Vintage Pulp

August 13 2024

MIXED MARITAL ARTS

Honey, just go watch tv or something. I really need to get through these quarterly financial reconciliations.

Marriage has its ups and downs, and those downs can range in pulp literature from deadly to downright bizarre. Above and below is a collection of vintage covers reflecting the sometimes unpredictable give and take between fictional spouses. If we wanted to we could make this set two-hundred covers long, if not longer, but today we’ll settle for a mere thirty examples. In addition, we’ve shared a lot of husband/wife covers in the past, so many that we can’t point to them all. But a few of our favorites are here, here, here, and here.

Vintage Pulp

January 28 2023

HOLLYWOOD ENDINGS

Some actresses consider it a role to die for—literally.

This is a beautiful Robert Maguire cover, somewhat different from his normal style, that he painted for Patrick Quentin’s 1957 mystery Suspicious Circumstances. Quentin was a pseudonym used by various authors, but in this case Hugh Wheeler was behind the façade. The cover blurb describes murder breaking down the Hollywood star system, and that’s basically what you get, as the book centers around nineteen-year-old Nick Rood, nervous son of globally adored actress Anny Rood, and follows his suspicions that his mother has killed in order to steal a plum movie role. The book is written in amusing and affected fashion, and is filled with characters speaking in ways no humans do, or likely ever did:

“It’s positively Greek. Sophocles would purr. Aeschylus would run not walk to the nearest papyrus or whatever he wrote on.”

How very arch. Thanks to various crises, third party manipulations, and suspicious deaths, the coveted film role repeatedly falls into and out of Anny Rood’s lap, while fragile Nick flips and flops from suspecting his mother of murder to not. Meanwhile a newcomer to the entourage, a young secretary named Delight Schmidt, turns Nick’s head with her beauty and sweetness, but may be just ambitious enough to have a hand in everything that’s occurring. Mid-century authors seem addicted to portraying Hollywood in comical or farcical fashion, but we can’t argue with the results here. Suspicious Circumstances is well written, generally interesting, and occasionally funny as hell.

Los Angeles, Dell Publications, Patrick Quentin, Hugh Wheeler, Robert Maguire, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

August 16 2015

OSTRICK RECIPE

J. Oval’s style was as clean and vivid as a master chef’s.

Illustrator J. Oval was a Brit named Ben Ostrick who painted under both his pseudonym and real name. His crisp illustrations helped make Pan Books, which debuted in 1944, one of the most eye-catching mid-century imprints. Pan is still around as part of Britain-based Macmillan Publishers, which is in turn owned by the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group of Germany. Many of Oval’s pieces for Pan were paired with works so obscure they’re almost impossible to find today, but above you see a good-sized collection, including a few we managed to turn up that haven’t been widely seen. With few exceptions they all use the same formula, though he would occasionally deviate by painting a fully rendered background, or populating a scene with more than one or two figures. You can see a couple more Oval covers in our collection of Asia-influenced paperback art here, and we also shared a small collection of his work back in 2011 that you can find here.

Vintage Pulp

September 11 2014

ALPHA BEST

Faced with this position surrender is the only option.

Here you see a pose that appears over and over in vintage paperback art—one figure looming menacingly in the foreground as a second cowers in the triangular negative space created by the first’s spread legs. This pose is so common it should have a name. We’re thinking “the alpha,” because it signifies male dominance and because of the A shape the pose makes. True, on occasion the dominator isn’t male, sometimes the unfortunate sprawled figure is depicted outside the A shaped space, and sometimes the art expresses something other than dominance, but basically the alpha (see, that just sounds right, doesn’t it?) has been used scores of times with only minor variation. You’ll notice several of these come from subsidiaries of the sleaze publisher Greenleaf Classics. It was a go-to cover style for them. We have twenty examples in all, with art by Bob Abbett, Robert Bonfils, Michel Gourdon, and others.

