SHIP WRECKERS

Everyone on the boat is cruising for a misusing.

The breezy Robert McGinnis (so say several online sources) cover art of a femme fatale sexily shedding a commander’s jacket belies the fact that Peter Baker’s 1967 novel Cruise is a deadly serious ensemble drama featuring seriously flawed characters that wear on the nerves from the moment they board. It’s only a rule of thumb that you must create a likeable character or two for your novel, but only the best writers can ignore it and succeed. Lolita, Gone Girl, and American Psycho might be examples. Baker is no Nabokov or Ellis, and when writers of lesser ability break rules of thumb they can break entire books. You won’t quite want the 33,500 ton cruise ship Queen Dee to sink, but you’ll wish a few people tumbled overboard.

Baker is actually a better writer than many. And his characters aren’t accidentally intolerable—there was a plan: Highsmithesque portraiture of upper class discontent and relational disfunction. His most palatable creations are Pamela Westcott and her son Richard, thirty-eight and eighteen respectively, widow and naïf, both seeking something they can’t quite define among more resolute and worldly passengers, on a Mediterranean pleasure voyage from Southampton to Beirut and back. Pamela hooks up with Chief Officer David Welch (who’s so terrible that for pleasure he brutally beats a hippie stowaway), while Richard has, first, a gay flirtation with an American theater student, then a crush on a French beauty named Simone, then a fling with a rich older lady.

Most of the action is aboard ship, but some of it happens in the ports of call—Southampton, Villefranche-sur-Mer, Athens, Izmir, Beirut, Rhodes, Naples—in that order. That would have been a scintillating real-life cruise at the time, but as a piece of fiction, the selfish, mean, and entitled passengers give the book the feel of a seagoing season of The White Lotus sans humor. Yet after a slow and taxing start, a funny thing happens on the way across the Med—the story starts to click, but only in pieces. By the end we were invested in learning how it all would turn out because the characters of Pamela, Richard, and his crush John grew on us.

We’d wager that Cruise is probably too ponderous for most readers. About one third of its omniscient interior musings could have been jettisoned. Patience is often rewarded in fiction. But time is precious. For those not impressed by its story the book may still have value—and that would be as travelogue. It’s enjoyably detailed on that score. If you’ve visited any of Queen Dee‘s stops you’ll be fascinated by Baker’s depiction of them from a lifetime ago. Maybe that isn’t the strongest endorsement for a novel, but it’s something. Baker is a good writer without an innate sense of conciseness, nor an editor cruel enough to do the job for him. But we’re glad to have gone on the trip.

Everyone wants flexibility in their work. Only a few succeed.


Bellydancer Nejla Ates strikes the difficult backbend pose for this unusual promo image made in 1954. Ates was born in Romania but was Turkish, and rose to become an internationally famous performer nicknamed the Turkish Delight. She later appeared in films, including 1955’s Son of Sinbad with Lili St. Cyr, and modeled for album sleeves for Middle Eastern music, as we’ve shown you. In addition to all that she was popular in the tabloids. That means you’ll see her again at some point.

Revenge is a dish best served on land. Served at sea it might come back up the wrong way.

Mort Engle art fronts this Dell edition of Frank Kane’s 1962 novel The Conspirators, the improbable tale of a tycoon named Howard Carter who takes an ill-fated yachting trip from New York City to the French Riviera and onward toward Crete and Turkey with his wife, lawyer, and various acquaintances. Carter is not a nice guy, while his guests are mainly sniveling, underhanded, and weak. Why then has he invited them onto his yacht? Good question. He plans to hold them helpless while the machinery of revenge churns. They tried to double-cross him on a land deal, which in reality was an elaborate loyalty test/entrapment he set up in the first place. He can’t wait to see their faces when he reveals that they’ve profited nothing except maybe prison terms for embezzlement, and, stuck on the boat, they can do nothing to help themselves—except possibly beg for mercy.

