Pulp International

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

EVERYONE KNOWS IT’S WINDY

I'm not crying because I'm heartbroken, I swear. It's the variable winds in this damned place.

Canadian author Mazo de la Roche was extremely famous in her day. She authored the Jalna saga, one of the best selling series of the time, about a majestic manor house in India and all the travails and intrigues of its occupants, the Whiteoak family. We haven’t read any of them, but we gather that for melodrama and romantic adventure de la Roche can’t be topped. Variable Winds at Jalna was the fifteenth entry of sixteen, coming originally in 1954 with this Great Pan paperback following in 1960 with Sam Peffer cover art. As always, his work is brilliant.

Canada, India, Pan Books, Great Pan, Mazo de la Roche, Sam Peffer, Peff, cover art, literature

MAIDING CALL

Help! Somebody! Get my employment agency on the line and tell them I need a new job!

Her contract says no windows, laundry, or corpses, so it looks like there’s going to be an opening for a new maid. Jonathan’s Latimer’s Sinners and Shrouds, the Pan Books version of which you see above with art from Samuel Peffer, is a find-the-real-killer novel in which the main character, ace reporter Sam Clay, wakes up in bed with a murdered blonde and needs to figure out how that happened before the police nab him. He’s blacked out the entire previous night thanks to some serious imbibing and, though he has few clues, eventually learns that the murder has to do with an enormous sum of money and has roots in the past. In the hands of many authors this would be a standard tale, but Latimer is an upper tier craftsman, and everything from the dialogue to the unusual mystery at the center of the book are a cut above. We won’t say it approaches his best—it was his second-to-last novel—but it’s still Latimer and that means it’s worth a read.  

Pan Books, Jonathan Latimer, Sam Peffer, Peff, cover art, literature

DEEPLY TROUBLED

Think your marriage is difficult? Think again.

Patricia Highsmith is here to tell you that no matter your perceived problems with your spouse, they’re actually a traipse down a flowered path, because Vic and Melinda Van Allen, the two main characters of her 1957 drama Deep Water—they have marital problems. Melinda is a serial cheater, and Vic has become so numb over the years that he can’t even be bothered to care. Melinda is so brazen she brings her lovers to the house to stay overnight and shows up with them at neighborhood parties. She even neglects and ignores her young daughter. In a fit of pique one night Vic claims to an acquaintance that he killed one of Melinda’s ex-lovers—who in reality had simply drifted away—and the reaction he gets makes him feel excellent. When he murders Melinda’s next lover for real, and gets away with it, he feels still better. So he murders her next lover…

Patricia Highsmith was the high mistress of sociopathic characters, and Vic Van Allen, coming a couple of years after her famed psycho Tom Ripley, is an amazing creation. He’s kind, urbane, low key, and horribly mistreated—all of which makes him a pressure cooker ready to explode. Deep Water is told entirely from his point of view, and its highly interiorized narrative makes you really feel for the guy—even after he starts killing people. The key to dragging forth the reader’s sympathy is Highsmith’s portrayal of Melinda, who tortures Vic day in and day out, destroying his peace of mind, his reputation, and his masculinity. This is a highly recommendable book, and if you can get the 1961 Pan edition you see here with Sam Peffer cover art, you’ll be that much the happier for it. 

Great Pan, Pan Books, Patricia Highsmith, Sam Peffer, Peff, cover art, literature

THE TRAP IS SPRUNG

There are lots of ways to enter and no way to leave.


Sam Peffer painted this beautiful cover for The Trapped Ones by Louis Charbonneau, originally published in 1959 as Night of Violence, with this renamed edition from Digit appearing in 1963. Either title works. The characters are trapped, and it’s violent. The location: a motel in nowheresville New Mexico. The violence: a mob guy who’s stolen $50,000 and whose pursuers catch up to him right when he stops for a rest. How to solve the problem? Taking a few hostages might work. The other characters include the studly owner, the beautiful best girl, the ex-wife, the hateful couple, the confirmed coward, the dangerously precocious daughter who’s mistaken the secretive criminal for her favorite singer, and the minor league pitcher-turned-hitman eager to throw his “fastball”—i.e. a hand grenade. Personal demons come to the fore, seduction has a cost, the premises become a battleground, people get shot, and that grenade explodes. The book is well written, if a little melodramatic. Certainly it’s in the upper half of the quality curve for mid-century thrillers. We’ll be back, Charbonneau. 

New Mexico, Digit Books, Louis Charbonneau, Sam Peffer, Peff, cover art, literature

BLOWING HIS OWN HORN

For someone so big he didn't leave much of a trace.


