Vintage Pulp

August 27 2024

HER FINAL PERFORMANCE

Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse.

Somebody call an accountant! That should be the tagline for Robert Dietrich’s (E. Howard Hunt’s) End of a Stripper, second in his series starring Washington, D.C. tax consultant Steve Bentley. In the first book, 1957’s Murder on the Rocks, Hunt made the involvement of an accountant in what turns out to be a criminal enterprise make sense. Here, people just treat him like a cop or private dick. Need someone protected? Call the accountant. Find yourself with a corpse on your hands? Call the accountant. Even the cops treat him like a cop.

In addition to answering poorly the question of how to engineer the participation of a financial manager in deadly intrigue (it happens randomly, by the way), Hunt, considering himself to be a man’s man and working with a character cut from the same cloth, doesn’t hesitate to toss off jarring homophobic comments at pointless moments. Generally that doesn’t occur in vintage fiction because it was considered gauche, but there are exceptions. This is one of them.

And perhaps we’re quibbling, but why did the book have to be titled End of a Stripper? Maybe that wasn’t Hunt’s idea, but it hurt the story because Bentley gets romantically entangled early with the peeler in question Linda Lee (real name Greta Kirsten), but she doesn’t turn up dead until nine chapters into a fifteen chapter novel. Why not avoid giving away that crucial plot point? If she’d been killed a chapter or two in, okay, call it End of a Stripper, no harm done. But it’s hard to care about Bentley’s involvement with Linda/Greta when we know she’s ticketed for oblivion.

Then there are Hunt’s angry digressions. Example: A lovely town to raise a daughter in, I thought as I started the engine. Send her to public school and she gets started with the janitor or a football hero. Put her in private school and she learns perversion from a female gym teacher. Keep her out of school and the corner grocer knocks her off in the back room on a pile of potato sacks. The most you hope for is that she knows about contraceptives and doesn’t grow up a doper. The whole goddam world’s gone crazy.

This sort of thing was absent from Murder on the Rocks. Maybe Hunt was being careful in the first book, but here cut loose with the polemics because he felt he had an established series on his hands. Well, it isn’t established with us. After such a precipitous drop-off from the debut we’re tempted to move on permanently, but we can’t lie and pretend End of a Stripper is poorly written. It’s just ill-conceived and irritating. We’ll give Hunt another shot. We have Steve Bentley’s Calypso Caper. Let’s see how that goes.

Washington D.C., Dell Publications, Robert Dietrich, E. Howard Hunt, Freeman Elliott, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

July 28 2024

ROCKS AND A HARD PLACE

If diamonds are a girl's best friend, emeralds are a girl's dodgy acquaintance.

This will come as a shock to those who don’t already know, but Robert Dietrich was a pseudonym used by E. Howard Hunt, before his stint as Richard M. Nixon’s hotel breaching black bag operative. 1957’s Murder on the Rocks is the first entry in his nine-part franchise about a Washington, D.C. based accountant, lawyer, and ex-military tough guy named Steve Bentley. Here he’s entangled in the search for a priceless emerald called the Madagascar Green, which he somehow needs to locate and exchange with the fake in order to save the owner the embrassement of knowing he was ever robbed. Quite a task.

Hunt makes the title character Bentley a cunning, smart-mouthed upsetter of applecarts and damager of delicate sensibilities. He seems to particularly dislike dishonesty and insiderism. You can’t be more dishonest or inside than breaking the law for the president the way Hunt did, so it goes to show that fictional characters are not always analogous to their authors. But Hunt certainly wasn’t the first or last writer to morph into a destructive political tool. The past is prologue, and all that. In any case, though Murder on the Rocks loses some momentum toward the end, for the most part it’s not unlike the Madagascar Green—colorful, multi-faceted, and hard-edged. We have a feeling the Bentley series is good.

Washington D.C., Dell Publications, Robert Dietrich, E. Howard Hunt, Howard Hunt, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

April 18 2024

MISPLACED CONFIDENCE

You're upset I betrayed your trust. But if I hadn't, all the publishers calling about your scandals would have been even more upset.

