Vintage Pulp

August 27 2024

HER FINAL PERFORMANCE

Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.

Somebody call an accountant! That should be the tagline for Robert Dietrich’s (E. Howard Hunt’s) End of a Stripper, second in his series starring Washington, D.C. tax consultant Steve Bentley. In the first book, 1957’s Murder on the Rocks, Hunt made the involvement of an accountant in what turns out to be a criminal enterprise make sense. Here, people just treat him like a cop or private dick. Need someone protected? Call the accountant. Find yourself with a corpse on your hands? Call the accountant. Even the cops treat him like a cop.

In addition to answering poorly the question of how to engineer the participation of a financial manager in deadly intrigue (it happens randomly, by the way), Hunt, considering himself to be a man’s man and working with a character cut from the same cloth, doesn’t hesitate to toss off jarring homophobic comments at pointless moments. Generally that doesn’t occur in vintage fiction because it was considered gauche, but there are exceptions. This is one of them.

And perhaps we’re quibbling, but why did the book have to be titled End of a Stripper? Maybe that wasn’t Hunt’s idea, but it hurt the story because Bentley gets romantically entangled early with the peeler in question Linda Lee (real name Greta Kirsten), but she doesn’t turn up dead until nine chapters into a fifteen chapter novel. Why not avoid giving away that crucial plot point? If she’d been killed a chapter or two in, okay, call it End of a Stripper, no harm done. But it’s hard to care about Bentley’s involvement with Linda/Greta when we know she’s ticketed for oblivion.

Then there are Hunt’s angry digressions. Example: A lovely town to raise a daughter in, I thought as I started the engine. Send her to public school and she gets started with the janitor or a football hero. Put her in private school and she learns perversion from a female gym teacher. Keep her out of school and the corner grocer knocks her off in the back room on a pile of potato sacks. The most you hope for is that she knows about contraceptives and doesn’t grow up a doper. The whole goddam world’s gone crazy.

This sort of thing was absent from Murder on the Rocks. Maybe Hunt was being careful in the first book, but here cut loose with the polemics because he felt he had an established series on his hands. Well, it isn’t established with us. After such a precipitous drop-off from the debut we’re tempted to move on permanently, but we can’t lie and pretend End of a Stripper is poorly written. It’s just ill-conceived and irritating. We’ll give Hunt another shot. We have Steve Bentley’s Calypso Caper. Let’s see how that goes.

Washington D.C., Dell Publications, Robert Dietrich, E. Howard Hunt, Freeman Elliott, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

July 28 2024

ROCKS AND A HARD PLACE

If diamonds are a girl's best friend, emeralds are a girl's dodgy acquaintance.

This will come as a shock to those who don’t already know, but Robert Dietrich was a pseudonym used by E. Howard Hunt, before his stint as Richard M. Nixon’s hotel breaching black bag operative. 1957’s Murder on the Rocks is the first entry in his nine-part franchise about a Washington, D.C. based accountant, lawyer, and ex-military tough guy named Steve Bentley. Here he’s entangled in the search for a priceless emerald called the Madagascar Green, which he somehow needs to locate and exchange with the fake in order to save the owner the embrassement of knowing he was ever robbed. Quite a task.

Hunt makes the title character Bentley a cunning, smart-mouthed upsetter of applecarts and damager of delicate sensibilities. He seems to particularly dislike dishonesty and insiderism. You can’t be more dishonest or inside than breaking the law for the president the way Hunt did, so it goes to show that fictional characters are not always analogous to their authors. But Hunt certainly wasn’t the first or last writer to morph into a destructive political tool. The past is prologue, and all that. In any case, though Murder on the Rocks loses some momentum toward the end, for the most part it’s not unlike the Madagascar Green—colorful, multi-faceted, and hard-edged. We have a feeling the Bentley series is good.

Washington D.C., Dell Publications, Robert Dietrich, E. Howard Hunt, Howard Hunt, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

September 9 2019

YOUR CHEATING ART

It looks amazing, baby. Er... aaaand should look even better on my lovely wife. Thanks for letting me test it on your neck.

Sometimes when you’re caught you’re caught. You can try and brazen the moment out, but it usually does no good, at least in mid-century fiction. From there it’s just a short distance to mayhem, murder, trials, prison, and all the other fun stuff that makes genre fiction worth reading. From James M. Cain’s iconic The Postman Always Rings Twice to J.X. Williams’ ridiculous The Sin Scene, infidelity is one of the most reliable and common plot devices. What isn’t common is cover art that depicts the precise moment of being caught. Of all the cover collections we’ve put together, this was the hardest one for which to find examples, simply because there are no easy search parameters. We managed a grand total of sixteen (yes, there’s a third person on the cover of Ed Schiddel’s The Break-Up—note the hand pushing open the door). The artists here are L.B. Cole, Harry Schaare, Tom Miller, Bernard Safran, and others. And we have thre more excellent examples of this theme we posted a while back. Check here, here, and here.

