We meant to get back David Markson’s private dick Harry Fannin sooner than today, but you know how it goes. We finally read this 1961 Dell edition of Epitaph for a Dead Beat with Robert McGinnis cover art, in which Markson brings back the former college halfback turned private detective from 1959’s Epitaph for a Tramp. This time Fannin becomes involved in what seems to be a case of family members successively knocked off for a $13 million inheritance. He descends into New York City’s beat counterculture of writers, poets, and general seekers of thrills and enlightenment.
As we noted before, Markson goes full bore on hard-boiled metaphorical language. Sometimes he hits the mark so perfectly you marvel:
You could have buried bones in the dirt under her fingernails.
She gave me a smile that could have paid the rent for a year.
He’d evaporated like Marley’s ghost.
Then there are the misses:
The elevator made as much noise coming down as a wounded moth.
These swings and misses are simply part of the Markson package. He compensates by bringing unique elements to the private eye milieu, among them centering his story in the real world by utilizing pop culture references, name dropping everyone from jazzist Miles Davis to baseballers Ducky Medwick and Stan Musial. Meanwhile the mystery Fannin is unraveling drops him hard a couple of times, the sweet beat thing he’s saved from a nasty situation in the first pages keeps popping up for reasons he learns later, and he eventually finds that the same base motives drive the Greenwich Village hipsters as drive the hated squares uptown.
We liked the first half of Epitaph for a Dead Beat quite a bit, but the vocal quips and internal banter, as well as Fannin’s superior attitude, wear a little thin as the pages pile up. We think Epitaph for a Tramp is a little better, though for a different take on the private eye genre either book has the potential to entertain. But considering the cool ingredients and Markson’s superior writing skill—later demonstrated with forays into acclaimed experimental fiction—both books could have been classics, either acknowledged or overlooked. Neither reaches that level, but still, they’re better than most.
Edna Sherry’s 1959 crime novel She Asked for Murder, originally published a year earlier as Tears for Jessie Hewitt, has rear cover text that gives away the show. We had no idea about that until the book arrived and we looked at it more carefully. We simply liked the cover (obviously Robert McGinnis, and a nice example) and could see that the genre was a fit for us. But okay, Dell Publications flubbed their editorial responsibilities. Let’s talk about the book anyway.
It follows the criminal activities of a thief, killer, and narcissist named Victor Clyde who, looking to throw off cops searching for a lone man, gives unsuspecting young Jessie Hewitt a ride crosscountry so they’ll appear to be a couple. By the end of the journey she’s grown so attached to Victor and so fearful he’ll leave her that he’s able to convert her to a life of crime. This toxic emotional bond is the beginning of Jessie’s downward spiral, as love mixes inextricably with fear of abandonment in Jessie’s scattered mind.
The book has a characteristic we enjoy, which is that of a criminal who thinks he’s smart but really isn’t. Because the early chapters are told mainly from Victor’s point of view, you have no evidence that he isn’t as brilliant as he describes himself. When other characters are folded into the story you see him for who he really is—a walking study for the Dunning–Kruger effect. Ultimately, he can’t even outsmart a child (but we bet he could outsmart a Dell editor). Since you can’t avoid seeing the rear anyway if you buy the book, it appears below.
If you're lucky maybe I'll make your little non-com stand at attention.
When you buy books in a group it’s usually for one or two specific titles, but among the ones you don’t recognize will sometimes be a surprise. We snagged a few paperbacks, and Dennis Murphy’s novel The Sergeant was in there, an author and title unknown to us. But we liked the cover, which Robert McGinnis painted for Crest’s 1960 edition of the 1958 novel, and it strikes us as one of those pieces that nudges up against fine art. If you imagine the text gone the painting seems museum quality to us. But about Murphy’s quality we had no ideas. We opened the book just to glance at the first page and got totally sucked in within two paragraphs. The opening sequence is a remembrance of battle, within which are the details of how Master Sergeant Albert Calllan became a decorated war hero. This is part of what Murphy relates:
[The Germans] were all hit but one who broke feeble and ran and the sergeant came on like a bull, dropping the empty gun, mad to touch one alive. And then he reached out and had the German’s neck, running alongside him with the head and neck tucked under his armpit, and they galloped together like crazed animals until finally he twisted and they fell into the leaves and as he choked the man the smell of leaves and grass came back strong again, with all the pain and joy he felt bunched into the crook of his arm as it labored and choked and labored and choked.
