Vintage Pulp

June 29 2018

BOATLOAD OF TROUBLE

You two stop fighting or I won't let either of you rub sunscreen on my back.

We got lazy about scanning again, but today we’re back to Australia’s Adam magazine with an issue published this month in 1970. The cover illustrates Mark Bannerman’s sea adventure “Day of the Knife,” in which a habitual troublemaker is released from an island prison by a connected police official on the condition that he recover a cache of Spanish gold. The gold happens to be aboard a ship that sank a hundred years ago in shark infested waters. This isn’t actually the major problem. The more serious issue is that he strikes up an affair with the wife of the rich man sponsoring the expedition, and quickly learns the wife wants her husband dead. Since they’ll be at sea together, what better time to do it than during the diving operation? But when he eventually feeds the husband to hungry sharks the femme fatale reverses course, accuses him of murdering her husband out of jealousy, and gets him tossed back in jail. It’s only when he’s sentenced to death at his trial that he realizes it isn’t just the wife who set him up, but the police official too—the pair had been lovers all along. It’s pretty straightforward stuff as adventure fiction goes, and not well written, but enjoyable just the same. Other tales in the magazine are better, particularly “The Mirage” by Walter S. Bratu. We have dozens of issues of Adam in the website, so if you want to see more from this publication just click the keywords at bottom.

Australia, Adam Magazine, Mark Bannerman, Walter S. Bratu, magazine art, literature, nudity

Vintage Pulp

March 18 2017

ADAM AND EVIL

You brute! Why don't you enslave someone your own size!

Above, more Down Under goodness from Australia’s Adam magazine, with a cover from this month in 1969 depicting a scene from Mark Bannerman’s “Murder in Marseilles.” It’s a tale of kidnapping and slavery, or as the author constantly puts it, “white slavery.” This is a term you run into often mid-century and pulp literature, and of course the idea is that enslaving white people must be specially pointed out, as it’s presumed to be orders of magnitude more evil than just plain slavery. In this case, a “swarthy Algerian” is the villain, and a Marseillaise beauty is the target. Do we need to tell you this plot is foiled? Of course not.

Adam offers another interesting feature—a piece of factual journalism entitled “Wild Girls of the American Suburbs.” It’s about apartment complexes for singles, which are described as if they’re twenty-four hour sex parties. All of this being well before our time, we weren’t sure if such places actually existed, but it seems they did, in locales all over the U.S., particularly San Francisco, the Jersey Shore, Myrtle Beach, and Fire Island. Apparently Los Angeles had a famous one called Villa Dionysus, which we can’t help noticing would be initialed V.D. Hopefully a walk-in-clinic was somewhere in the same zip code. Twenty-seven scans below.

Australia, France, Marseilles, Adam Magazine, Mark Bannerman, magazine art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

November 11

1918—The Great War Ends

Germany signs an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside of CompiÃ¨gne in France, ending The Great War, later to be called World War I. About ten million people died, and many millions more were wounded. The conflict officially stops at 11:00 a.m., and today the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month is annually honored in some European nations with two minutes of silence.

November 10

1924—Dion O'Banion Gunned Down

Dion O’Banion, leader of Chicago’s North Side Gang, is assassinated in his flower shop by members of rival Johnny Torrio’s gang, sparking the bloody five-year war between the North Side Gang and the Chicago Outfit that culminates in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

November 10

1940—Walt Disney Becomes Informer

Walt Disney begins serving as an informer for the Los Angeles office of the FBI, with instructions to report on Hollywood subversives. He eventually testifies before HUAC, where he fingers several people as Communist agitators. He also accuses the Screen Actors Guild of being a Communist front.

November 9

1921—Einstein Wins Nobel

German theoretical physicist Albert Einstein is awarded the Nobel Prize for his work with the photoelectric effect, a phenomenon in which electrons are emitted from matter as a consequence of their absorption of energy from electromagnetic radiation. In practical terms, the phenomenon makes possible such devices as electroscopes, solar cells, and night vision goggles.

November 9

1938—Kristallnacht Begins

Nazi Germany’s first large scale act of anti-Jewish violence begins after the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan. The event becomes known as Kristallnacht, and in total the violent rampage destroys more than 250 synagogues, causes the deaths of nearly a hundred Jews, and results in 25,000 to 30,000 more being arrested and sent to concentration camps.

November 8

1923—Hitler Stages Revolt

In Munich, Germany, Adolf Hitler leads the Nazis in the Beer Hall Putsch, an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the German government. Also known as the Hitlerputsch or the Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch, the attempted coup was inspired by Benito Mussolini’s successful takeover of the Italian government.

November 8

1932—Roosevelt Unveils CWA

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt unveils the Civil Works Administration, an organization designed to create temporary winter jobs for more than 4 million of the unemployed.