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vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news

ELLIS’S ISLAND

Finally! Not another soul in sight. For some reason, the beach always gets crowded right where I am.

In this 1937 promo image U.S. actress Patricia Ellis has channeled our exact sentiment, as our local beaches begin to fill with vacationers. Luckily, we have lots of beaches, and like Ellis, we know some secret spots. She had a busy run in Hollywood, appearing in more than forty films from 1932 to 1939. Among them were The Lady in the Morgue, based on a Jonathan Latimer novel, The Case of the Lucky Legs, based on an Erle Stanley Gardner novel, While the Patient Slept, based on a Mignon G. Eberhart novel, and The Narrow Corner, based on a W. Somerset Maugham novel. That’s a lot of high quality source material. We’ll try to see one or more of those films.

The Lady in the Morgue, The Case of the Lucky Legs, While the Patient Slept, The Narrow Corner, Patricia Ellis, Erle Stanley Gardner, Mignon G. Eberhart, W. Somerset Maugham

A WOMAN OF HER WORD

Okay then, I promise not to murder you. Feel better?

Mignon G. Eberhart’s The Promise of Murder, which came in this Dell edition in 1961 with art by Mort Engel, was originally published as Melora in 1959. We turned to Eberhart because we wanted a break from the type of women that predominate male-authored vintage crime fiction. Eberhart, even in her less successful efforts, creates women with enough emotional depth to cleanse the palate that occasionally becomes too flavored by hard-as-nails femmes fatales. We haven’t yet read a book of hers we truly loved, but we always like her women. She has a knack of making them relatable.

In this book Eberhart tells the story of Anne Wystan, whose husband’s ex-wife Melora returns to the Wystans’ lives for mysterious reasons. She’s literally inside the sprawling Wystan mansion one day when Anne returns from an outing. That sets the creepy meter ticking. It hits peak levels when Anne keeps finding notes promising, “I’m going to kill you.” But she doesn’t believe the threat is real until, during the night of a snowstorm, with the house’s electricity down because of the weather (or is it the weather?), she’s attacked by a man in black.

Between Melora resurfacing, a sister-in-law who unilaterally runs the Wystan domicile like her personal fiefdom, a sixteen-year-old niece who treats Anne shabbily, and the black-clad intruder, Eberhart hits the same note over and over of others attempting to deny a woman control over her own circumstances. We won’t tell you whether the promise of murder is kept, but we can tell you that The Promise of Murder manages to be creepy and mostly interesting, perhaps dragging just a bit in the late middle stages before rebounding for the climax. We still didn’t love it, but it’s our favorite Eberhart so far.

Dell Publications, Mignon G. Eberhart, Mort Engel, cover art, literature

EXTREME WEATHER

It's characterized by a rise in freak events and a general increase in harming.

We used the term “swooning flowers of maidenhood” last time we read a Mignon Eberhart novel, and she holds true to form with 1949’s House of Storm. It’s set on a small Caribbean island—so small in fact that it’s named for the family that runs a plantation there. Murder occurs as a tropical storm shuts down transport and strands swooning flower and bride-to-be Nonie Hovenden with others in a large house. The real storm is (of course) emotional and deals with a weighty romantic subplot centered around her wishing to escape her pending nuptials so she can marry the man she really loves—who soon becomes murder suspect number one.

It’s less complicated than it sounds. The murder plotline is interesting enough and the atmosphere is reasonably well rendered, but all you really need to know is that Eberhart operated at the nexus of suspense and romance, and here Nonie’s breathless flutterings are almost intense enough to riffle the book’s pages. If you can take that sort of thing, you’ll like House of Storm. We kept making moments to finish it despite our reservations, so we have to call it a success. But we’re suckers for tropical island fiction—even when there’s breastbeating romance at its core—so take our endorsement with a grain of salt.

Bantam Books, Mignon G. Eberhart, cover art, literature

MIDNIGHT VISITOR

Sorry to scare you. Just triple checking. So it's a firm no on that dinner invitation. Any chance you'd meet me for coffee?

In one of our favorite episodes of The Simpsons, Bart is on edge because he’s being stalked by Sideshow Bob, who wants to kill him. Homer decides to show Bart a new hockey mask and chainsaw he’s bought. He bursts into Bart’s room wearing the mask, brandishing the roaring chainsaw, and yells, “Hey Bart! Check out my new hockey mask and chainsaw!” Bart screams in terror, and Homer, realizing he’s chosen the worst possible time to show off these purchases, backs out of the room apologizing.

Amazingly, a scene exactly like that occurs in Mignon G. Eberhart’s 1946 Miami based parlor mystery The White Dress, except protagonist Marny Sanderson is terrified of a killer who’s been stalking her while wearing a black raincoat with a black scarf wrapped around his head. Another character dons the same costume and walks unannounced into her room with the intention of confirming her description of the killer. He doesn’t yell, “Hey Marny, did he look anything like THIS!” But he might as well have. His subsequent apology: “My God, how stupid of me. It never occurred to me that I might frighten you.” We got a hearty laugh from that.

None of this is to say The White Dress is bad, but it’s certainly obtuse in parts. It’s also old fashioned, even for a novel from the period. Authors like Dashiell Hammett had debuted more than a decade earlier and changed the conventions of detective novels, peopling them with hard-boiled men and women. Swooning flowers of maidenhood like Marny continued to exist in the sub-genre of romantic mysteries Eberhart specialized in, but ladies of leisure faced with murder don’t react in proactive ways.

