Vintage Pulp

August 19 2024

LOSING HIS EDGE

Guess he never heard the old saying about bringing a knife to a gunfight.

In so many instances an author’s first novel is their best, but in 1951’s The Perfect Frame William Ard had not yet fully harnessed the wordcraft that would serve him in composing sparkling crime thrillers like Club 17, Wanted: Danny Fontaine, and When She Was Bad. The seeds are there, but in this debut outing for both him and his franchise character Timothy Dane, he hasn’t yet reached the elevation of subsequent work. The story deals with Dane being hired under false pretenses by a beautiful woman in danger, and leads to a New York City insurance brokerage called Oceanic where things are not quite as they seem. It doesn’t work as well as it could, but as Dane’s origin story it’s probably obligatory. Ard would later become one of the top talents in crime fiction and, later, even westerns.

Vintage Pulp

November 23 2023

CITY HEAT

Temperatures rise and tempers fray in Ard thriller.

We’ve been searching for everything we can find by William Ard because his books have been consistently good. This Popular Library edition of 1955’s Hell Is a City has George Mayers cover art. We dove right into it, and the narrative (which is unrelated to the movie of the same name) focuses again on Ard’s NYC private investigator Timothy Dane, who this time tries to prove that a slam-dunk murder charge is a frame put together by a predatory cop.

Ard reveals this in chapter one, when young Jamie Colyero, barely more than a boy, shoots the cop who tries to rape his sister Rita. The cop had been after her for weeks, and finally plants heroin on Jamie, engineers an arrest, then tells Rita the charges can possibly dropped if she meets him at a hotel and gives up her goodies. Out of desperation to help her brother, she agrees.

Unbeknownst to her, she’s followed to the hotel by her brother, who’s out on bail, and Jamie kicks in the door and ruins the cop’s plan—lethally. Dane is in the picture shortly thereafter, working for a newspaper editor who wants to expose the lies of a rival sheet that has used its pages to turn the dirty cop into a saint. All of this will swing the next mayoral election, so the stakes are as high as can be.

Long story short, the book is great. Like other Ard tales it moves exceedingly fast for a piece of vintage fiction, racing through numerous twists and scrapes, with intermittent bursts of action, until it reaches a conclusion that shakes the city to its foundations and leaves readers satisfied. If you enjoy 1950s crime novels, read anything by Ard. You won’t regret it.

New York City, Popular Library, William Ard, Ben Kerr, Mike Moran, George Mayers, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

January 17 2023

BAD AS IN GOOD

Fontaine returns for another deadly installment of the hunger dames.

It’s official. William Ard, in all his incarnations, is a trusted author. In 1960’s When She Was Bad, the follow-up to 1959’s As Bad As I Am, Danny Fontaine is now a fledgeling detective on his first case. Many mid-century detectives are ladykillers, but Fontaine is on a level that silences rooms when he enters. He’s what women these days might amusingly call a “dilf”—a detective I’d like to fuck. His job is to locate a missing minor royal, a thrillseeker who’s caused a ruckus from Grand Bahama to New York City but now may be in trouble way over her head. Fontaine mixes with women ranging from a marquess related by marriage to the Queen of England to a trio of top rank call girls, and they all fall hard for him. His efforts to earn his wings as a private operator under these circumstances are often funny and always exciting. Simply put, Ard’s got skills. The cover art on this Dell edition is by Robert McGinnis, and he’s got skills too.

New York City, Dell Publications, William Ard, Ben Kerr, Mike Moran, Robert McGinnis, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

November 14 2022

OBJECT OF DESIRE

Do you ever put the gun away? I'm just wondering because you'll probably need two hands for what I have planned.

We recently called Barye Phillips a ubiquitous illustrator, but we keep running into Robert McGinnis too. Which mid-century artist do you suppose painted the most paperback covers? Surely both Phillips and McGinnis have to be in the running. Here’s the latter’s masterful work on the cover of William Ard’s Wanted: Danny Fontaine, a 1960 re-issue of 1959’s As Bad As I Am. In this novel the title character has just been paroled after his third prison stint. Because his crimes always involve helping damsels in distress, a provision of his parole is that he must stay away from women for eighteen months. That’s not easy. He has movie star looks on a six-four frame, and an overt but non-aggressive masculinity wrapped inside a genuine charm that verges on innocence. All of that makes him irresistible to women. But the fact that his probabtion officer can’t wait to send him back to prison offers all the motivation he needs to keep his life unentangled.