Murphy can really write. A chapter or so in we stopped reading to look the guy up. Apparently he was tabbed to be a new Hemingway, or a new thing all his own. His talent was mighty, which becomes clear when he takes The Sergeant the direction he does, but it was his only novel, published when he was twenty-five. He wrote three screenplays, including the adaptation of his own book, which became a 1968 film with Rod Steiger in the lead. But while Murphy didn’t blossom into a literary leading light, he didn’t suffer financially. His family was well-to-do (his doctor grandfather actually delivered John Steinbeck, who became a close family friend). He also knew Hunter S. Thompson well. So he lived a literary life, even if he didn’t produce much work.
In The Sergeant, which is set years after that vivid scene of killing in the forest, Murphy’s titular character is middle aged, performing maintenance with the U.S. Army’s 61st Petroleum Supply in France. He becomes attracted to a private first class named Swanson. The young soldier has no sexual interest in Sergeant Callan—he has a French girlfriend named Solange. But Callan offers for Swanson to work under him as a company clerk. He’s insistent, making the offer multiple times: Sergeant Callan took a long drink from his can. He set it on the ground, staring at the boy. “You coming to work for me?” The question hung in the night, like the expected beat of a drum, straining, sounding, then rolling soft through the air. He was enveloped, trapped, caught in a rhythm outside himself.
Well, they do work together, and from there the two become wrapped in an interpersonal drama that tortures them both. As you doubtless know, books of this type are almost always tragedies. In our opinion that doesn’t owe so much to sexual preference as to sex itself. It’s pretty hard to find an American novel where sex or sexual desire doesn’t have negative consequences. We’ve observed this constantly over our years of reading and consider it to be a revealing quirk about American culture, an embedded puritan streak to which authors succumb. Some have argued that it’s actually a broadly Western syndrome. That could be, but we mostly read American fiction. The point is The Sergeant doesn’t foreshadow a happy ending. Unrequited love—or maybe obsession is a better label—rarely does. But Murphy’s skill makes it a marvel to read.
He stood at the wooden bar eating his sandwich, listening with pleasure to the voices from the card room. He was all alone. Then the door behind him opened and a cold rush of wind swept through the room. There was no mirror along the bar but somehow he did not need it. He sipped once more from the beer and when he set it down all the pleasure was gone and he knew at that moment that no pleasure could ever last while this could still happen—while his heart was helpless against this quick and fearful tightening. He did not turn around. There were three footsteps and the man was beside him. “You’ve been following me,” said the boy, hoarsely, almost in a whisper.
You start with one murder then slowly increase your reps.
A while back we read an Al Fray novel titled Come Back for More, so we took his advice. Fray’s Built for Trouble, from Dell Publications in 1958 with Robert McGinnis cover art, is the tale of Eddie Baker, a Los Angeles lifeguard tricked into being a dupe in a publicity stunt that costs him his job. Basically, a minor starlet named Nola Norton is made to seem as if she saved Eddie from drowning, and thanks to the press exposure scores the lead in an upcoming motion picture. Eddie, who nobody will ever hire as a lifeguard again, decides he deserves a cut of Nola’s fee, and tries to deal himself in. The fact that the cynical know-it-all Eddie thinks he’s smarter than everyone, when it’s actually Nola who’s a top notch intellect, makes for a cat and mouse battle to the bitter end. We’ll definitely take Fray’s advice again, and come back for more.
