Vintage Pulp

October 10 2025

HIGHWAY ROBBERY

Life in the fast lane surely make you lose your mind.

This poster and the one at bottom were made for the Jules Dassin directed crime drama Thieves’ Highway, starring Richard Conte, Lee J. Cobb, and Valentina Cortese. It had a special premiere in Los Angeles in September 1949, and went into nationwide release today the same year. It was based on the unpublished novel The Red of My Blood by A. I. Bezzerides, who saw the book optioned by Twentieth Century Fox and was asked to instead make a screenplay of it. Bezzerides also wrote the screenplays for Kiss Me Deadly, On Dangerous Ground, and They Drive by Night. The last of those was based on his (published this time) novel of the same name, a tale with a similar setting as Thieves’ Highway.

What is that setting? Thieves’ Highway explores the world of trucking and goods transport. In the story, Conte returns from working at sea to find that his father has lost his legs in a truck accident arranged by crooked San Francisco produce marketer Cobb in order to steal a payment. Conte decides that wrongs must be righted, and sets up an apple hauling deal meant to get him close to Cobb. He goes through hell to get that fruit to market, and once he arrives, well, balancing the cosmic scales in vintage dramas doesn’t usually work out as cleanly as its planners hope.

Conte is morally disadvantaged from the beginning. He has senses of honor and fair play, which don’t bode well for him in the cutthroat realm into which he’s descended. Because he’s an everyman, at its core Thieves’ Highway is more than a crime drama—it’s a broad but subtle capitalism critique. Its subtext suggests that hypercompetitiveness ultimately ends badly for everyone involved. When the rules are made by predators at the top, most people are simply consumed, while the closer others get to a seat at the banquet table the more of their humanity they lose.

Thieves’ Highway covers other themes too. Valentina Cortese embodies the fallen woman archetype. With her meager circumstances and Milanese accent, her character hints at the struggles of immigrants in new lands, and of impoverished women everywhere. She’s reduced to hustling men and doing paid favors for Cobb. In fact, it’s a favor for Cobb that brings her into contact with Conte. He’s just another mark to her at first, if one with a cute cleft chin, but when the two throw together she learns that life need not be lived transactionally. With its interesting similarities to Le salaire de la peur, On the Waterfront, and They Drive By Night, and anchored by a frankly brilliant Cortese, Thieves’ Highway is worth a careful watch and a post-screening think.

San Francisco, Twentieth Century Fox, Thieves' Highway, Kiss Me Deadly, On Dangerous Ground, They Drive by Night, Le salaire de la peur, On the Waterfront, Richard Conte, Valentina Cortesa, Valentina Cortese, Lee J. Cobb, Barbara Lawrence, Jules Dassin, A. I. Bezzerides, poster art, cinema, movie review

Vintage Pulp

September 15 2025

STEALY RESOLVE

He has the face of a male model, and the guts of a thief, but the brains of a male model.

Les tueurs de San Francisco, aka Once a Thief, for which you see a nice Georges Allard promo poster above, starred French pretty boy Alain Delon in a New Wave workout about a heist Delon isn’t smart enough to refuse. It was based on Zekial Marko’s autobiographical novel. We talked about the movie several years ago, but back then we shared only three promo images. We’ve found so many since then we thought we’d circle back and upload more today. Though the film was black and white, some of the promos are in color. The studio shots of Ann-Margret may seem incongruous, but she’s in costume as her showgirl character. You can see another image from that series here. Once a Thief opened in the U.S. in early September 1965, and had its French premiere as Les tueurs de San Francisco today the same year.

France, San Francisco, Les tueurs de San Francisco, Once a Thief, Ann-Margret, Alain Delon, Van Heflin, Jack Palance, Georges Allard, poster art, cinema

Vintage Pulp

August 27 2025

DAME, SET, MATCH

Baby, it's been a perfect night—good food, good drinks, good music, bad girl.

