vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Being in the right place at the right time is an art. The three guys on the cover of Amanda Moore’s 1964 sleaze novel The Yes Girl hope to have mastered it, but we didn’t buy the book to find out. We’ve read a fair number of Midwood paperbacks now and, though we love the covers, as a rule the writing is pretty bad. That said, we have a few Midwoods sitting on our shelves awaiting attention. You’ll see those later.
We’re always right. We’ve gotten used to it. A couple of years ago we shared Paul Rader cover art for the Russell Trainer sleaze novel His Daughter’s Friend, but lamented that the book was selling for more than two-hundred dollars. Have a look at the art here. It’s worth the detour. We consider it one of Rader’s best covers, but the price made the purchase a non-starter for us. Sleaze fiction is usually poorly written, and in our view no cover makes a book worth two bills. But we hoped we’d see it listed at a reasonable price one day.
It happened. His Daughter’s Friend popped up in a large group of paperbacks for which we paid a little more than a hundred bucks. We’d have already done well paying half rate for a potentially two-hundred dollar paperback, plus more books, but it gets better. In the lot were a few of the more expensive gets in the paperback game—among them Paul Renin’s Midnight Sinner, listed for up to $60.00, and Mary Clare’s rare White Man’s Slave, which we saw sell most recently for $120.00. Jackpot. Of course, the ironic part is we’ll never actually cash in our chips—the books are way too useful to us as conversation pieces.
We delved into His Daughter’s Friend immediately upon reciept. Trainer spins the tale of widowed advertising man Mark Corbin, who gets mixed up with his virginal daughter Judy’s sexually precocious best friend Lithe. We thought the story might be one in which Corbin is tempted but ultimately resists, but no, he gets on seventeen-year-old Lithe at first opportunity, and second, and third, and so forth. She falls in love with him, but he feels considerable guilt and tries to break off the relationship. At that point Lithe turns vengeful and seeks payback, even if it means using Judy as a pawn.
How dark does His Daughter’s Friend get? Pretty dark—Lithe arranges to have Judy raped. Revealing that would normally be giving away too much plotwise, but were you going to pay an exorbitant amount for mediocre fiction? Really? Oh. In that case—spoiler alert! But there’s more to Trainer’s Lolita-lite, so if you see it on sale feel free to splurge. Trainer may not be a great writer, but he tries to make a point without overstepping his bounds—which is to say, when it comes to sleaze he knows his place. We’ll be getting into the rest of these novels over the next year or two.
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.”
This cover for the 1965 sleaze novel Overnight Guest features art from Victor Olson depicting an actual scene from the story, except in the text the woman in question is face up and topless. It’s a good illustration, notable for the fact that it wasn’t painted by Paul Rader, who you’d be forgiven for thinking painted every cover for Midwood Books. As for Ludwell Hughes’ story, it’s the tale of a middle-aged man who becomes obsessed with two girls aged seventeen and nineteen, and pursues them relentlessly despite dire and multiplying consequences. This tale isn’t one where main character Richard Pell’s behavior is thought to be acceptable for the period. Pell knows himself to be a predator, and Hughes writes in zero excuses for his behavior. That’s pretty progressive for the era. Unfortunately, the book also takes a wrenching turn into evil lesbian tropes—not unusual in a Midwood paperback. Even so, Overnight Guest was a surprise in terms of theme and quality.
Above: more from Paul Rader, who, if we were ranking paperback artists (which we don’t), would certainly be in the top five (we just did). This effort for Bart Matty’s Next Stop, Shame is signed with a single R, and is high quality, as always. It came in 1966.
This awesome Paul Rader cover for Russell Trainer’s 1963 novel No Way Back made us think we were dealing with another natural disaster story—and you know we love those—but the art deceived us. The book is actually a sleaze tale—maybe the nipples should have clued us in—with only the last fifteen pages set during a storm. It’s about a man who returns from the Vietnam War to find that his wife has gotten involved in an affair with a woman who’s also taken his spot in his real estate business. While it’s filled with titillation, it’s relentlessly anti-gay, with Trainer calling homosexuality depraved, perverted, wicked, and other slanders. It would be interesting to know, considering how hot his love scenes are, whether the moralizing came from his mind or those of Midwood editors. The climax where Trainer’s lesbian turns homicidal is unlikely, at best. Readers might have believed it in 1963, but they wouldn’t now. As we’ve said many times, book and poster art have gotten worse since the mid-century, but culture has gotten better.
