I've shot enough people now that it doesn't really faze me anymore.
Carolyn Jones is known to most people for her turn as Morticia Addams on The Addams Family, but this chilled out photo was made when she was filming the gangster drama Baby Face Nelson in 1957. It wasn’t her only crime thriller. She also appeared in The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Man in the Net, and Johnny Trouble. We’ve actually never seen an episode of The Addams Family, but we knew it was a bit of a cultural phenomenon, and after learning it started as a cartoon in The New Yorker all the way back in 1938, we may have to check it out.
If it bends, it's pulp. But if it breaks, it's parody.
Does the line in our subhead ring a bell? It’s from Crimes and Misdemeanors, the 1989 Woody Allen film, spoken by Alan Alda, but applied to comedy. The quote is: “If it bends it’s funny, but if it breaks it isn’t.” That jumped into our heads when reading James Gunn’s Deadlier than the Male. Gunn is described by New Yorker reviewer Clifton Fadiman as bloodier, nastier, and tougher than James M. Cain. Well, okay, but Gunn and Cain come at crime fiction from slightly different angles. Gunn is a good writer, though. No doubt about it. He plays with subtle alliterations, symmetries, and anastrophes that mark him as a skilled practitioner of his art. But can he write a murder book? Was he even trying? Was his primary goal to bend the genre, or to break it?
Deadlier than the Male has been described as a pulp parody but we aren’t sure about that. Gunn comes up with some off-the-wall similes, but we don’t see them as satirical. We think he simply wanted to push the established tropes of the crime novel a bit farther than usual. He wanted to write a femme fatale that was more of a femme fatale, and write deadpan cynicism that was even more so, to be more Cain than Cain perhaps, which we think Clifton Fadiman was correct to point out in his review. So then, returning to the question of whether Gunn’s goal was to write a murder book, we think it was. It bends, but we don’t think it breaks.
In terms of plot, what you have here is a woman who vows to unmask the murderer of her friend, while another woman decides to dig into the shady history of the man who’s married her younger sister. Murderer and husband are the same man, and his plan is to get his mitts on his new bride’s fortune, while of course avoiding any connection to the previous murder. Both women are metaphorically deadlier than the male, since both could be the ruin of the main male character, but their deadliness derives from loyalty, persistence, wiliness, and a lack of scruples. It’s not’s quite good versus evil, so much as scalpels versus hammer, which we thought was a cool approach.
But you know how you read something, know it’s artful, yet fail to be fully engaged? For us this was one of those books. Is it a failure of the writer or the reader? We’ll take the blame. We have certain tastes. By now, if you’ve visited Pulp Intl. often, you know what types of books get our juices flowing. If you tackle Deadlier than the Male you’ll probably have the sense of reading something notable. And if you like to get under the hood you’ll find a lot of stylish work inside. But will it get your pulse racing? Umm.. *looking over our shoulders to see if any literary critics are near* …we doubt it.
Motel owner Gerald Foos spied on his guests for decades. Now his story is set for publication.
The New Yorker magazine’s newest online issue features author Gay Talese’s biographical account of a man who may be the most dedicated and successful voyeur who ever lived—Gerald Foos, who bought the Manor House Motel in metropolitan Denver in 1966, installed ceiling vents in more than a dozen rooms, and until 1995 watched his guests most intimate moments from an attic observation space. The vents were louvered and angled in such a way that he was invisible from below, and the attic was modified with carpet and reinforcing wood to make him undetectably silent as he lurked above his guests. In this way he observed thousands of couples, singles, and groups having sex, masturbating, arguing, using drugs, showering, using the toilet, and—on one occasion—committing murder.
Foos considered himself a researcher of sorts, and his decades of watching people’s sexual liaisons gave him many insights into personal relationships as well as American society at large. All the while he took detailed notes of his observations and thoughts, which he eventually offered to Talese after contacting the author in 1980. Talese has culled those extensive writings for the publication of an upcoming book. The New Yorker article outlining Talese’s meetings with Foos, their long correspondence, and the author’s visit to the motel to peer through the illicit vents for himself, is long but we recommend a visit to the website to read it. And in case you’re wondering, the Manor House Motel was demolished in 2014, so travelers in the Denver area need not worry about being secretly observed. At least at that motel.
Owen Smith’s pulp influenced creations are modern masterpieces.
We don’t spend as much time as we should on what we like to call modern pulp, but we very much like contemporary artist Owen Smith, so above and below are some of his unique, pulp-style covers for The New Yorker magazine. He also created two brilliant Dashiell Hammett posters that we shared back in 2009, and you can see more from him on his website.
Folies de Paris et de Hollywood shows readers where to get their kicks in '66.
Folies de Paris et de Hollywood often published themed issues, and this one—Vedettes du Strip-Tease 1966—is reserved entirely for dancers from Paris cabarets such as Clair de Lune (Moonlight), La Boule Noire (The Black Ball), Moulin a Poivre (The Pepper Mill), La Tomate, and Alain Bernardin’s famed Crazy-Horse Saloon. We love some of the dancers’ stage names (aspiring strippers take note)—there’s Franca Germanicus, Kitty Tam-Tam, Salammbo, Dailly Holliday, cover star Bijoux, from club Sexy, and Bella Remington, who occupies the coveted centerfold position and two more pages later in the issue.
We researched all of them, and the only dancer mentioned online more than in passing was Dailly Holliday. She had already appeared on a Folies de Paris et de Hollywood cover from 1962, and was written of in a New Yorker article in October 1966, having apparently moved on from Moulin a Poivre to dance at a club in Montparnasse called Dolce Vita. Kitty Tam-Tam was briefly mentioned in François des Aulnoyes’ book Histoire et philosophie du strip-tease, and Bella Remington’s name appeared in an online list of former Crazy Horse dancers, but those instances hardly count because no actual information was attached.
With the exception of Holliday there were no photos out there at all, but we’ve remedied that today, and were happy to do our part for posterity. We didn’t scan the entire issue, because the dimensions of the magazine meant scanning the pages in two pieces and joining them in Photoshop, and that is—how shall we put it?—an enormous pain. But we did manage nineteen of the thirty-two pages before we gave up. All below.
American blues and jazz singer Billie Holiday records “Strange Fruit”, which is considered to be the first civil rights song. It began as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, which he later set to music and performed live with his wife Laura Duncan. The song became a Holiday standard immediately after she recorded it, and it remains one of the most highly regarded pieces of music in American history.
1927—Mae West Sentenced to Jail
American actress and playwright Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity for the content of her play Sex. The trial occurred even though the play had run for a year and had been seen by 325,000 people. However West’s considerable popularity, already based on her risque image, only increased due to the controversy.
1971—Manson Sentenced to Death
In the U.S, cult leader Charles Manson is sentenced to death for inciting the murders of Sharon Tate and several other people. Three accomplices, who had actually done the killing, were also sentenced to death, but the state of California abolished capital punishment in 1972 and neither they nor Manson were ever actually executed.
1923—Yankee Stadium Opens
In New York City, Yankee Stadium, home of Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees, opens with the Yankees beating their eternal rivals the Boston Red Sox 4 to 1. The stadium, which is nicknamed The House that Ruth Built, sees the Yankees become the most successful franchise in baseball history. It is eventually replaced by a new Yankee Stadium and closes in September 2008.
1961—Bay of Pigs Invasion Is Launched
A group of CIA financed and trained Cuban refugees lands at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro. However, the invasion fails badly and the result is embarrassment for U.S. president John F. Kennedy and a major boost in popularity for Fidel Castro, and also has the effect of pushing him toward the Soviet Union for protection.