The main character of Florence Stonebraker’s digest novel Frisco Dame is named Nora Prentiss, which raises the question of whether this is the source novel for the Ann Sheridan movie of the same name. No—the movie is from 1947, and the novel is from 1950. Because Sheridan was famously red-haired, and so is Stonebraker’s Nora, it’s natural to wonder if author used actress for physical inspiration. We say yes, and we wonder what Sheridan thought (she must have been told at some point), considering what Stonebraker does with Nora. Interestingly, this isn’t the only time Sheridan helped inspire a Stonebraker digest novel.

Nora is a San Francisco artist’s model who wants it all. We learn that she’s like her mother, who was once a great beauty but is now aging, overweight, and an alcoholic. In her lovely heyday she had spent many years as the kept woman of a rich man, who for years young Nora thought of as a sort of kindly uncle. But eventually he threw Nora’s mother aside for a younger plaything. You know the drill with these guys—they maintain a conveyor belt of always fresh models.

This same man, now much older, shows up at now nineteen-year-old Nora’s apartment with a very un-unclelike offer—if she’ll be his mistress, he’ll pay her well and set her up in a nice apartment. Will Nora accept? Since this is a “love” or “intimate” novel, slimy fellows get what they want, even if—as in this case—it’s eventually through blackmail. But what will the consequences be? You can bet they’ll be dire—for someone. As we’ve mentioned before, Stonebraker has surprised us in the past with some of her novels. This one is along standard lines, but for what it is it gets the job done just fine.

The cover is top quality. There’s no artist credit, but the general style narrows the possibilities down to three digest specialists: George Gross, Howell Dodd, and Rudy Nappi. In our opinion, this is Dodd’s work, but officially it’s by an unknown. There’s more art inside, a lot actually, in the form of posed photos. We’ve scanned some. The binding is tight enough that a couple of shots in the center would have been impossible to get to without destroying the book, but we were able to scan the outlying images. See below.

San Francisco, Quarter Books, Nora Prentiss, Florence Stonebraker, Ann Sheridan, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

August 4 2025

FLY FIRST CLASS

He's the epitome of cooler than thou.

Above: two headshop posters—a white version and a black light version—made to promote the blaxploitation classic Super Fly. There’s a small line on the bottom of the white version revealing that it was printed by the Underground Head Shop, on Market Street in San Francisco. Super Fly was a hell of a lot of fun. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1972. If you’re interested in headshop posters you can plug that word into the search box in the sidebar and those posts will come right up.

San Francisco, Super Fly, Ron O'Neal, poster art, cinema, blaxploitation

Vintage Pulp

July 22 2025

GRAVITY FALLS

Wheeeeee! Only at 10,000 feet can I forget the shambolic disaster down there that is late stage American capitalism!

Lou Cameron’s 1962 novel The Sky Divers is yet another book we didn’t seek, but which came in a bundle with other novels we wanted. It happens all the time, and often these books we take in like orphans are good. In this one Cameron tells the tale of skydive club instructor Lou Hovik, glamorous rich girl and club treasurer Amber McCall, and newbie jumper Cyrus Hall, a man with secrets. They juggle interpersonal drama in and around San Francisco while dealing with the mystery of who sabotaged the chutes of all the female club members.

The previous Cameron books we’ve read—his debut Angel’s Flight and his second effort The Empty Quarter—were both entertaining, but the first was far better than the second, and the second is far better than this one. Cameron would go on to publish many novels, but in these first three he’s on a steep downward trajectory. His ear for dialogue is diminished compared to earlier work. His characters speak in a stilted, self-conscious manner:

“Kisses are fun, and you’re pretty, but don’t let’s start the old Victrola. [snip] I mean, don’t let’s start the moon-June-croon-swoon bit.”

Huh? Moon-June-croon-swoon? Who talks like that?

In general, Cameron has traded in the relatively normal dialogue of earlier work for something that stylistically comes across as John D. MacDonald without the precision and acerbity. We’d let it pass if it were one character, but Cameron saddles all of them with this sort of language. The goal, we suppose, was to make them sound smart. Instead, they sound pretentious, exactly the type of people we avoid in real life.

Cameron’s writing also has a second important dialogue flaw, foundational more than stylistic, but something that could have been repaired easily with better editing. We consider constant name usage to be a negative skill indicator because, again, people don’t talk like that. Way back in the 1920s Ernest Hemingway and others pioneered long dialogue passages with no names at all. So there’s simply no point, in 1962, in doing this:

“That girl may be just the thing for you, Steve. You’ll never have to struggle for eating money, anyway. But don’t give up too much for security, Steve.”