We don’t know exactly when we became aware that Robert McGinnis had died, but it was sometime during our long trip to Mexico. Someone e-mailed us about it. We’ve mentioned numerous times that we don’t like Pulp Intl. to be a death roll, and we never interrupt our intermissions, but some deaths are more significant than others. Yet we couldn’t make time to write about McGinnis because we were away from our primary computers and art files, and because immediately after Mexico PSGP had two subdural hematomas drained from his brain. Wait! What? Did we hold back details about the trip? Perhaps, but it doesn’t matter because he’s fine now.
In any case, we’re backposting about McGinnis. We’ve placed a small collection here—though we actually did it around a month after the event—so that the many thousands of visitors who come here will find a tribute near the actual day he died. Most vintage cover art aficionados will say McGinnis was the very best. That’s a matter of taste. But there’s no dispute he was indispensable, and his work will always be a reminder of what is lost when art is sidelined in favor of capital. Modern paperback publishers cannot make the anonymous cover designs they produce ever have the impact of a McGinnis, or rationally view them as significant by comparison.
McGinnis is credited with more than twelve hundred book covers and forty or so movie posters. You’ve seen much of his best work on Pulp Intl: his posters for Live and Let Die and Cotton Comes to Harlem, a spectrum of art for Casino Royale, awesome paperback covers for The Girl Who Cried Wolf, If the Shoe Fits, and Death Deep Down, mock-up covers for modern movies, and rare sketches sold at auction. He was even the subject of a documentary. Today we’re looking at his original paintings, clean, with no graphics. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1926, dead in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, today. The man will be missed.
Normally an author of sci-fi and supernatural fiction, Thorne Smith’s Did She Fall was the only time he turned his acclaimed typewriter to crime. It’s too bad, because this book is excellent, taking a stab at the device of murder, but adding the twist of whether or when that murder improves the world. Smith began his career way back in 1918 and died in 1943, but his creative influence rippled through the years. His posthumously published novel The Passionate Witch was even the inspiration for the television show Bewitched.
The character at the center of Did She Fall, both before and after death, is beautiful Emily-Jane Seabrook, who is thought by most to be loving and kind, but is really an amoral, grasping, extortionate gold-digger. She plans to marry into a rich Long Island family, but the groom’s brother, the brother’s wife, the brother’s best friend, and others intend to prevent the wedding. With all that hate bouncing around, when Emily-Jane ends up a stain at the bottom of a cliff, detective Scott Munson has his work cut out for him.
In terms of setting up the murder, Smith arranges for five (or maybe six) people to be at the top of that cliff at the fatal moment, yet the identity of the murderer is still in doubt. How does he manage that unrealistic feat? Darkness, confusion, certain persons protecting others, etc. It doesn’t really work as a spatial event, but we suspended disbelief and really enjoyed the book, particularly its surprising conclusion. It was originally published in 1930, with this Paperback Library edition and its Robert McGinnis cover art coming in 1962.
Why should I wait to go into mourning when I already know you'll be dying soon?
The lady in black on the cover of Once a Window was painted by Robert McGinnis, and she’s a brilliant femme fatale depiction, even if she’s only tangentially related to the story. Lee Roberts’ 1959 thriller is about a greedy kept man who throws his rich wife off a boat into the middle of Lake Erie, but is shocked to find days later that she survived. Instead of turning her husband in, the wife pretends she has amnesia and has no idea how she ended up in the water. Her plan is to confront her husband, with whom she’s still in love. It’s not easy to understand her behavior. Does she really think she can salvage a relationship in which her partner tried to murder her?
Roberts forges ahead with this dubious theme. Meanwhile, the other women in his narrative are equally confounding. The husband’s sidepiece girlfriend is too naive and gullible to realize she’s hooked up with a sociopath, while a third important female character is delusional with love for a dead paramour. Was Roberts making a statement about women and their giving hearts? Maybe, but it isn’t a flattering one. There’s being too trusting to see the forest for the trees; and there’s recovering from a murder attempt with love still aflame. The latter, we can’t buy. But even if the book was unrealistic, it wasn’t bad.
