vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above a cover for the sleaze novel Depraved Debutante, published in 1962, with art by an unknown. Roger Blake, aka John Trimble, also wrote 1962’s Sex King and its follow-up Sex Queen, which aren’t about royals getting freaky, but would probably be better if they were. See Sex Queen here.
Above: a cover for Sex Queen by Roger Blake, aka John Trimble, for Fabian books, copyright 1962. Add this to our growing therapy collection, which you can get into starting here. The art is uncredited, but it could be Bill Edwards.
Satchel Paige, considered at the time the greatest of Negro League pitchers, makes his Major League debut for the Cleveland Indians at the age of 42. His career in the majors is short because of his age, but even so, as time passes, he is recognized by baseball experts as one of the great pitchers of all time.
Ronald Biggs, a member of the gang that carried out the Great Train Robbery in 1963, escapes from Wandsworth Prison by scaling a 30-foot wall with three other prisoners, using a ladder thrown in from the outside. Biggs remains at large for nearly forty years.
NBC radio broadcasts the cop drama Dragnet for the first time. It was created by, produced by, and starred Jack Webb as Joe Friday. The show would later go on to become a successful television program, also starring Webb.
Veronica Lake, beautiful blonde icon of 1940s Hollywood and one of film noir’s most beloved fatales, dies in Burlington, Vermont of hepatitis and renal failure due to long term alcoholism. After Hollywood, she had drifted between cheap hotels in Brooklyn and New York City and was arrested several times for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. A New York Post article briefly revived interest in her, but at the time of her death she was broke and forgotten.
American author William Faulkner, who wrote acclaimed novels such as Intruder in the Dust and The Sound and the Fury, dies of a heart attack in Wright’s Sanitorium in Byhalia, Mississippi.
