vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Author Max Brand, née Frederick Faust, was incredibly prolific for a guy who died early. He produced numerous stories and around a hundred fifty novels, including the source material for film and television’s Dr. Kildare, and the 1956 western Brothers on the Trail, which you see here with Robert Stanley cover art. Brand was killed in 1944 at age fifty-one while working as a war correspondent in Italy, but he left quite a literary legacy.
South Pacific. South America. South of France. We don’t care—we love books sets in exotic places wherever they might be. Tell It on the Drums takes readers to South Africa as five men attempt to escape with $250,000 in diamonds from a dusty mining town called Kimberley and reach Pretoria. The story is basically a western escape tale, set in the late 1800s, when places like the Orange Free State and Cape Colony still existed, and the law was something that could be outdistanced on the back of a good horse. Pursuit is inevitable, but paranoia too. And as you’d expect, the real problem is not the law but the fractious partnership between the quintet of fugitives, which includes fearsome U.S. Civil War rebel Adam, craven Boer mercenary Coenraad, and compulsive French thief Dénis.
The 24/7 throbbing of drums is intelligible to tribespeople, and relays news in rhythm about the robbery. The five fugitives are soon known throughout the land, as are their movements and deeds. They have an inkling reports of their heist have travelled by air, but still think they’re escaping secretly. It’s an illusion. Too bad none of them understand the drums, because they begin urging that the quintet be herded north for some mysterious purpose. Surprisingly, Krepps splits the group up at that point in the story. Coenraad and Dénis trek upcountry to trick tribesmen out of their riches. Adam and one other continue fleeing to Pretoria. The inside man-turned-unwilling accomplice bolts into the veldt but is taken on by a veteran hunter. All the while the drums say: north, send them north, and it’s clear that a reckoning looms.
We’ll stop there, but we want to note a great set piece—to steal a cinematic term—involving a mass charge by twenty enraged baboons. It’s a centerpiece sequence, all teeth, fangs, gunsmoke, and blood, and it’s well written. Krepps is a solid writer on all fronts. Tell It on the Drums moves quickly and there are no moments where the narrative falters or feels forced. All the usual warnings about mid-century literature set in Africa apply, but in this case Krepps gives South African tribespeople agency via his device of coded drum talk. Drums speak in most novels of this type, but this time they’re in all places at all times, surrounding the white men, and seem to be the entity in control. It adds a nice layer of dread. Overall, an excellent book, with nice cover art by Robert Stanley.
Falling into the category of well-known authors writing lurid fiction under pseudonyms, we have today The Naked Storm by Simon Eisner, from Lion Books in 1956 with a cover by Robert Stanley. Eisner was a cloak for sci-fi author C.M. Kornbluth, who was co-winner of the coveted Hugo Award in 1973 for his short story “The Meeting.” The Naked Storm employs as its central plot device a train snowbound on the high Raton Pass during a bitterly cold Colorado winter. Essentially, it’s a disaster novel, and you know we always grab those when we can.
This is not the only tale of this ilk Kornbluth was involved with. Perhaps you remember A Town Is Drowning. As is typical of trapped cast novels, a number of ongoing dramas take place here, and these offer windows into mid-1950s sociology. The character unwillingly controlled by organized crime figures, the pretty wife who’s a heroin addict, the wide-eyed ingenue, the obese woman carrying a baby that will—shocked, we tell you!—turn out to be brown rather than white, and even the starving wolf that happens upon and begins eating a human body are interesting, but the notable personality here is the predatory lesbian who lacks a single scruple.
For that reason, the novel is an instructive look at the prevalent mid-century belief (which of course never went away in some benighted quarters) that homosexuality is a sickness. While any character can be a villain in fiction, and any character can be a sexual predator, since lesbianism is posited here to be both evil and contagious, the core drama of whether the ingenue will be lured onto track 69 is pure patriarchal hate-mongering. Hilariously, from an authorial point of view, she should choose one of the male characters with whom to bed down. The fact that they’re all losers doesn’t seem to matter.
So what you get in the end is a textbook example of homophobia in mid-century literature, one that’s fit for study, should anyone out there be looking for thesis material. However, it’s pretty well written and reasonably engrossing once you slog past the first thirty pages. Also, Kornbluth wrote other books with lgbt themes, such as Half and Sorority House, and because we haven’t read them we feel it’s only fair to suggest that he may have produced more nuanced, less reactionary work in those (though probably not). Hmm… to read a bigoted novel or not? Serious vintage book fans always face that question. You’ve been duly informed.