Vintage Pulp

November 15 2012

HONEY DO TIMES TWO

Clean the toilet? Take out the trash? Sigh. I was expecting twice the sex, not twice the chores.

Here’s a nice cover for Patrick Quentin’s, aka Hugh Wheeler’s murder mystery The Man with Two Wives, which was published in hardback in 1955, and appeared in this paperback edition in ’59. In the story, a man’s wild child first wife reappears to complicate his orderly existence with his second. His problem gets worse when his first wife’s lover is killed, and the only way he can get her off the hook is by admitting to the police—and his current wife—that he was with the first wife when the murder happened. Complicated? No doubt. An interesting bit of trivia: the flim rights were bought by David Niven, but he never managed to get the project made. The art here is by Robert McGinnis.

The Man with Two Wives, Hugh Wheeler, Patrick Quentin, Robert McGinnis, David Niven, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

August 20 2012

DEATH BECOMES HER

Die young and leave a good-looking corpse.

Above, seven excellent if morbid paperback covers showing a favorite pose of pulp artists—the beautiful supine dead woman with (just to make it extra creepy) nice cleavage. It’s amazing how similar these covers are. Art is by Maurice Thomas, Rudolph Belarski, Willard Downes, George Geygan, Harry Schaare, and unknowns.

Update: We were also sent another example in this style by a reader. Check here.

Patrick Quentin, Lawrence Lariar, Leslie Ford, Margot Neville, Maurice Thomas, Rudolph Belarski, Willard Downes, George Geygan, Harry Schaare, Albert Conroy, Carolyn Thomas, Mary Shelley, cover art, cover collection, literature

Vintage Pulp

November 1 2010

EXCRUCIATING STAIN

Is that blood? Do you care at all about my carpet and how hard that is to— Well, I guess you probably don't.

Samuel Cherry cover art for Q. Patrick’s Cottage Sinister, originally published in 1933 with this Popular Library edition coming in 1951. Patrick is yet another one of those pseudonyms for multiple authors. Writing under that name—as well as the names Patrick Quentin, Quentin Patrick, and Jonathan Stagge—was a quartet of authors consisting of Hugh Callingham Wheeler, Richard Wilson Webb, Martha Mott Kelly, and Mary Louise White Aswell. We know. This pulp stuff gets really complicated sometimes.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

October 9

1967—ChÃ© Executed in Bolivia

A day after being captured, Marxist revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara is executed in Bolivia. In an attempt to make it appear as though he had been killed resisting Bolivian troops, the executioner shoots Guevara with a machine gun, wounding him nine times in the legs, arm, shoulder, throat, and chest.

October 8

1918—Sgt. York Becomes a Hero

During World War I, in the Argonne Forest in France, America Corporal Alvin C. York leads an attack on a German machine gun nest that kills 25 and captures 132. He is a corporal during the event, but is promoted to sergeant as a result. He also earns Medal of Honor from the U.S., the Croix de Guerre from the French Republic, and the Croce di Guerra from Italy and Montenegro. Stateside, he is celebrated as a hero, and Hollywood even makes a movie entitled Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper.

October 8

1956—Larsen Pitches Perfect Game

The New York Yankees’ Don Larsen pitches a perfect game in the World Series against hated rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers. It is the only perfect game in World Series history, as well as the only no-hitter.

October 7

1959—Dark Side of Moon Revealed

The Soviet space probe Luna 3 transmits the first photographs of the far side of the moon. The photos generate great interest, and scientists are surprised to see mountainous terrain, very different from the near side, and only two seas, which the Soviets name Mare Moscovrae (Sea of Moscow) and Mare Desiderii (Sea of Desire).

October 6

1966—LSD Declared Illegal in U.S.

LSD, which was originally synthesized by a Swiss doctor and was later secretly used by the CIA on military personnel, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and members of the general public in a project code named MKULTRA, is designated a controlled substance in the United States.