Burt Reynolds' iconic character loses his bite in sequel to gritty 1973 debut.
We talked about Burt Reynolds’ 1973 actioner White Lightning a few weeks ago, and though we mentioned that the sequel Gator isn’t nearly as good, what it did have was promo art painted by Robert McGinnis. That’s Lauren Hutton wrapped around Burt. She was transitioning from top tier modeling to acting and ended up in some good flicks, including American Gigolo, Welcome to L.A., The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and The Gambler. She deserved better than Gator. As for Burt, he once said he was as good in roles like these as any actor could have been. He literally said Robert De Niro couldn’t have played the part of Gator McCluskey. And as great as DeNiro has been, Burt had a point. You gotta love the guy.
The breezy Robert McGinnis (so say several online sources) cover art of a femme fatale sexily shedding a commander’s jacket belies the fact that Peter Baker’s 1967 novel Cruise is a deadly serious ensemble drama featuring seriously flawed characters that wear on the nerves from the moment they board. It’s only a rule of thumb that you must create a likeable character or two for your novel, but only the best writers can ignore it and succeed. Lolita, Gone Girl, and American Psycho might be examples. Baker is no Nabokov or Ellis, and when writers of lesser ability break rules of thumb they can break entire books. You won’t quite want the 33,500 ton cruise ship Queen Dee to sink, but you’ll wish a few people tumbled overboard.
Baker is actually a better writer than many. And his characters aren’t accidentally intolerable—there was a plan: Highsmithesque portraiture of upper class discontent and relational dysfunction. His most palatable creations are Pamela Westcott and her son Richard, thirty-eight and eighteen respectively, widow and naïf, both seeking something they can’t quite define among more resolute and worldly passengers, on a Mediterranean pleasure voyage from Southampton to Beirut and back. Pamela hooks up with Chief Officer David Welch (who’s so terrible that for pleasure he brutally beats a hippie stowaway), while Richard has, first, a gay flirtation with an American theater student, then a crush on a French beauty named Simone, then a fling with a rich older lady.
Most of the action is aboard ship, but some of it happens in the ports of call—Southampton, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Athens, Izmir, Beirut, Rhodes, Naples—in that order. That would have been a scintillating real-life cruise at the time, but as a piece of fiction, the selfish, mean, and entitled passengers give the book the feel of a seagoing season of The White Lotus sans humor. Yet after a slow and taxing start, a funny thing happens on the way across the Med—the story starts to click, but only in pieces. By the end we were invested in learning how it all would turn out because the characters of Pamela, Richard, and his crush John grew on us.
We’d wager that Cruise is probably too ponderous for most readers. About one third of its omniscient interior musings could have been jettisoned. Patience is often rewarded in fiction. But time is precious. For those not impressed by its story the book may still have value—and that would be as travelogue. It’s enjoyably detailed on that score. If you’ve visited any of Queen Dee‘s stops you’ll be fascinated by Baker’s depiction of them from a lifetime ago. Maybe that isn’t the strongest endorsement for a novel, but it’s something. Baker is a good writer without an innate sense of conciseness, nor an editor cruel enough to do the job for him. But we’re glad to have gone on the trip.
How does an angel get its wings? Via cleverly repurposed cover art.
European and Australian publishers made a habit of reusing U.S. paperback art, and you see another example above. The top piece for John D. MacDonald’s 1963 novel On the Run received a remix on the front of 1968’s Een “kick” voor Erica, which is a translation by Dutch publishers Combinatie of Stephen Marlowe’s 1967 novel Drumbeat — Erica. It’s hard to improve on a McGinnis, but we think the fantasy-like transformation and giant wings—dare we say?—elevate cover number one to something even nicer. We found both on Flickr, so thanks to those two uploaders.
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.
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.
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.