A simple strikethrough of fifty percent of the name usage within the novel’s dialogue would have helped. Seventy percent, even better. Another quibble—and this, admittedly, is nitpicking—are the many typos. Dozens of “its/it’s” errors made it to print, along with a few heinous misspellings, and amazingly, occasional bits of dialogue left outside quotation marks. Whether editorial or proofing failures have a bearing on your assessment of fiction depends on how exacting you are. We found the sloppiness distracting.

But how about some positives? On the plus side, The Sky Divers illuminates an interesting (if self-satisfied) subculture and generally moves at a decent clip to its tidy conclusion. We can’t say it was bad. Maybe it’s even better than most popular fiction. But it certainly underachieved based on the author’s previously demonstrated skill. We expect the book to be our last Cameron. This Gold Medal edition has Bill Johnson cover art we imagine he had fun painting. Even his skydiver is grinning from ear to ear.

San Francisco, Fawcett Publications, Gold Medal Books, Lou Cameron, Bill Johnson, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

March 18 2025

FIGHT OR FLIGHT RESPONSE

Mobsters will go where angels fear to tread.

Above you see a beautiful cover for Verne Chute’s 1951 novel Flight of an Angel, with high action art by Robert Stanley. The title of the book, like Lou Cameron’s 1960 masterpiece Angel’s Flight, is provided by the famous Los Angeles funicular line on Bunker Hill. The story is set in 1943 and is about a man with amnesia. He has it when the tale opens. Though at a loss, he cleverly takes his cues from others to find out his name is Jamey-Boy Raider. He subsequently discovers that his life is pretty good. He has a decent job, a good apartment, and a smoking hot wife who adores him. It also soon becomes clear that his amnesia is a recurrence of an earlier spell of memory loss. Somehow, he must have been struck on the head twice.

Raider is almost willing to leave well enough alone, what with his nice wife and comfy flat, but men pop up who seem to be from his forgotten past, and they aren’t nice. He learns that he may have been some kind of mob operative in San Francisco. He decides he has to know who he was—or is—so up to the Bay he goes, and discovers that it all has to do with the murder of a San Francisco industrialist’s son. Did he commit the crime? How did he get amnesia in the first place? Why was he found wandering in only a sheet? Is his wife really his wife? Who was the other woman who recognized him on Angel’s Flight only to say she’d made a mistake? That’s a lot of mystery for one guy to unravel.

We wanted to love Flight of an Angel. It had promise, but poor execution hurt it. The narrative gets bogged down with unimportant details, everything from cigarette smoking to shopping. Literary authors can make those moments resonate, but here they contribute to what feels like a lack of focus and poor pacing. Chute was an experienced writer who published in pulp magazines like Weird Tales, but even experienced practitioners take missteps occasionally. By the three-quarters mark the novelty of the book has worn off, and the answer to the amnesia puzzle—when it finally comes—feels long overdue. But in its favor, you’ll probably never read another book where a dead cat is successfully used to terrify a gangster into talking.

Dell Publications, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Verne Chute, Robert Stanley, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

February 24 2025

ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS ASK

If trouble is what you really want you'll always find it.

Another book chosen at random, another interesting story. This time, though, the story isn’t by the author, but about him. Joe Rayter was in reality Mary Fuller McChesney, who wrote three novels under pseudonyms, but is remembered as a sculptor. She was a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, and became famous enough during her career to receive a New York Times obituary when she died in 2022.

McChesney’s first job was as a welder in the San Francisco shipyards, so the story goes, but before or by 1949, when she married artist Robert McChesney, she had turned her attention to sculpting. She had to pay her bills, so simultaneously she was teaching art in Point Richmond. When the state of California ordered all public employees to sign oaths disavowing politically inconvenient beliefs (a terrible period of American history that seems about to repeat), she refused and was fired. She and her husband moved to Guadalajara, where she kept sculpting.