It’s election season in the U.S., so above we have a cover for Harriett H. Carr’s Confidential Secretary, originally published in 1958, with this Berkley paperback arriving in 1961. It’s about a woman who takes a job in a Washington, D.C. corporation and is drawn into congressional intrigue, over the course of which she finds true love. This isn’t one we’d read, but it does fit into our cover collection featuring the U.S. Capitol building—soon to be belching smoke and flames, the way things are going over there. The art is uncredited.

Washington D.C., Berkley Books, Harriett H. Carr, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

January 13 2024

OVER THE TOP

Powell shoots for a comedic mystery but doesn't have Hammett's perfect aim.

What is a “hilarious all-action thriller” like? That’s the question that went through our minds when we impulsively ordered Richard Powell’s 1946 novel All Over but the Shooting, though we were also drawn by the cover. The book was originally published by Popular Library, but the striking version you see above with art that’s unfortunately uncredited came from the British imprint Hodder & Stoughton in 1952.

Powell weaves a tale set in 1942 about Richard Blake and his danger-magnet wife Arabella—Arab for short—who believes she’s stumbled across a spy plot centered around a Washington, D.C. women’s boarding house. Determined to delve for answers—and to her husband’s chagrin—she pretends to be a single woman, takes a room, and starts poking around. Her suspicions are of course correct. The place is a den of Nazis.

Powell thinks outside the box about every aspect of his story: how the conspiracy is uncovered, how the investigation proceeds, what clues are found, and what leaps of intuition keep the intrepid Arabella moving toward a solution. But the entire story is preposterous. Example: when Arab seems likely to be connected to a raincoat she lost while fleeing for her life, her hubby manages to sneak into the room where it’s being kept—while its occupant is just upstairs—and have it altered in five minutes by a conveniently situated maid. That way the coat won’t fit Arab when the villain tries to say it’s hers.

That and about two dozen other moments are silly. Powell achieved, we think, exactly what he set out to do as an author, but we didn’t find the book to be exactly scintillating. It was no Thin Man, for example, Dashiell Hammett’s smashingly successful amalgam of humor and danger. But in the same way Arab erodes her husband’s disbelief and finally gets him to buy into her wacky ideas, she wore us down too. She’s a fun character, and makes the book worth a read. We won’t seek out Powell again, but one spin around wartime D.C.? Sure, okay.

World War II, Washington D.C., Hodder & Stoughton, Richard Powell, cover art, literature, nazis

Femmes Fatales

July 4 2022

HOW DO YOU HAIRDO

I came up with it all by myself. Totally groovy, right?

These shots show U.S. actress Teresa Graves today in 1970, and despite the fact that her bizarro hairdo makes her look counterculture, she was in Washington, D.C. attending the Honor America Day celebration. If you’ve never heard of Honor America Day, that’s because it was a one-off, hastily cobbled together by then-president Richard Nixon, who was under pressure due to his decision to send U.S. troops into Cambodia during the Vietnam War, a move which precipitated a protest at Kent State University at which Ohio National Guard troops shot and killed students.

Graves was a minor television star at the time, a recurring guest on the show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, however she was a natural for the D.C. event because she had built her career partly by touring Southeast Asia as a singer with Bob Hope’s USO show. She would eventually become a major star on the police drama Get Christie Love! By then she’d ditched the hairdo that looked like it picked up signals from space for something conventional, as you can see at this link. But whatever shape her hair took, she was quite beautiful.

Cambodia, Vietnam, Ohio, Washington D.C., Vietnam War, Kent State University, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, Get Christie Love!, Teresa Graves, Bob Hope, Richard Nixon, television

Vintage Pulp

March 15 2022

CONVENTIONAL APPROACH

I'm going to reach the top and I'll do it by using the most American method of all—buying my way there.

Above are the cover and original uncredited art for the sleaze novel Convention Girl, written by Rick Lucas for Beacon Signal and published in 1954. This was a one-day read. Basically, at a yearly Washington, D.C. convention staged by the Association of Young Executives, oil tycoon Holly Carroll and beer baron James Barton are both convinced by AYE string-pullers to run for the position of association president. Both are promised the inside track to victory by means not solely involving how many votes they actually get. As ex-lovers, the complications soon pile up between them, as well as between other highly sexed characters. The reasons they were asked to run for president are obscure, but they eventually boil down to a vast communist plot to undermine the free enterprise system. Commie scare fiction mixed with sleaze? What a concept! Sadly, as usual with these anti-commie books, the political aspects are laughably simple-minded. But we expected that. The hurdle that can’t be overcome is the tepid eroticism. There’s just not much heat—and this in a book with so many reds. We don’t think we’ll be reading Mr. Lucas again.

