Vintage Pulp

January 10 2024

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

Vintage Pulp

August 12 2020

FOCUS PEOPLE

Hollywood gets wholly weird in Bill Gault's show business thriller.

With Death Out of Focus, which is our third reading of Bill Gault, aka William Campbell Gault, we’re thinking he can be moved into the trusted bin. He once more documents the decadent ins and outs of Southern California, this time centering his tale around a movie production. When director Stephen Leander’s leading man ends up in the wreckage of his car at the foot of a cliff in Pacific Palisades and police call it an accident, a determined insurance investigator launches his own inquiry and begins turning up what looks like evidence of murder. Leander joins forces with the insurance guy to uncover the truth.

Fun to read, quick of pace, and quirky the way a Hollywood thriller should be, Death Out of Focus takes various Tinseltown archetypes—the aging actress, the tyrannical producer, the sexy ingenue, the loyal industry wife—adds money motivations and showbiz ambitions, and ends up with a nice concoction. Like a typical Hollywood movie, it doesn’t strive to be unique or lofty, but with so many literary duds out there, good enough is good enough. This Dell edition is from 1960 and the cover is by Robert McGinnis.

Dell Publications, Hollywood, Bill Gault, William Campbell Gault, Robert McGinnis, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

May 6 2020

WENCH WAY IS BEST

So, I'm off to that crucial business meeting with— Wow, that thing's transparent, isn't it? Well, money can wait.

Above, a beautiful Bob Abbett cover for William Campbell Gault’s Sweet Wild Wench, published by Crest Books in 1959. Abbett used a still of Brigitte Bardot from the 1958 film En cas de malheur as his inspiration. It certainly worked on us—we wanted to read this entirely because of the cover art. The story deals with a promiscuous private eye named Joe Puma who’s hired to look into the activities of a Los Angeles cult, but soon finds himself tangled up in two murders, multiple lovers, and various pulp fiction tropes, which his main character actually refers to in his interior monologues as being like “something out of the pulps.” We appreciated the meta touch, the narrative has a nice L.A. feel, and there’s a pretty good fight scene about three quarters of the way through, but the long and winding mystery resolves with a fizzle. Two Gaults down, two meh results. We’ll dutifully try another.

Los Angeles, En cas de malheur, Love Is My Profession, Crest Books, William Campbell Gault, Bob Abbett, Brigitte Bardot, cover art, literature

Vintage Pulp

October 4 2017

COFFIN CORNER

I think I've finally got his strategy figured out. Every time he throws a punch he hits me.

William Campbell Gault was a fan of sports—or at least of using sports as a backdrop for his fiction. In The Canvas Coffin the boxer hero Luke Pilgrim wakes up the morning after a tough title fight and fears he may have killed Brenda Vane, the woman he escorted to his victory party. He can’t quite remember, though, what with all those blows to the head, but she’s definitely dead, and he needs to unpuzzle the mystery before he ends up in prison. As set-ups go, this is a nice one. Guys who think they may have committed murder are staples of crime fiction and film noir, but the idea of making the character a concussed boxer is clever. Gault wrote about twenty sports thrillers, so he knew his stuff. Illustrator William George knew his stuff too, and produced a nice cover for this Dell paperback, dated 1954.

Dell Publications, William Campbell Gault, William George, cover art, literature, boxing

Vintage Pulp

July 10 2015

GIRL MEETS CORPSE

What do you call forty dead men? A good start.

Two years ago we shared five covers of women standing over men they had just killed and mentioned that there were many examples in vintage cover art of that particular theme. Today we’ve decided to revisit the idea in order to reiterate just how often women in pulp are the movers and shakers—and shooters and stabbers and clubbers and poisoners and scissorers. Now if they do this about a billion more times they’ll really be making a difference that counts.

French publishers, interestingly, were unusually fond of this theme—so egalitarian of them. That’s why many of the covers here are from France, including one—for which we admit we bent the rules of the collection a bit, because the victim isn’t dead quite yet—of a woman actually machine gunning some hapless dude. But what a great cover.

We also have a couple of Spanish killer femmes, and a Dutch example or two. Because we wanted to be comprehensive, the collection is large and some of the fronts are quite famous, but a good portion are also probably new to you. Art is by the usual suspects—Robert Maguire, Barye Phillips, Alex Piñon, Robert Bonfils, Robert McGinnis, Rudolph Belarski, et al. Enjoy.

Vintage Pulp

November 5 2014

SPEED THRILLS

Oh boy, when you go really fast I feel it right here in my loins! Do it again!

Yet another subset of post-pulp literature was the hot-rod or racing novel. Henry Gregor Felsen made them his specialty and cranked out at least six books on the subject, but many other authors tackled the genre also. Above and below we have a collection of twenty-seven covers with racing themes, with art by Harry Schaare, et.al. A few of these came from the racing forum theroaringseason.com, so thanks to the original uploaders.

Vintage Pulp

August 6 2009

NO MORE TEARS

Sorry, the agony from these unbelievably tight ropes distracted me. Did you say don’t cry for you?

William Campbell Gault, aka Will Duke, aka Roney Scott won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel when he published Don’t Cry for Me in 1952. Despite the nature of the prize, he was no novice writer—he had published many shorter length works before turning his talents to the novel form. His characterizations were unusual, and he worked hard at avoiding a cookie-cutter approach. For instance, the hero here lives next door to a pulp writer and constantly overhears bitter authors complaining about the travails of their profession. It’s an ironic touch, but more importantly, it’s a realistically quirky detail. Like many crime novels, the plot here involves an unidentified corpse and the trouble that tends to bring. Gault’s unique voice elevates the tale, but in the end Don’t Cry for Me is still nothing special. We’ll try him again down the line and hope for better.

Edgar Award, William Campbell Gault, Will Duke, Roney Scott, 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.