But Carter hasn’t considered that this disloyal crowd might fight back. They might, for example, knock him over the head and toss him overboard. We didn’t blame them a bit for deep-sixing him. Carter is one of the meanest characters we’ve come across in fiction. There’s an Ayn Randian shading to his portrayal, and you already know we hate Rand’s objectivist horseshit. The land swindle was even over a parcel named Galt, just to make Kane’s thinking clear. In any case, sending Carter over the side is not the end of the conspirators’ problems, but we won’t tell you more of the plot except to say that it’s malarky. But Kane can write, so the story comes across mostly okay. We can’t say we were enamored of him repeatedly describing one of the characters—a blonde woman—as “the snowtop.” That’s just bizarre. But all authors have quirks. The Conspirators is an entertaining voyage.

She's arrived on this earthly plane to love you to death.


We said you’d see sexploitation star Laura Gemser again sooner than you thought, and here she is—or at least here’s an interesting depiction of her—on a poster made in Turkey to promote her film AteÅŸle Oyun. That translates as “game with fire,” but the movie was known in English as Divine Emanuelle and Love Camp. There’s no Turkish release date, but we’re talking about it today because it premiered today in 1981 in West Germany, where it was released as Die Todesgöttin des Liebescamps, or “the death goddess of love camp.” Death goddess, eh? That doesn’t sound fun, but we’ll get to that in a minute.

As you can see in panel two, the West German promo is nothing to write home about, which is why we decided to focus on the Turkish art. It’s signed by an illustrator named Ömer Muz. We looked him up and got many hits, but with no way of knowing whether any of them were the Muz we were seeking. A few of them were artists, and one was even an art director in movies back in the early 1980s, but final identification eluded us.

Die Todesgöttin des Liebescamps was written, directed by, and co-starred Christian Anders, an Austrian musician/singer/composer and man-in-over-his-head in terms of technical ability. His character oversees a free-love cult on Cyprus called Children of Light. He’s the servant of the Divine One, played by Gemser, who bathes in milk, parades around topless while flanked by an oiled up bodybuilder, and preaches an apocalyptic schadenfreude doctrine that sounds a lot like the Rapture. In her cult, you can give love freely, but cannot be in love. “Love for only one person is egosim,” she puts it. “When two people love each other they shut the world out. That’s a sin.” Basically, that means the cult is an ongoing orgy. Rulebreakers get slapped around or whipped. Gemser even whips herself occasionally. She’s a true believer.

The plot kicks into gear, sort of, when one of the cult babes decides she wants to leave and is instead thrown off a cliff by the oiled up bodybuilder guy. There had to be a dark side to all this sex, and that dark side is you can check in anytime you like but you can never leave. We next learn that the police have become suspicious about missing cult members and have inserted an undercover operative who’s poking around even as Gemser tries to indoctrinate an heiress and soak her down for her fortune. Will the undercover cop learn the truth of the cult? Will Gemser expose him? Will she expose herself? On the latter score, fans will be satisfied, rest assured. But for objective film buffs, we have to tell you that, like most Gemser efforts, this flick is terrible.

But it’s also significant because there’s bizarre trivia associated with it. Most notably, David Koresh has a small role. You perhaps remember him? As the leader of the Branch Davidian cult he sought to create a new lineage of world leaders, had sexual partners as young as ten years old, and finally died in 1993 with seventy-five disciples during a fire that broke out at the cult’s compound during an FBI raid. On top of all that, writer director Anders propagated various conspiracy theories in books and interviews. The lesson is don’t take a movie script too seriously. Especially a sexploitation script. Die Todesgöttin des Liebescamps premiered today in 1981.

Witness me, little ones! Are my abdominals not out of this world?

Bring forth the divine ointments and sexual lubes!

I and my slippery, steroid enraged servant shall now engage in the holy rite of hot raw sex. You may want to rewind this part a few times.

I came here to find myself, and she gives me this room. Feels like she’s mocking me.