Washington D.C., Beacon Signal, Rick Lucas, cover art, literature, communism

Hollywoodland

April 5 2019

REINVENTING LAMARR

She was more than just a movie star.

Smithsonian.com published an in-depth story yesterday about Austria-Hungary born Hollywood icon Hedy Lamarr, and how her technical genius helped bring the world Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and cell phones. Hah! Get with it Smithsonian. We talked about this under-discussed aspect of her life years ago.

It’s curious that no matter how many times people write about Lamarr’s technological exploits it never seems to become a generally known aspect of her personality. Maybe people want to see her as a beautiful actress, and much of the interest stops there. The Smithsonian piece will probably help change that a bit, and it’s well written also (though considering what digital technology has wrought we’d probably add the phrase “for better and worse”).

Yesterday’s piece comes in tandem with the Smithsonian’s Washington D.C. based National Portrait Gallery acquiring a rare original Luigi Martinati poster painted to promote Lamarr’s 1944 thriller The Conspirators. We have no idea what it cost, but certainly a pile of money, since Martinati was not just a great artist, but one who tended to focus more on portraiture in his promos. You can see what we mean just below, and by clicking here and scrolling. As for Lamarr, we’ll doubtless get back to her—and all her interesting facets—later.

Austria, Austria-Hungary, Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institute, National Portrait Gallery, The Conspirators, I cospiratori, Hedy Lamarr, Luigi Martinati, poster art, cinema

Vintage Pulp

November 5 2018

WHAT A DICK

He always manages to insert himself into the most private places.

When one of the Pulp Intl. girlfriends saw this book, she said, “I could use some house dick right now.” That’s a true story. But moving on, think you have a right to privacy in your hotel room? Think again. In House Dick the detective main character has the run of a 340-room Washington, D.C. hotel, and he liberally uses his master keys to go where he wishes whenever on the flimsiest of pretexts. This is highly ironic considering author Gordon Davis was in reality E. Howard Hunt and, as a member of Richard M. Nixon’s black bag squad, arranged the world’s most famous hotel break-in at the Watergate Hotel.

He probably never should have gotten into politics—not only because his name is associated with one of the more shameful episodes in domestic American history (please, no obtuse e-mails, authoritarians), but also because Hunt could actually write. He’s no Faulkner, but as genre fiction goes he’s better than many. The main character in House Dick, tough guy Pete Novak, is drawn by a beautiful femme fatale into a scheme involving stolen jewels that—naturally—goes all kinds of sideways. There’s less D.C. feel than we’d have liked, but the narrative works well overall. Gordon/Hunt wrote something like seventy books and we’re encouraged to try a few more. This Gold Medal edition is from 1961 with Robert McGinnis cover art.

Washington D.C., Fawcett Publications, Gold Medal Books, Gordon Davis, E. Howard Hunt, Richard Nixon, Robert McGinnis, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

October 25 2017

HARD HABIT TO BREAK

Once an addict always an addict.

The title of Jonathan’s Craig’s, aka Frank E. Smith’s novel Junkie! is a bit misleading. The junkie in question has little part in the action save as the damsel in distress, mostly kept offpage. But the art by Ketor Seach captures the book’s mood nicely, even if it highlights someone other than the actual protagonist, a jazz musician named Steve Harper who prowls the mean streets and smoky clubs of Washington, D.C. trying to solve a murder, then another, then another. A trio of beautiful women keep him thoroughly baffled, and a specially made couch plays a crucial role. Harper’s characterization as an actual musician is thin, but the book is a good read, with short chapters and spare prose. Though the fertile milieu could have led to a higher quality result, we recommend the final product.

Washington D.C., Falcon Books, Jonathan Craig, Frank E. Smith, Ketor Seach, drugs, cover art, literature

Sex Files

December 20 2016

BEAT’S STREET

Nightbeat shines a light into the darkest reaches of American vice.