With George McGee’s 1961 novel Desire Under the Sun we were hoping for a hot and heavy set-in-Mexico sleazer with possibly a little gunplay. We didn’t get that, exactly. It mostly has to do with a gold mine in an unnamed state in the western U.S., and one man’s attempt to steal a fortune from another. The man who owns the mine is crazy and at one point even chains up his poor wife Lupe and makes her a gold digging slave. She’s the cover figure in Paul Rader’s art, but in the story she’s not a vampy mama. But this is Rader we’re talking about. All his women were vamps, none more so than this one who’s going to have a very interesting a-shaped tan on her torso.
Lupe is facing a terrible future of working to exhaustion in the mine, then being shot and buried. Unless of course her husband dies somehow. Then the mine and everything in it is hers. Enter an ambitious hunter with dreams of getting rich. He’ll consider rescuing Lupe—at a price. There’s also a repressed incel who wants Lupe for himself—at a price. And there’s a family of hungry mountain lions watching all this, planning a human repast. It sounds weird, we know, but the story isn’t bad. It’s just limply written. But the Rader cover, all on its own, makes Desire Under the Sun a little nugget of gold. It’s another treasured addition to our collection.
Paul Rader was tapped by Midwood books so often he like a house artist. Paperbacks with very nice Rader covers can get expensive, but not in this case. We got lucky and found Richard Mezatesta’s 1963 sleaze tale One of the Girls for twelve bucks. It deals with the lovely Barbara Sellers, nineteen and horny as hell in New York City, paired up with a jealous, violent lover, but who wants to find a worthwhile replacement and expand her social horizons. Instead, an eely smooth pimp first gives Barbara some serious bedwork, then turns her out for rich customers.
As always with the call girl sub-genre of sleaze, the lead’s rationale for turning to prostitution is unconvincing, but it isn’t the point anyway. The point is titillation, and Mezatesta is pretty good on that front. Barbara satisfies numerous clients, wrestles with feelings of love for one man, and takes the requisite journey into self-loathing, yet finds quitting the sex-for-pay life difficult. Will she be a prostitute forever? Will she get married and live happily ever after? A gamut of endings are always in play in these novels, which means you can never guess until the final chapter. In all, this particular effort was pretty good.
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 Buenos Aires, Argentina, four Israeli Mossad agents abduct fugitive Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who had been living under the assumed name and working for Mercedes-Benz. Eichman is taken to Israel to face trial on 15 criminal charges, including crimes against humanity and war crimes. He is found guilty and executed by hanging in 1962, and is the only person to have been executed in Israel on conviction by a civilian court.
Doris Eaton Travis, who was the last surviving Ziegfeld Follies chorus girl, dies at age 106. The Ziegfeld Follies were a series of elaborate theatrical productions on Broadway in New York City from 1907 through 1931. Inspired by the Folies Bergères of Paris, they enjoyed a successful run on Broadway, became a radio program in 1932 and 1936, and were adapted into a musical motion picture in 1946 starring Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Lucille Ball, and Lena Horne.
In the U.S., J. Edgar Hoover is appointed director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a position he retains until his death in 1972. Hoover is credited with building the FBI into a large and efficient crime-fighting agency, and with instituting a number of modern innovations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories. But he also used the agency to grind a number of personal axes and far exceeded its legal mandate to amass secret files on political and civil rights leaders. Because of his abuses, FBI directors are now limited to 10-year terms.
American actress Joan Crawford, who began her show business career as a dancer in traveling theatrical companies, but soon became one of Hollywood’s most prominent movie stars and one of the highest paid women in the United States, dies of a heart attack at her New York City apartment while ill with pancreatic cancer.
In Monaco, upon the death of Prince Louis II, twenty-six year old Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand Grimaldi, aka Rainier III, is crowned Prince of Monaco. Rainier later becomes an international household name by marrying American cinema sweetheart Grace Kelly in 1956.
After having told a gathering of science fiction writers two years earlier that the best way to become a millionaire was to start a new religion, American author L. Ron Hubbard publishes Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. The book is today one of the canonical texts of Scientology, referred to as “Book One”, and its publication date serves as the first day of the Scientology calendar, making today the beginning of year 52 AD (After Dianetics).
American science fiction and pulp writer Theodore Sturgeon, who pioneered a technique known as rhythmic prose, in which his text would drop into a standard poetic meter, dies from lung fibrosis, which may have been caused by his smoking, but also might have been caused by his exposure to asbestos during his years as a Merchant Marine.