There’s something to find right under these holy raiments, little lost blonde one.

Divine One, I prefer this female version of myself. Diversity is good and all, but we’re a matched set. Hope you’re okay with that.

Throw them both into the pit of eternal-despair-without-hope-of-redemption-or-surcease! Hmm… probably need to shorten that name. And who forgot to order the lube for today’s orgy? Throw him in the whatever pit too!

I’m a cruel goddess, it’s true. But behold the everloving fuck out of this!

Claudia and Co. keep on trucking all the way to Turkey.

Above is a poster made for Turkey to promote the film DiÅŸi Soyguncular, which you know as Truck Stop Women. Or maybe you don’t. If not, you can get acquainted with it at our write-up from last year. There’s no release date for Turkey, and we couldn’t begin to guess when it played there, but we like this piece of art.

Bailiff, dispose of the deputy mayor's corpse. Anyone else got complaints about how much time I spend in the jacuzzi?


Above, a nice 1967 photo of award winning Turkish actress Fatma Girik, who appeared in almost two-hundred films. We featured her as a femme fatale long ago, back in 2009, and as we noted then she left acting to become a politician. Her political career spanned 1989 to 1994, when she was mayor of Şişli, which is one of thirty-nine districts of Istanbul, or so we’re informed by the internet. We suspect she ruled with an iron rod.
Vintage men's magazine stands at the threshold to a new era.

In many countries during the late 1960s the newsstands were still dominated by nudie mags that bore classical, studio nude-style depictions of women, but the transition toward magazines recognizable as modern porn was well underway. Knight, from Sirkay Publishing out of Los Angeles, is one of those transitional magazines. It debuted as Sir Knight in 1958 with a focus on fiction, humor, and demure photo features. The above issue published in 1967 is a bit racier, but still middle-of-the road for the time period. In another few years pubic hair would be on display in American men’s magazines. Soon after that the pearly gates would appear, and in short order they’d be wide open. Did we really write that? Sorry—it’s the booze talking.

On the cover here is Rita Rogers, touted as the next big thing, but who made only a few magazine appearances as far as we can tell. Inside you get William Holden, Turkish bellydancer Kiash Nanah, aka Aïché Nana, whose impromptu strip in a Rome cafe we talked about a while back, and actress Joi Lansing, whose age resistant DNA we talked about here. And you get some fantastic art, much of it with a psychedelic edge. There’s also an article on psychedelic music, so that seems to have been a theme with this issue. We love these old nudie publications. They’re so innocent by today’s bizarro standards that if you caught your kid looking at one you’d probably hug him and go, “You’ve made me very, very happy!” Scans below.
Schell, Mercouri, and Ustinov plan a field trip to the local museum.

This French promo poster was made for the big screen Technicolor thriller Topkapi, which was based on a novel by Eric Ambler, who was such a popular author that the book was optioned before it even hit bookstores. The sedateness of the poster, which was painted by Yves Thos and René Ferracci, belies how outlandish the movie is at points. It starred Greek actress Melina Mercouri, British actor Peter Ustinov, and Austrian actor Maximilian Schell, with American Jules Dassin in the director’s chair, filming mainly in Istanbul and using the location to voyeuristic effect as he documents exotic aspects of Turkish life.

Inside all the window dressing is a heist flick about a group intent on stealing a priceless jewel encrusted dagger from the Topkapi Palace Museum. Aspects of this will look familiar to fans of the Mission: Impossible films, but Dassin adds extravagances such as direct-to-audience narration by Mercouri, a touch of Hitchcockian vertigo, and some overly broad comedic digressions that make the final result thrilling and bizarre in equal parts. While we had issues with the movie, who are we to argue with the top critics of the day? They mostly liked it and audiences did too. Topkapi had its world premiere in France today in 1965.

Nana gives Turkey something to be thankful for.