Asking for Trouble came in 1954, so it seems she turned to literature to earn a bit of money outside of art, writing as Rayter, as well as Melissa Franklin. We should note that, as always, details vary when it comes to life stories. In particular, there’s contradiction over her Mexico period. Some sources say she spent less than a year in Guadalajara, while others say she spent two years in Ajijic and San Miguel de Allende. In any case, she and her husband returned to the Bay Area, and she was based there the rest of her life.

Asking for Trouble is set in and around San Francisco and tells of private eye John Powers, who discovers his friend’s shotgunned body and sets out to determine who killed him. The plot follows normal detective yarn forms: he might get blamed for the killing, there are available femmes fatales, etc. The story is enlivened somewhat by a couple of leftfield characters and a trip to Reno, but we never quite developed an affinity for Mr. Powers, and the mystery doesn’t progress in the most engrossing fashion.

Still though, the book is readable and we’re happy to have picked it up. We chose it based on price and cover art alone. Its unknown backstory turned out to be a bonus, and who knows, might even increase the book’s value if its provenance becomes more widely known. It doesn’t hurt that the cover art is by James Meese, who depicted a scene from the story in which a character gets her dressed ripped off. We may try one of Rayter/McChesney’s other crime novels. If we do we’ll report back.

Mexico, California, Nevada, Guadalajara, San Francisco, Reno, Pocket Books, Joe Rayter, Mary Fuller McChesney, Melissa Franklin, Robert McChesney, James Meese, cover art, literature, communism

Vintage Pulp

January 17 2025

MORTGAGE YOUR SOUL

Don't be so dramatic. It's not evil. Overpriced for this area, yes. Evil, no.

You see here the front and rear covers for House of Evil, a thriller published in 1954 and written by the wife/husband team of Clayre and Michel Lipman (you’ll see them as Clayre and Michael on some sites, but that’s an incorrect spelling of his name). It’s a crime novel, but horror-adjacent as the plot develops. Basically, it deals with an everyman named Roman Laird who gets tangled up in a macabre mystery when he walks into a murder scene in his girlfriend’s San Francisco apartment. His girlfriend is out of town, so the initial elements of the puzzle are: why kill in her apartment, and did the killer get who he was really after?

When the body seems to vanish, only to reappear, the puzzle deepens. As Laird begins to feel observed and the killer goes after another woman, answers continue to be in short supply. The few uncertain eyewitnesses are unhelpful with identification. Later Laird and the police uncover a set of oil paintings depicting terrors such as women hung upside down on hooks and strange beasts assaulting terrified victims. The Lipmans don’t make direct comparisons to existing artists, so the choice of what the art looks like is up to the reader’s imagination. People often go to Bosch or Goya when it comes to dark art, but we decided the paintings probably looked like those of Francis Bacon. In any case, the riddle in the story is what they might mean.

House of Evil is bold, and it’s well written and interesting, however because iterations of the book’s central gimmick have appeared quite a bit since 1954 (click only if you want to find out about a book—and movie—with an identical twist), you may guess what’s happening a few chapters in. That’s no fault of the Lipmans, but it means for modern readers that the mystery may not scintillate, the ending may feel too drawn out, and the final shocker may not hold sufficient impact. But even so, it’s a deft, dark, deeply psychological, outside-the-box thriller. We had to appreciate it.

San Francisco, Lion Books, Clayre Lipman, Michel Lipman, cover art, literature, horror

Vintage Pulp

December 25 2024

HAPPILY EVER AFTER

For Nick and Nora marriage and murder go together like Scotch and soda.

After the Thin Man, sequel to 1934’s seminal mystery-comedy The Thin Man, was the 1930s equivalent of a holiday event movie, premiering on Christmas Day 1936 with sky high expectations. It’s also set during the holidays, with its events bracketing New Year’s Eve. Because of the setting, general atmosphere, and romantic interplay between leads William Powell and Myrna Loy as spouses Nick and Nora Charles, the movie is pleasantly transporting, a good watch for the yuletide season. Most couples can’t even decide on pizza toppings together, but Nick and Nora laughingly solve murders.

