Pulp International

vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news

NEXT TO GO

There's never anyone trying to cut in line when you need them.

Above you see two paperback covers of similar style. The first is for Adam Knight’s 1954 novel I’ll Kill You Next, with art that was used on William R. Cox’s Murder in Vegas in 1960. You can see that here. The second is for Peter Rabe’s Benny Muscles In. The art on the first cover is by Jerry Allison, while the second is unattributed. We enjoy identifying artists and have had some successes over the years. We’re wondering if the unattributed cover is by Allison too. The resemblances are striking, but in this case we can’t say with 100% certainty. It’s just a thought for this fine day. We talked about Benny Muscles In a while back. Check here.

Signet Books, Five Star Books, Peter Rabe, Jerry Allison, Adam Knight, cover art, literature

DECEPTIVE CALM

I know I look under control right now. They weren't expecting the French Revolution either.

Above: another nice cover for The Revolt of Mamie Stover. The femme fatale, painted by an uncredited artist, looks like she’s hiding something behind her back. Could it be destruction of the ruling class? This is a book we discussed in exhaustive detail a while back.

Signet Books, William Bradford Huie, cover art, literature

WAIT FOREVER

You got loose! Great! Untie me. Now would be good. Or...are you still mad I got you into this in the first place?

This cover is part of a series Barye Phillips was commissioned to paint for Signet Books’ Mickey Spillane novels, however The Long Wait isn’t part of Spillane’s legendary Mike Hammer series. Instead, in this tale he introduces a new character, George Wilson, and immediately dumps him into deep trouble. Wilson rolls into the fictional gambling haven of Lyncastle seeking to avenge the honor of his friend Johnny McBride, who had fled town five years earlier, a suspect in the murder of the district attorney.

Wilson looks enough like McBride that he’s able to assume his identity, which certainly throws the locals for a loop. The cops immediately try to arrest him for the murder but they have no evidence except fingerprints, and weirdly, Wilson doesn’t have any because his were burned off during a fiery bus crash. It gets even weirder. The crash caused amnesia. But Wilson remembers his buddy McBride because he also survived the crash, leading to the pair becoming pals afterward. Later, though, McBride dies falling off a bridge (unlucky, these two).

As the Lyncastle section of the story develops, you get a crime kingpin, a femme fatale who’s kept naked so she can’t leave the house, and other hard-boiled elements. While Wilson is no Mike Hammer, he’s plenty tough. He even makes a couple of hardened thugs faint dead away just by glaring at them. Spillane tops all the craziness off with a triple-twist ending. Degree of difficulty—high. Deductions—several. But the old routine is still pretty fun when it comes from a legend like Mickey.

Signet Books, Mickey Spillane, Barye Phillips, cover art, literature

SHOOT ON SIGHT

If a detective doesn't have eyes in the back of his head he might end up with holes there instead.

Cleve F. Adams’ The Private Eye was originally published in 1942 with this Signet edition fronted by a Lu Kimmel action scene appearing in 1951. Adams sets a story in fictional Las Cruces, Arizona featuring two rival mining concerns, a current mayor and a former, a sheriff and a former, a femme fatale who the hero desires but whose husband’s suicide he’s investigating as a possible murder, which he does by first inventing a fake investigation as cover, but is sought for hire by three rival parties, accepts an offer, but with the understanding he’ll pretend to be working for his employer’s enemy, and somehow does all this while supervising a less than brilliant partner, and navigating the surprise appearance in town of his longtime flirtation who uses his cases as inspiration for her popular crime novels.

That’s just a mini summary. There’s plenty more we could add to that run-on sentence. Excellent writing is useful in helping readers keep complex mystery novels straight. Read this passage where the main character John Shannon muses on his next move and see if you think it’s excellent: Also there was the matter of a certain hunk of dynamite thrown at a man named John J. Shannon. He decided that whatever Giles MacLeish chose to tell him, and regardless of the motivation behind the telling, he, Shannon, could not lose by listening.

That’s tortured. It’s almost as if Adams had trouble keeping things straight himself. We can envision his agent and Signet editors suggesting that his plot would lose many readers, and we can imagine him assuring them that people would follow it fine. He’d have been correct if he’d been better at his job, but his style and approach aren’t what you’d call riveting, so the complexity of the story will be a problem for some. Still, we can’t knock him for treating his readers like attentive adults. We can knock him for straining credulity in numerous instances. Can someone really snap-draw a pistol and shoot someone else’s gun out of their hand? We seriously doubt it, but maybe Adams figured if it’s a good enough gimmick for Old West gunslingers it’s good enough for modern detectives. Despite its problems, though, The Private Eye is probably worth a try for hardcore vintage mystery fans.

Arizona, Signet Books, Cleve F. Adams, John Spain, Lu Kimmel, cover art, literature

WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS

Fear and loathing are the least of his problems.

Jerry Allison art strikes a menacing note on the cover of William R. Cox’s 1960 novel Murder in Vegas, in which Cox’s gambler hero Tom Kincaid from 1958’s Hell To Pay, which we recently discussed, returns to the written page to find more trouble. The first murder in the book actually occurs in Los Angeles, but someone is later knocked off in Vegas and as a direct result Kincaid is elevated from silent partner to full owner of a casino called the White Elephant. Simultaneously his girlfriend Jean Harper is in town filming a movie, and the murder and film production seem tied together. Kincaid is as interesting as before, but the fun creation here is down-on-her-luck party girl Carry Cain, who mixes sexiness and vulnerability with a beatnik mentality. She’s an aspiring actress and gambling addict who thinks Kincaid might finally bring her the luck she’s been seeking. Instead she finds herself in the middle of a Vegas-sized mess. Cox has talent, as we’ve noted before. It shines bright in Murder in Vegas.

Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Signet Books, William R. Cox, Jerry Allison, cover art, literature

BEYOND A REASONABLE DEBT

This ain't Happy Days and he ain't the Fonz.

Since reading William R. Cox’s 1961 thriller Death Comes Early we’d been looking around for more from him and located 1958’s Hell To Pay, which you see above with a Robert Schulz cover. Cox writes in that same cool style we noted before, as he combines two crime sub-genres—organized crime, and juvenile delinquency. His main character Tom Kincaid is a successful NYC gambler who gets swept up in a mafia takeover centered around crooked boxing. Kincaid is thought by a kingpin named Mosski to be working for an upstart mob, which essentially makes this a find-the-real-killer novel in the sense that if Kincaid can’t prove he isn’t setting up Mosski his ass is grass. The book has in abundance generation gap musings, shady mingling between criminals and cops, poker described in hand-by-hand detail, and a lot of shooting and/or brutal beatings. Cox provides several good secondary characters, particularly Kincaid’s been-around-the-block girlfriend Jean Harper. She’s flawed, but then so is everyone here. There’s a sequel to Hell To Pay, and we’re onto that already.

New York City, Signet Books, William R. Cox, Robert Schulz, cover art, literature

LONG TIME NO C-NOTE

I'd have sex for free, but that would be irresponsible from a business perspective.


The 1962 Signet paperback of The Hundred-Dollar Girl has striking cover art by Jerry Allison, whose nice work we’ve seen before here, here, and here. William Campbell Gault’s tale sees L.A. private dick Joe Puma investigating whether a boxing match was fixed, then finding himself in the middle of murder and an organized crime takeover of the fight racket. This is the second Puma we’ve read, and as with the previous book, he gets laid a couple of times, gets ko’d a couple of times, and beats up a couple of guys. All this is fine, but we haven’t yet read the Gault novel that makes us sit up and go, “Ahh!” Certainly though, he’s been good enough to make looking for that special book a pursuit we expect to pay off. We’ll keep looking. In the meantime, if you want an L.A. crime read, you can do worse than The Hundred-Dollar Girl.  

Los Angeles, Signet Books, William Campbell Gault, Jerry Allison, cover art, literature, boxing

UNCONTROLLABLE FIRE

Only Coffin Ed and Gravedigger can put out a blaze this hot.

Above: an alternate cover for Hot Day Hot Night by Chester Himes, the 1975 edition from Signet Books. We talked about this thriller starring the fictional cop duo Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones in detail at this link. The art here is uncredited, as is this cover and this one by the same artist. Major demerits for Signet.

Signet Books, Chester Himes, cover art, literature
Femme Fatale Image

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1955—Disneyland Begins Operations

The amusement park Disneyland opens in Orange County, California for 6,000 invitation-only guests, before opening to the general public the following day.

1959—Holiday Dies Broke

Legendary singer Billie Holiday, who possessed one of the most unique voices in the history of jazz, dies in the hospital of cirrhosis of the liver. She had lost her earnings to swindlers over the years, and upon her death her bank account contains seventy cents.

1941—DiMaggio Hit Streak Reaches 56

New York Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio gets a hit in his fifty-sixth consecutive game. The streak would end the next game, against the Cleveland Indians, but the mark DiMaggio set still stands, and in fact has never been seriously threatened. It is generally thought to be one of the few truly unbreakable baseball records.

1939—Adams Completes Around-the-World Air Journey

American Clara Adams becomes the first woman passenger to complete an around the world air journey. Her voyage began and ended in New York City, with stops in Lisbon, Marseilles, Leipzig, Athens, Basra, Jodhpur, Rangoon, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Wake Island, Honolulu, and San Francisco.

1955—Nobel Prize Winners Unite Against Nukes

Eighteen Nobel laureates sign the Mainau Declaration against nuclear weapons, which reads in part: “We think it is a delusion if governments believe that they can avoid war for a long time through the fear of [nuclear] weapons. Fear and tension have often engendered wars. Similarly it seems to us a delusion to believe that small conflicts could in the future always be decided by traditional weapons. In extreme danger no nation will deny itself the use of any weapon that scientific technology can produce.”

1921—Sacco & Vanzetti Convicted

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are convicted in Dedham, Massachusetts of killing their shoe company’s paymaster. Even at the time there are serious questions about their guilt, and whether they are being railroaded because of their Italian ethnicity and anarchist political beliefs.

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TRICK SHOT ARTIST

Uncredited art for Poker de blondes by Oscar Montgomery, aka José del Valle, from the French publisher Éditions le Trotteur in 1953.

DON’T RIDE THE WHITE HORSE

Rafael DeSoto painted this excellent cover for David Hulburd's 1954 drug scare novel H Is for Heroin. We also have the original art without text.

BARN GIRLS

Two Spanish language digest novels from Argentine publishers Malinca Debora and Malinca Nueva Pandora.
Argentine publishers Malinca Debora reprinted numerous English language crime thrillers in Spanish. This example uses George Gross art borrowed from U.S. imprint Rainbow Books.

LOVES OF A BLONDE

Uncredited cover art for Orrie Hitt's 1954 novel Tawny. Hitt was a master of sleazy literature and published more than one hundred fifty novels.

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