Unfortunately, Fontaine gets entangled anyway. He gets involved in a cop killing, at which point a beautiful actress named Gloria Allen risks everything to come to his aid. We thought it was a clever thematic reversal by Ard after taking such lengths to portray Fontaine as a habitual white knight. The man who’s gone to prison three times rescuing women is doomed unless a woman helps him—and at great risk to herself, since the police have gone full vigilante in an attempt to avenge one of their own. While the plot Ard spins is unlikely in parts, and there are some of the issues regarding race that are endemic to vintage fiction, Danny Fontaine and Gloria Allen are both winning creations, the supporting cast is good, and the story is propulsive. With this one on his ledger, plus the excellent Club 17 and Deadly Beloved, we may have to elevate Ard to our top rank of vintage crime authors, that lofty designation we like to call “trusted.”

Dell Publications, William Ard, Ben Kerr, Mike Moran, Robert McGinnis, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

March 27 2022

BUYERS CLUB

No, my husband doesn't mind that I have sex with other men. Though he probably would if he knew.

Ben Kerr, who we first knew as Mike Moran, then William Ard, might make the trusted author category. His 1957 novel Club 17 is a nice little yarn. It deals with a down-on-her-luck actress finally driven to prostitution, but her first customer is a vice cop out to bust the crime ring she works for, which operates out of an unassuming Manhattan watering hole called Club 17.

She can’t go through with the deed, which transforms the cop’s appraisal of her from hooker to sweetheart, and romance is born. We know what you’re thinking, but the same old motif of love at first sight works because Kerr writes fast and with style. He had to write fast—he churned out three books a year, but his work didn’t suffer for it. Some writers just have that gift. He pulls together a cohort of major characters—the cop, the call girl, the groomer, the pimp, a political climber, his two-timing wife, and a private investigator—and effortlessly sets the narrative spinning within only twenty pages. Turning to the cover, which is amazing, it’s unattributed, but we think it’s by Ray Johnson.

He was working with Popular Library from at least 1955 onward, as we’ve shown you here and here. The rear cover below reinforces our conviction on this. Look below and note the hair, the shape of the face, and that certain lift of the eyebrows, then check the links. He’s the prime suspect. If so, excellent work, from a top rank illustrator.

Vintage Pulp

January 7 2022

ORANGE CRUSH

Packed with flavor and fortified with the recommended daily allotment of vitamin f.

Victor Kalin went the tight focus route with this cover of an orange femme fatale he painted for William Ard’s 1958 thriller Deadly Beloved, also published as The Root of His Evil. We love the art, and we loved the book too. An insurance investigator named Tim Dane is hired to transport a $100,000 gambling debt from an unlucky loser to a Miami hood named John Cashman. Cashman plans to use the money to help finance a war in Latin America, but that’s just background. The more immediate part of the narrative involves an exotic dancer named Lissa, real name Elizabeth Ann Miller, who he has ringfenced with the help of 24/7 bodyguards and a lifetime management contract. Dane ignores warnings to keep away and is soon giving Lissa deep nocturnal lovin’—a pleasure that could cost his life if Cashman finds out about it. Ard, who also wrote as Ben Kerr, Mike Moran, et al, is a talented stylist with an approach all his own. His way of cutting transitional exposition is pretty neat. Every writer is required to do it, but Ard can cross town within the space of a sentence and still not sound like he’s rushing. We’re already trawling the auction sites for more from him. Highly entertaining.

Edit: We got an e-mail asking exactly what we meant by “cutting transitional exposition.” We don’t want to search through the book for an example, so we’ll make up one. It would go something like this. “He decided he’d have to drive to Coral Gables to ask Cashman in person, and two days later when the door opened to his knock, he was surprised that it wasn’t a servant but Cashman himself who answered.”