Here in movie two, Nick and Nora return home to San Francisco after solving movie one’s baffling NYC murder case, only to find Nora’s cousin involved in a love triangle that leads to a fatal shooting. Once again, functional alcoholic Nick sifts his way through a roster of suspects that include James Stewart, Elissa Landi, and Joseph Calleia, as Nora remains the sharp marital foil who, to quote the screenplay, doesn’t scold, doesn’t nag, and looks far too pretty in the mornings. She also can drink like a fish, a crucial skill when wedded to Nick. Everything climaxes with Nick explaining the crime to a roomful of suspects, one of whom, as required by the format, completely loses his shit when unmasked as the killer.

Unsurprisingly, audiences made After the Thin Man a hit, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences favored it with two Oscar nominations for best screenplay. It’s definitely clever. That was job one for the follow-up to the pithy The Thin Man, an all-time classic. Hiring the same writing and directorial team from the debut was a no-brainer for MGM. The entire group was elsewhere by the time the series ended—which may be one reason why it ended. But the decline of the franchise is a long way off yet. After the Thin Man is a fine night’s entertainment. Watch it with a full flute of bubbly and your Christmas lights twinkling.

San Francisco, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Academy Award, After the Thin Man, William Powell, Myrna Loy, James Stewart, Elissa Landi, Joseph Calleia, Sam Levene, poster art, cinema, movie review

Vintage Pulp

April 29 2024

PICK YOUR POISON

It's the old love triangle: man, woman, and liquor.

Charles Willeford’s 1956 novel Pick-Up is fronted by the work of Frank Uppwall, who we’ve featured here once before. We’ve featured a bit more of Willeford. In this one a down-on-his-luck San Francisco diner counterman named Harry Jordan meets a down-on-her-luck customer named Helen Meredith and sparks fly. Also flying in short order are emotional turmoil, tears and regrets, and unsound life choices. The duo mostly drink and dream. They fall into a mutual depression. They make a suicide pact but fail in their wrist-slashing attempt to shuffle off this mortal coil. They check themselves into a hospital for mental care but manifest no discernible benefits. Finally they return to their downward spirals of alcoholic self-medication. The story is a bit like a noirish Days of Wine and Roses, as Harry is able to keep a grip on his drinking but Helen isn’t. When you reach the end you’ll go, “Huh?” and wonder whether you should read the entire thing again. It’s a black tale. Willeford might not be the best writer, but his ideas are definitely unique.

San Francisco, Charles Willeford, W. Franklin Sanders, Frank Uppwall, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

November 13

1940—Fantasia Premieres

Walt Disney’s animated film Fantasia, which features eight animated segments set to classical music, is first seen by the public in New York City at the Broadway Theatre. Though appreciated by critics, the movie fails to make a profit due to World War II cutting off European revenues. However it remains popular and is re-released several times, including in 1963 when, with the approval of Walt Disney himself, certain racially insulting scenes were removed. Today Fantasia is considered one of Disney’s greatest achievements and an essential experience for movie lovers.

November 12

1912—Missing Explorer Robert Scott Found

British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his men are found frozen to death on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, where they had been pinned down and immobilized by bad weather, hunger and fatigue. Scott’s expedition, known as the Terra Nova expedition, had attempted to be the first to reach the South Pole only to be devastated upon finding that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them there by five weeks. Scott wrote in his diary: “The worst has happened. All the day dreams must go. Great God! This is an awful place.”

November 12

1933—Nessie Spotted for First Time

Hugh Gray takes the first known photos of the Loch Ness Monster while walking back from church along the shore of the Loch near the town of Foyers. Only one photo came out, but of all the images of the monster, this one is considered by believers to be the most authentic.

November 12

1969—My Lai Massacre Revealed

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the story of the My Lai massacre, which had occurred in Vietnam more than a year-and-a-half earlier but been covered up by military officials. That day, U.S. soldiers killed between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians, including women, the elderly, and infants. The event devastated America’s image internationally and galvanized the U.S. anti-war movement. For Hersh’s efforts he received a Pulitzer Prize.

November 11

1918—The Great War Ends

Germany signs an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside of Compiègne, France, ending The Great War, later to be called World War I. About ten million people died, and many millions more were wounded. The conflict officially stops at 11:00 a.m., and today the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month is annually honored in some European nations with two minutes of silence.