Brian Aldiss was better known as a sci-fi author, but his 1961 novel The Male Response deals with sexual mores and politics. On Aldiss’s website he writes: “Only marginally science fiction, the story tells how the indecisive Soames Noyes is sent by his company with a computer to the newly free black state of Goya, in Africa, where he becomes entangled with women and witch-doctors. Reluctantly, Noyes faces all challenges and, following by public promiscuity, becomes President.” That certainly sounds fun, especially the promiscuity to president part. It obviously could only happen in sci-fi. The cover art here is by Robert Stanley.
Remember that time Tarzan went all the way to the city to buy bug repellant? Jane was alone, and they’d been having some troubles, and she needed a shoulder to cry on, and Chad, who lives a couple of trees over, happened to be around, and, well, something happened. It lasted like a week. Chad was such an entitled ass it made Jane realize how good she actually had it with the King of the Jungle. And him? What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.
This cover for Cyril Judd’s 1961 Mars based sci-fi novel Sin in Space makes the book look like ridiculous sleaze but there’s serious ambition here. We discerned this in the first five pages thanks to the undefined jargon, numerous made-up place names, and copious technical language that’s supposed to understood through context. The nomenclature of life on Mars, the minerals that are mined, Mars Machine Tool, greeners, marcaine, and much more, are all woven together by Judd (a pseudonym for Cyril Kornbluth and Judith Merril) in an attempt to create a believable alternate reality of a human colony on Mars.
Earth has numerous problems and independence is thought by Mars colonists to mean an escape from those issues. But the colony has a few problems of its own. Most importantly, a stash of drugs has gone missing and if it doesn’t reappear the consequences, both political and existential, will be dire. Meanwhile, even though forty years of colonization has turned up no Martian life, sightings of so-called “brownies” are on the upswing, but are dismissed as fantasies. Do these brownies exist? Well, they’re more likely to turn up than the rampant sin of the book’s title. Check out this passage, which we’ve edited a bit for brevity:
“You got born into a hate-thy-neighbor, envy-thy-neighbor, murder-thy-neighbor culture. Naked dictatorship and leader worship, oligarchy and dollar-worship. Middle classes with their relatively sane families were growing smaller and being ground out of existence as still more black dirt washed into the ocean and more hungry mouths were born and prices went higher and higher. How long before it blew up? The damned, poverty-ridden, swarming Earth, short of food, short of soil, short of metals, short of everything except vicious resentments and aggressions bred by other shortages.”
Does that sound like sleaze to you? Us either. Sin in Space is a serious book, but far less interesting than it should be, considering the fertile setting. Put it in the wildly misleading bin thanks to its title and the cover by artist Robert Stanley. We mentioned the drugs subplot. That’s so far in the background it barely qualifies as a plot driver. The sin of the title actually refers to the fact that a reporter writes an article falsely telling everyone on Earth the Martian colony is a hotbed of vice, thus threatening its status. That’s still not a good reason for the sensational title or titillating art, but we don’t really mind. A piece of sleazy art—even misplaced—always brightens the day.
After two months of evading police and federal authorities, Angela Davis is arrested in New York City by the FBI. She had been sought in connection with a kidnapping and murder because one of the guns used in the crime had been bought under her name. But after a trial a jury agreed that owning the weapon did not automatically make her complicit in the crimes.
Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious is arrested on suspicion of murder after the body of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen is found in their room at New York City’s Chelsea Hotel. Vicious and Spungen had a famously stormy relationship, but Vicious proclaims he is innocent. He is released on bail and dies of a heroin overdose before a trial takes place.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first of five books in a series, is published by Douglas Adams. The novels follow on the heels of the tremendously successful British television series of the same name.
The new head of the Chinese Communist Party, Hua Goufeng, snuffs out a coup led by Chairman Mao’s widow Jiang Qing and three other party members. They become known as the Gang of Four, and are tried, found guilty of treason, and receive death sentences that are later commuted to lengthy prison terms.
A sonar exploration of Scotland’s Loch Ness, called Operation Deepscan, ends after a week without finding evidence that the legendary Loch Ness Monster exists. While the flotilla of boats had picked up three sonar contacts indicating something large in the waters, these are considered to be detections of salmon schools or possibly seals.
After being sold, dismantled and moved to the United States, London Bridge reopens in the resort town of Lake Havasu City, Arizona.
British actor Richard Burton and American screen star Elizabeth Taylor secretly remarry sixteen months after their divorce, then jet away to a second honeymoon in Chobe Game Park in Botswana.