Vintage Pulp

April 29 2018

BYE BAYOU

Tough time on the front, and unwelcome back at home.

You’d never guess from the art, but The Big Kiss-Off deals with an Air Force pilot named Cade Cain who, after twelve years in Korea, returns to a life of boating around the Louisiana bayou and comes across the bodies of six Chinese men on an isolated mud flat. And on his first day back, too, which is pretty bad luck, even for a guy who got shot down and spent two years in a prison camp. He wants nothing to do with the bodies or whoever was responsible for putting them there, but somehow his old local nemesis learns of the find and before he knows it he’s beaten, threatened, and told to leave town again—this time for good. Two fisted loners in mid-century fiction rarely take that sort of treatment laying down. When Cain learns that his wife has sold off his family’s land, divorced him in absentia, and found comfort in his enemy’s bed, something simply has to be done.

Before he gets his vengeful ducks in a row, a near-naked fugitive swims aboard his boat and the mystery deepens. Her name is Mimi Moran, because the alliteration is strong with this book. She’s looking for her husband, who it happens is a pilot who flies illegal aliens into the U.S. for the bad guys. Cade Cain decides to help Mimi Moran and that’s when the real trouble starts. The Big Kiss-Off is a solid yarn from Day Keene. It has the usual issues common to fiction of the 1950s, for example the hero having to constantly resist forcing himself on his beautiful passenger because he’s “only human, after all.” Fortunately, even though “her flesh constantly attracted his hands like a magnet,” he contains himself—mostly. Not someone you’d want near your sister. Or any woman, really. But as a fictional hero he serves his purpose just fine.

With a setting in the endlessly fertile (for genre fiction) Louisiana bayou, and a narrative that wastes no time putting Cain in hot water, The Big Kiss-Off keeps the pages turning. It originally appeared in 1954 but the above edition was published in 1972 by Triphammer Books in Britain, with nice art by Ron Lesser borrowed from Robert Dietrich’s (E. Howard Hunt’s) 1962 Lancer Books thriller Curtains for a Lover. Notice how Triphammer erased part of Lesser’s distinctive signature. That was obviously to keep the figure on their cropped art from looking crowded by the lettering, but we imagine it still annoyed Lesser. You can see a U.S. cover for The Big Kiss-Off in this collection of Day Keene novels we put together back in 2009.

Louisiana, Triphammer Books, Lancer Books, Day Keene, Gunard Hjerstedt, Robert Dietrich, E. Howard Hunt, Ron Lesser, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

December 28 2011

DR. MANHATTAN

Okay, now you’re going feel a little prick.

Did you ever see the movie Doc Hollywood? Well, 1962’s A Halo for Dr. Michael is the same sort of thing—i.e., a bright young doctor passes up a glittering career in the big city (Manhattan) and practices medicine in a small southern town. He learns a little about himself, and of course finds love. Author Dorothy Worley specialized in this stuff, churning out books such as Dr. John’s Decision, Dr. Jefferey’s Awakening (are you sensing a theme here?) Dr. Michael’s Challenge, and, for a change of pace, Cinderella Nurse. It’s cheeseball stuff, but sometimes only a medical romance will scratch that itch. The cover art, in all its overwhelming pinkness, is by Tom Miller, who did a lot of work for Monarch and Fawcett. You don’t hear his name mentioned with the top rank of pulp artists, but he was a first rate stylist who created more than a few classic images. We’ve collected a few below so you can see for yourself.

Don James, Carlton Joyce, Mack Reynolds, Max Brand, Robert Dietrich, Carlton Gibbs, Edwin West, Carson Bingham, Dorothy Worley, Tom Miller, cover art, literature, cover collection

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

September 10

1935—Huey Long Assassinated

Governor of Louisiana Huey Long, one of the few truly leftist politicians in American history, is shot by Carl Austin Weiss in Baton Rouge. Long dies after two days in the hospital.

September 9

1956—Elvis Shakes Up Ed Sullivan

Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, performing his hit song “Don’t Be Cruel.” Ironically, a car accident prevented Sullivan from being present that night, and the show was guest-hosted by British actor Charles Laughton.

September 8

1966—Star Trek Airs for First Time

Star Trek, an American television series set in the twenty-third century and promoting socialist utopian ideals, premieres on NBC. The series is cancelled after three seasons without much fanfare, but in syndication becomes one of the most beloved television shows of all time.

September 8

1974—Ford Pardons Nixon

U.S. President Gerald Ford pardons former President Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office, which coincidentally happen to include all those associated with the Watergate scandal.

September 7

1978—Giorgi Markov Assassinated

Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov is assassinated in a scene right out of a spy novel. As he’s waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge in London, he’s jabbed in the calf with an umbrella. The man holding the umbrella apologizes and walks away, but he is in reality a Bulgarian hired killer who has just injected a ricin pellet into Markov, who develops a high fever and dies three days later.