably well. If you show the same aptitude academically you might actually graduate.

Above: a classic in the lesbian sleaze genre, 1964’s Tutor from Lesbos, by A. P. Williams. If you want a copy of this it’ll run you upwards of two-hundred dollars, which we can tell you is a lot for a book that’s almost guaranteed to be bad. We’ve never paid more than thirty dollars for a paperback, and then only a rare few times. At that maximum price, we might never be able to buy Tutor from Lesbos, but we can certainly buy something almost identical. That’s the real lesson learned.

Some call it kidnapping. He prefers to think of it as privatization.

Above: a cover for La Venere d’Amburgo, “the Venus of Hamburg,” by Georges H. Boskero. This is nice work. The gunman’s orange hair, yellow tie, and the captive’s blazing red dress really make this jump from the black, grey, and blue background. It isn’t signed but it’s probably by Franco Piccioni, who was used often by this particular publisher, Edizioni MA-GA. The copyright is 1965.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the panting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.

1960—Woodward Gets First Star on Walk of Fame

Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains nearly 2,800 stars.

1971—Paige Enters Baseball Hall of Fame

Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.

Cover art by Roswell Keller for the 1948 Pocket Books edition of Ramona Stewart's Desert Town.
Rare Argentinian cover art for The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.

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