You’d think a guy named Bunyan would be a giant, at least figuratively, but after some deep searching we found no mention of Pat Bunyan associated with the mid-century jazz movement in any context other than that offered by the blurb on the back of the jazz oriented 1963 novel The Big Blues. The rear says, “Told by a man who blew the horn in many a night spot from the lowdown dive to way up there…” So you can see why we expected to find him mentioned as a major dude of the bop era. But we found no credits for him—way up there or anywhere, even on the comprehensive music site Discogs. Well regarded jazz players often—if not typically—played on albums as sidemen. No such indications exist for Mr. Bunyan. Of course, he could have performed under a pseudonym.

The Big Blues was originally published in the U.S. in 1958 by Newsstand Library, then again in 1960 as I Peddle Jazz by Saber Books, both low budget outfits that specialized in sleaze novels. That probably tells you all you need to know as far as Bunyan’s literary talent goes. As far as confirming his identity, we had hopes when we saw he was referred to as Paul Porto on the U.S. edition. Maybe that was the name he used when he lit a firestorm in the American jazz scene. Maybe he had to change identity or be arrested for terrorism after blowing club after club sky high. To the far corners of the online realm we went and… nope. There’s no evidence of a Paul Porto playing music during the mid-century jazz era.

As we’ve commented before, the internet is just an aperture and only about .000001% of all knowledge makes it through the opening. Someone has to actually take the time to do what we do here at Pulp Intl., which is decide the data is worthwhile to others and upload it. We’re constantly uploading from sources we’ve purchased, for example from old tabloids. That makes us gatekeepers of sorts, and as members of that group we can tell you we’re notoriously lazy, repetitive, and biased. But even if the gatekeepers don’t do the best job getting all relevant data online, would the internet not have info on a great jazzman who played way up there? For that reason, we suspect Bunyan/Porto was just a hack author taking advantage of the jazz trend.

In any case, Digit saw something salable in The Big Blues and certainly elevated it when it produced its edition. The company often featured brilliant cover art—examples here, here, and here—and the front of this one was painted by the masterful Sam Peffer, aka Peff, who we’ve talked about a couple of times, notably here. So The Big Blues paperback ended up being more artful than its author probably ever expected, and thanks to its collectible nature survives today. As for Big Pat Bunyan, he wrote one other novel that used jazz as a backdrop, 1966’s A Doll for Johnny Marco, then disappeared from the publishing scene. We’re curious though. Which means we’ll probably pick up one of his books if we find one at the right price.

Update: we received an e-mail with a scan of an item from the Hartford Courant newspaper of June 1957 containing an announcement about a concert by Pat Bunyan and his band. So Bunyan did exist. Corrections from readers are part of the package for bloggers, and we’d be nothing without them. So thanks for the e-mail. Now we’ll definitely have to read one of Bunyan’s books. In fact, we just ordered The Big Blues a few minutes ago.
Digit Books, Saber Books, Pat Bunyan, Sam Peffer, Peff, cover art, literature
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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1940—Smedley Butler Dies

American general Smedley Butler dies. Butler had served in the Philippines, China, Central America, the Caribbean and France, and earned sixteen medals, five of which were for heroism. In 1934 he was approached by a group of wealthy industrialists wanting his help with a coup against President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and in 1935 he wrote the book War Is a Racket, explaining that, based upon his many firsthand observations, warfare is always wholly about greed and profit, and all other ascribed motives are simply fiction designed to deceive the public.

1967—Muhammad Ali Sentenced for Draft Evasion

Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who was known as Cassius Clay before his conversion to Islam, is sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to serve in the military during the Vietnam War. In elucidating his opposition to serving, he uttered the now-famous phrase, “I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong.”

1953—The Rosenbergs Are Executed

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted for conspiracy to commit espionage related to passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet spies, are executed at Sing Sing prison, in New York.

1928—Earhart Crosses Atlantic Ocean

American aviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first woman to fly in an aircraft across the Atlantic Ocean, riding as a passenger in a plane piloted by Wilmer Stutz and maintained by Lou Gordon. Earhart would four years later go on to complete a trans-Atlantic flight as a pilot, leaving from Newfoundland and landing in Ireland, accomplishing the feat solo without a co-pilot or mechanic.

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INSATIABLE APPETITE

George Gross art for Joan Sherman’s, aka Peggy Gaddis Dern’s 1950 novel Suzy Needs a Man.

TIT FOR TAT

Swapping literature was a major subset of midcentury publishing. Ten years ago we shared a good-sized collection of swapping paperbacks from assorted authors.

TO DIE FOR

Cover art by Italian illustrator Giovanni Benvenuti for the James Bond novel Vivi e lascia morire, better known as Live and Let Die.

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Uncredited cover art in comic book style for Harry Whittington's You'll Die Next!

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