That’s where the romance comes in, as Marny attracts the attentions of a dashing Navy flier who makes it his latest mission to swoop down and save the hot damsel in distress. Though more decisive than Marny, his approach to the mystery is often ridiculous. Without getting deeply into it, suffice it to say he has a couple of dangerously cockeyed brainstorms. But you know what? For all its quirks we still liked The White Dress. It’s a window onto a romanticized realm we’ve never understood. Maybe it never truly existed. But viewed anthropologically, it’s engaging and amusing.

Miami, Bantam Books, Mignon G. Eberhart, cover art, literature

CLAMEUR FOR ATTENTION

All her problems turned out to be relative.

Above: cool French cover art for Mignon G. Eberhart’s 1937 mystery novel Danger in the Dark, also known as Hand in Glove, and released in France by Presses de la Cité in 1947 as Une clameur dan la nuit, which translates as “a scream in the night.” A man means to stop the distant cousin he loves from getting married, but when her fiancée turns up dead the two relatives decide to make the scene look like a robbery to avoid the police suspecting them of murder. But who did the killing? Eberhart had a long and distinguished literary career, typically mixing her mysteries with strong elements of romance and ending up with Christie-meets-Harlequin. This is a prime example, and a well reviewed book.

France, Presses de la Cité, Une clameur dan la nuit, Danger in the Dark, Mignon G. Eberhart, cover art, literature

HAYAT VOLTAGE

Ottoman, Ottoman, Otto mighty mighty good man.

Above: assorted Turkish language paperbacks published by the pop culture magazine Hayat, circa 1960s and early 1970s. The authors are, top to bottom, Allison L. Burks, Gerald de Jean, William McGivern, Ngaio Marsh, William Irish, Mignon G. Eberhart, Nora Roberts, Ellery Queen (aka Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, aka Daniel Nathan and Manford Lepofsky), John Dickson Carr, and Robert Bloch. 

Turkey, Hayat, Gerald de Jean, William McGivern, Ngaio Marsh, William Irish, Mignon G. Eberhart, Nora Roberts, Ellery Queen, Frederic Dannay, Manfred Bennington Lee, Daniel Nathan, Manford Lepofsky, John Dickson Carr, Allison L. Burks, Robert Bloch, cover art, cover collection, literature

NO MUSS, NO FUSS

Not the hair! Not the hair!

Mignonette Eberhart was an acclaimed mid-century crime writer who was the first to create a female sleuth, which she did in her book The Patient in Room 18. This was a year before Agatha Christie created her immortal sleuth Jane Marple in Murder at the Vicarage. Eberhart soon veered away from pure whodunits and into romance-mysteries that usually centered on good women involved with bad men. The tagline of 1940’s The Hangman’s Whip—“Death is quicker than divorce”—gets that idea across succinctly. It was in these writings that Eberhart flourished, becoming internationally known and highly paid. She authored fifty-nine books, six of which were adapted to film, along with three of her short stories, and in 1971 she earned the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award. Eberhart died in 1996, but she changed the romance genre and entertained millions while doing it. Her books—including The Hangman’s Whip—remain widely available.      

Popular Library, Mystery Writers of America, Mignon G. Eberhart, Agatha Christie, cover art, literature
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1916—Richard Harding Davis Dies

American journalist, playwright, and author Richard Harding Davis dies of a heart attack at home in Philadelphia. Not widely known now, Davis was one of the most important and influential war correspondents ever, establishing his reputation by reporting on the Spanish-American War, the Second Boer War, and World War I, as well as his general travels to exotic lands.

1919—Zapata Is Killed

In Mexico, revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata is shot dead by government forces in the state of Morelos, after a carefully planned ambush. Following the killing, Zapata’s revolutionary movement and his Liberation Army of the South slowly fall apart, but his political influence lasts in Mexico to the present day.

1925—Great Gatsby Is Published

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is published in New York City by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Though Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s best known book today, it was not a success upon publication, and at the time of his death in 1940, Fitzgerald was mostly forgotten as a writer and considered himself to be a failure.

1968—Martin Luther King Buried

American clergyman and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., is buried five days after being shot dead on a Memphis, Tennessee motel balcony. April 7th had been declared a national day of mourning by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and King’s funeral on the 9th is attended by thousands of supporters, and Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

1953—Jomo Kenyatta Convicted

In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta is sentenced to seven years in prison by the nation’s British rulers for being a member of the Mau Mau Society, an anti-colonial movement. Kenyatta would a decade later become independent Kenya’s first prime minister, and still later its first president.

1974—Hank Aaron Becomes Home Run King

Major League Baseball player Hank Aaron hits his 715th career home run, surpassing Babe Ruth’s 39-year-old record. The record-breaking homer is hit off Al Downing of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and with that swing Aaron puts an exclamation mark on a twenty-four year journey that had begun with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro League, and would end with his selection to Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame.

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BRAZIL UNDERGROUND

Edições de Ouro and Editora Tecnoprint published U.S. crime novels for the Brazilian market, with excellent reworked cover art to appeal to local sensibilities. We have a small collection worth seeing.

FLUENT IN VIOLENCE

Walter Popp cover art for Richard Powell's 1954 crime novel Say It with Bullets.

IN HOT WATER

There have been some serious injuries on pulp covers. This one is probably the most severe—at least in our imagination. It was painted for Stanley Morton's 1952 novel Yankee Trader.

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