vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: another sleaze digest cover—Unleashed Woman, originally Dark Passion, by Gail Jordan, aka Peggy Gaddis, for Uni Books, 1950. Uni was only intermittently diligent about crediting artists, so this one goes in the unknown bin.
It’s time for another look at George Gross, one of the true giants of mid-century paperback and magazine illustration. On this cover for 1945’s As Good As Married you see that the artist who was a master of ornate clothing and highly sculptural hair was also capable of dialing it back a bit. The author here, Perry Lindsay, was Peggy Gaddis writing under a pseudonym. We recently bought a book she wrote as Lindsay that we’ll get to in a bit. She’s usually an entertaining author, so we’re looking forward to that.
We’ve said it before—you never what you’re going to get when you buy vintage paperback digests. The cover art, as in the case of James Clayford’s 1949 novel Marriage Can Wait, often has nothing to do with the content. This looks straightforward but it’s one of the stranger tales you’ll come across. It was written by Peggy Gaddis under her Clayford pseudonym, and it’s about a hard partying yacht trip from New York City to Jacksonville, peopled by six jet-set types and one everyman named Tony Ware.
As the only unwealthy person aboard aside from the crew, Tony takes it badly when the yacht’s owner Elaine Ellison jilts him one night. She’d invited him to her cabin for nocturnal fun, but he arrived to find another man there. In embarrassment and disgust he jumps overboard and swims ashore. He thinks he’s swimming to the Florida mainland. He actually ends up on an island nudist colony. He’s horrified, but since supply boats come only once a month the only way he can eat is to doff his garments and join the colony. And it’s there that he finds true love in the form of Eve Darby.
Tony’s yachting pals, who are habitually hungover each day, assumed he’d abandoned them in port one morning and they’d simply slept through it. Nobody is concerned except Elaine, who realizes she behaved terribly toward him. Weeks later they sail to the nudist island thanks to a bizarre subplot that has them half-jokingly searching for Blackbeard’s buried treasure. They don’t know the place is inhabited, but they soon find out, and can only stay if they agree to become nudists, which Elaine and her five idle rich friends do in order to secretly search for the treasure.
They of course find the long lost Tony, and Elaine is ashamed at how she treated him, then smitten as she realizes she loves this newly bronzed hunk. The only way to try and win him over is to stay at the colony—plus the treasure might be there too—so she settles in for an extended nude sojourn. We’ll stop the synopsis there except to say that you have to give Gaddis major points for creativity. The cover art, by the way, is uncredited.
First of all, 1953’s Love-Hungry Boss is not the same book as 1954’s Love-Crazy Millionaire. The confusion could be excused—the titles are close, both came from Croydon Books, and the art on both covers is by Bernard Safran. But Love-Crazy Millionaire was written by Gordon Semple, while Love-Hungry Boss is from the mind and typewriter of Peggy Gaddis.
It’s about a young hottie named Leona Hale who takes a job at an Atlanta film distribution company and sets her sights on the principle owner Gordon. What she doesn’t know is that Gordon, though handsome, charming, and generous, is also a serial womanizer. When Leona meets his wife and three children she breaks off the affair only to find herself smitten with a senior partner. She moves on to greener mattresses, but Gordon won’t let her go, so what results is a classic love triangle with the usual trappings—lies, betrayals, misunderstandings, and plenty of the old horizontal slip ‘n’ slide.
These books were racy for their time, but these days the sex is about junior high level, in terms of explicitness. However, the stories can still be involving if competently written, and Gaddis is a decent stylist who makes Love-Hungry Boss an entertaining and speedy read. We have a few more of her books, so we’ll revisit her in a little bit.
Above: James Clayford’s Tonight for Sure, 1951 from Exotic Novels, with yet another amazing cover by George Gross, plus the original art. Clayford was a pseudonym used by Peggy Dern, better known as Peggy Gaddis. We’ve discussed a couple of her books, and have still others to read that we’ll break down later.
Above, a really nice cover for Beach Party by Peggy Gaddis, aka Joan Sherman, Joan Tucker, Pearl Gaddis, Peggy Dern, et al. This was published in 1950 by Venus Books, and the art is uncredited.
Who constitutes an essential worker is really a matter of opinion, isn’t it? In pulp terms, a city without vice can’t claim to be a functioning city at all. And since they say prostitution is the oldest profession, it follows it would be the last to shut down. Brothels in various cities are now requiring customers to wear masks when having sex, and the international gimp crowd is like: “Right? You see? It’s hella fun. You should try it with leather.” We wonder what happens when the brothels run out of masks (The international gloryhole crowd is like, “You can’t guess? Really?”).
You won’t find any such dickulous variations in Women of the Evening, written by Peggy Gaddis and published by Belmont Books in 1962. In fact, you won’t find much sex at all, if our previous Gaddis experiences are an indication. We just finished a Gaddis a few days ago—Once a Sinner, which she wrote as Gail Jordan—and it was more like a romance novel. Well, we’ll keep looking. She wrote not only as Gaddis and Jordan, but as Peggy Dern, Sylvia Erskine, Roberta Courtland, Perry Lindsay, et al. One of those alter egos has to be the dirty version of Peggy. We’ll find her. She can’t hide. Not from us. See more from her extensive bibliography here, here, here, and here.
About fifty percent of the time we choose books by the cover art, and about twenty-five percent of the time the author draws us. The other twenty-five percent? Those are books that are bundled in lots. We end up with them because we have no choice if want the other books in the group. Gail Jordan’s, aka Peggy Gaddis’s Once a Sinner is one of those. The cover art is blah, and we don’t seek out Jordan especially. But we dutifully read it.
It’s a melodrama about a war veteran who gets married overseas in England, much to the chagrin of his longtime sweetheart waiting back home. When the vet shows up with his new bride Heather, the other woman, Drusilla, sets about trying to ruin the marriage by any means necessary. Dru is stubborn, spoiled, arrogant, and sneaky, yet we liked her more than any of the other characters. That’s probably not what Jordan intended, and is definitely a symptom of a book not executed to the highest level. But for all that, it isn’t bad. Maybe we’ll try another effort from her down the line. Then again, maybe not.
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.
A six month strike by Hollywood set decorators becomes a riot at the gates of Warner Brothers Studios when strikers and replacement workers clash. The event helps bring about the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, prohibits unions from contributing to political campaigns and requires union leaders to affirm they are not supporters of the Communist Party.
The Soviet Union launches the satellite Sputnik I, which becomes the first artificial object to orbit the Earth. It orbits for two months and provides valuable information about the density of the upper atmosphere. It also panics the United States into a space race that eventually culminates in the U.S. moon landing.
American blues singer Janis Joplin is found dead on the floor of her motel room in Los Angeles. The cause of death is determined to be an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.
The newspaper Pravda is founded by Leon Trotsky, Adolph Joffe, Matvey Skobelev and other Russian exiles living in Vienna. The name means “truth” and the paper serves as an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991.
An obscenity trial brought against Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the counterculture City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, reaches its conclusion when Judge Clayton Horn rules that Allen Ginsberg’s poetry collection Howl is not obscene.
After a long trial watched by millions of people worldwide, former football star O.J. Simpson is acquitted of the murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. Simpson subsequently loses a civil suit and is ordered to pay millions in damages.