We don’t often find stuff from Turkey, but we ran across this item and thought it was worth a share. It’s the cover of a pop culture magazine called Peri Kizi, which translates into English as “fairy,” as in a mystical creature from ancient folklore. The reason this caught our eye is because the cover star, billed as Nana Aslanoglu inside the magazine, is famed Lebanese born bellydancer and impromptu Rome stripper Kiash Nanah, who was also known as Aïché Nana. The photos feature her sporting a top added by censors, sadly, but the images are still quite nice. Almost forgotten in this millennium, Nanah was quite the sensation in her day. What did we mean by impromptu Rome stripper? Check here, uncensored.

A stranger in strange lands comes to know pure evil.

Because Eric Ambler’s 1939 thriller The Mask of Dimitrios is the source of the 1944 film noir of the same name starring Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, we should have read it long ago, but better late than never. The book tells the story of a writer in Istanbul who becomes interested in a killer, smuggler, slaver, and political agitator known as Dimitrios Makropoulos. In hopes of finding inspiration the writer begins to piece together the life of this mystery man.

The investigation carries him from Istanbul to Sofia to Geneva and beyond. That sounds exotic, but the story is almost entirely driven by external and internal dialogues, with little effort spent bringing alive its far flung locales. While we see that as a missed opportunity, and the book could be shorter considering so much of the aforementioned dialogue fails to further illuminate matters, it’s fascinating how Dimitrios is slowly pieced together. Here’s a line to remember, as the main character Latimer reflects upon the modern age and what the world is becoming:

“The logic of Michelangelo’s David and Beethoven’s quartets and Einstein’s physics had been replaced by that of The Stock Exchange Yearbook and Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”

That isn’t one you’d soon forget. Ambler sees casino capitalism and Nazism as twin signposts on a road to perdition built by people like Dimitrios. We can’t even imagine that being written by a popular author today without controversy, but Ambler, writing in England during the late 1930s, had zero trouble identifying exactly what he was looking at. This Great Pan edition of The Mask of Dimitrios appeared many years later in 1961, and it has unusual but effective cover art from S. R. Boldero. 

Femme Fatale Image

ABOUT

SEARCH PULP INTERNATIONAL

PULP INTL.
HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

1918—Sgt. York Becomes a Hero

During World War I, in the Argonne Forest in France, America Corporal Alvin C. York leads an attack on a German machine gun nest that kills 25 and captures 132. He is a corporal during the event, but is promoted to sergeant as a result. He also earns Medal of Honor from the U.S., the Croix de Guerre from the French Republic, and the Croce di Guerra from Italy and Montenegro. Stateside, he is celebrated as a hero, and Hollywood even makes a movie entitled Sergeant York, starring Gary Cooper.

1956—Larsen Pitches Perfect Game

The New York Yankees’ Don Larsen pitches a perfect game in the World Series against hated rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers. It is the only perfect game in World Series history, as well as the only no-hitter.

1959—Dark Side of Moon Revealed

The Soviet space probe Luna 3 transmits the first photographs of the far side of the moon. The photos generate great interest, and scientists are surprised to see mountainous terrain, very different from the near side, and only two seas, which the Soviets name Mare Moscovrae (Sea of Moscow) and Mare Desiderii (Sea of Desire).

1966—LSD Declared Illegal in U.S.

LSD, which was originally synthesized by a Swiss doctor and was later secretly used by the CIA on military personnel, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and members of the general public in a project code named MKULTRA, is designated a controlled substance in the United States.

1945—Hollywood Black Friday

A six month strike by Hollywood set decorators becomes a riot at the gates of Warner Brothers Studios when strikers and replacement workers clash. The event helps bring about the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act, which, among other things, prohibits unions from contributing to political campaigns and requires union leaders to affirm they are not supporters of the Communist Party.

Classic science fiction from James Grazier with uncredited cover art.
Hammond Innes volcano tale features Italian intrigue and Mitchell Hooks cover art.

VINTAGE ADVERTISING

Things you'd love to buy but can't anymore

Vintage Ad Image

Around the web