This issue of Nightbeat which hit newsstands in December 1957 is the first ever published—and possibly the last. We’ve seen no hint of another one. That would make it probably both the best debut and finale by any mid-century tabloid. The magazine focuses entirely on call girls, delving into their activities in cities such as Washington, D.C., Hollywood, and Miami Beach. Shame is the name of the game here—there are many photos of arrested prostitutes hiding from the camera, many actual names revealed, and in the Hollywood section many of those names belong to celebrities.

Among the major and minor stars covered are Ronnie Quillen, an actress-turned-hooker-turned madame, who after years in the trade was beaten to death in 1962. Patricia Ward, aka The Golden Girl of Vice, makes an appearance. She was turned out by her boyfriend Minot Jelke, who was heir to a margarine fortune but had fallen on hard times and decided he needed to use his girlfriend’a body to survive. Actress Lila Leeds is covered. She’s best known today for being the other party snared in Robert Mitchum’s drug bust. Most sources today don’t mention that she went on to be arrested in Chicago for soliciting.

The magazine also touches on Barbara Payton. Back in 1957 it was already known that she sold her wares, but she’s unique in that we now know what it was like to have sex with her, thanks to Scotty Bowers, who revealed in his 2012 Flickertown tell-all Full Service that

for a while Payton was the top call girl in town, and added this tidbit: “I have to say that a half hour with her was like two hours with someone else. She was electrifyingly sexy and made a man feel totally and wholly satisfied.”

The details keep coming for more than sixty pages in Nightbeat. One unlikely character is Lois Evans Radziwill, née Lois Olson, who is better known as Princess Radziwill. Info on her is actually a bit scarce, especially considering she was a princess. She was born in North Dakota, sprouted into a six-foot beauty, and married Polish royal Prince Wladislaw Radziwill in 1950. By 1951 she was divorced and running with the Los Angeles fast set. Nightbeat says she was arrested under suspicious circumstances—check the photo at right—but we can find no official confirmation of that anywhere.

However, according to a couple of non-official sources she became addicted to drugs, pawned most of her possessions, and eventually turned to prostitution in New York City, selling herself on the streets of Harlem—at least according to one account. We’ll stress here that these are third party claims from blogs and we’re merely collating and reporting them. We make no assertions as to their accuracy or truthfulness. In fact, let’s just say they’re all lying. We don’t want to get sued again. Did we mention Pulp Intl. got sued a while back? That’s when you know you’ve really arrived. We kind of thought being based way out in the Philippines would discourage that sort of thing—but no. We’ll get into that some other time maybe.

Anyway, Nightbeat is an amazing magazine. It’s possible there was never another issue put together. The first one would have been such a tough act to follow. But the masthead designation Vol. 1 issue 1 seems to indicate others were planned, so maybe there are more out there somewhere. This was really a great find for us. It’s going for fifty dollars on Ebay right now, but we got ours for five as part of a group of ten other excellent magazines, including this one. We intend to hold onto Nightbeat for a long time. It’s a dirty treasure. We have nineteen interior scans below.

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

September 10

1935—Huey Long Assassinated

Governor of Louisiana Huey Long, one of the few truly leftist politicians in American history, is shot by Carl Austin Weiss in Baton Rouge. Long dies after two days in the hospital.

September 9

1956—Elvis Shakes Up Ed Sullivan

Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time, performing his hit song “Don’t Be Cruel.” Ironically, a car accident prevented Sullivan from being present that night, and the show was guest-hosted by British actor Charles Laughton.

September 8

1966—Star Trek Airs for First Time

Star Trek, an American television series set in the twenty-third century and promoting socialist utopian ideals, premieres on NBC. The series is cancelled after three seasons without much fanfare, but in syndication becomes one of the most beloved television shows of all time.

September 8

1974—Ford Pardons Nixon

U.S. President Gerald Ford pardons former President Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office, which coincidentally happen to include all those associated with the Watergate scandal.

September 7

1978—Giorgi Markov Assassinated

Bulgarian dissident Giorgi Markov is assassinated in a scene right out of a spy novel. As he’s waiting at a bus stop near Waterloo Bridge in London, he’s jabbed in the calf with an umbrella. The man holding the umbrella apologizes and walks away, but he is in reality a Bulgarian hired killer who has just injected a ricin pellet into Markov, who develops a high fever and dies three days later.