Miami, William Ard, Ben Kerr, Jonas Ward, Mike Moran, Thomas Wills, Victor Kalin, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

December 9 2021

SAMBA DO CRIME

It's a carnaval of mayhem in Brazil.

We wanted to call attention one last time to an interesting Facebook page dedicated to vintage crime paperbacks published in Brazil by Edições de Ouro and Editora Tecnoprint. We started our webpage in 2008 and back then we had a lot of company. Somehow or other, regretfully, we’ve outlasted many of them. Maybe in the age of Twitter and Instagram, blogs with actual words have died. But for that reason it’s exciting to see someone launch something new—especially dedicated to such an exotic (from our point of view) niche of paperback style. It was actually launched in 2017, but we saw it only recently. We can tell you this—we love Brazil, have been there for carnaval, and if we’d known these books were down there we’d have brought back more than just a long lasting cachaça hangover. We knew Brazil had produced some pulp style paperbacks—much of the art was repurposed from U.S. editions—but we didn’t know it was this extensive. Carnaval 2022? Well, probably not. But one day, return we will, to old Brazil.

Brazil, Tecnoprint, Edições de Ouro e Editora Tecnoprint, Bruno Fischer, Wade Miller, William Ard, Frank Kane, Rex Stout, Brett Halliday, Stephen J. Marlowe, cover art, cover collection, literature

Vintage Pulp

October 20 2018

TOPs OF THE POPP

A free class in Popp art from one of the best vintage paperback illustrators.

Above, a collection of covers from the U.S. artist Walter Popp, who illustrated numerous pulps before moving into paperback art, men’s adventure magazines, and commercial package design. We’ve featured quite a bit of his work, including this cover and this one. You can be sure he’ll Popp up again.

M.S. Marble, Orrie Hitt, Steve Harragan, Stephen Marlowe, Octavus Roy Cohen, Robert O. Saber, Geoffrey Wagner, Henry Lewis Nixon, Jay de Bekker, William Ard, Gail Jordan, Walter Popp, cover art, literature, cover collection

Vintage Pulp

February 27 2017

LESS THAN HERO

Femmes fatales are tough but are they bulletproof?

We’ve run across some low characters in paperback art, but these guys are the lowest. Faced with danger they’ve grabbed the nearest woman to use as a shield. Women in mid-century fiction have it rough—they’re interrupted while skinny-dipping, carried off against their will, manhandled, spied on, tied up, and more. They have their victories too, thankfully—put a gun in their hands and they start dropping men like two-foot putts. Well, good thing femmes fatales are so tough, because they’ll need to be hard enough to stop bullets to get out of these jams. We shared another cover in the same style back in 2009 and you can see that nice effort here.

Vintage Pulp

February 5 2017

LIKE MURDER THIS IS

Actually, the flap on my bikini does slim the hips. It also hides pistols. Now get your hands up, idiot.

William Ard’s Like Ice She Was stars his detective creation Lou Largo in a missing persons case. He’s looking for a former prostitute who robbed a Montreal casino owner and fled to Miami. He finds her, but the situation escalates to murder and an attempted frame-up. This character was supposed to tentpole a series, and it did, but this was the second and last Largo written by Ard, as he died after writing it. The books thereafter were ghost written by Lawrence Block, and later John Jakes. Like Ice She Was is copyright 1960, and the Monarch Books cover guide has the art as uncredited, which is a shame.

Montreal, Miami, Monarch Books, William Ard, Lawrence Block, John Jakes, cover art, literature

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

October 7

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).

October 6

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.

October 5

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.

October 4

1957—Sputnik Circles Earth

The Soviet Union launches the satellite Sputnik I, which becomes the first artificial object to orbit the Earth. It orbits for two months and provides valuable information about the density of the upper atmosphere. It also panics the United States into a space race that eventually culminates in the U.S. moon landing.

October 4

1970—Janis Joplin Overdoses

American blues singer Janis Joplin is found dead on the floor of her motel room in Los Angeles. The cause of death is determined to be an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with the effects of alcohol.