| Vintage Pulp | Feb 17 2020 |
He promised her a smashing time on safari but this was nothing like she had in mind.
Adam magazine's covers are nearly always the same—two to four people and a pivotal action moment. This front from February 1970 is a typical example. It shows an unfortunate hunter learning that elephants sometimes won't simply stand still and let you shoot them through the heart so you can turn their tusks into paperweights. The nerve, really. The painting is great. It's by Jack Waugh or Phil Belbin, but it's unsigned, so there's no way to know. Waugh did sign a couple of the interior panels, though. The cover was painted for Ken Welsh's story, “Dirge for a Darling,” which deals with a woman on safari who wants her hunting guide to kill her rich, alcoholic husband. Risky, but when you stand to inherit fifty million dollars, what's a little risk?
We try to avoid spoilers, but since you're never going to have a chance to read this obscure story, we'll just tell you what happens. The husband is a terrible guy, and he spends his days shooting badly at wildlife, and his nights drinking himself into a stupor. The fact that he's always insensate by dark is what allows the wife to start bedding the hunter right in camp in the first place. Once the hunter has been convinced to do the job, he realizes he must devise a foolproof yet suspicion free murder. He plans and schemes for days, looking for an angle, and finally tells the wife he has an idea, but the less she knows the better. Her job is to convincingly play the grieving widow when it happens, so for the sake of realism it's better if she's in the dark.
One morning the hunter comes to fetch the husband for a foray into the bush. Elephants are near. Today is the day the husband will finally get a big tusker. But the husband is hung over like never before. He wants a trophy, but can't possibly go shooting. He asks the hunter to bag an elephant for him. As the cover depicts, the hunter gets trampled to death. When the news comes to camp, the husband smiles evilly. The hangover had been an act. He'd discovered his wife's affair and, while she and her lover were otherwise occupied, had filed down the firing pin on the hunter's rifle. The gun didn't work when needed, resulting in a squashing.
The husband has a celebratory drink and forces his wife—who hates liquor—to join him. The husband cramps, convulses, and dies in excruciating pain. The wife realizes the hunter's foolproof murder method was to poison her husband's beloved liquor in such a way as to make authorities think it had been a bad batch. Then she cramps, convulses, and dies in excruciating pain too. The story ends: “It was all very sad when you considered the talent of those involved, but there it was. The principals, no doubt, went to hell. The $50,000,000 went to charity.” We've read a lot of Adam stories, and this was one of the more entertaining efforts. We have numerous scans below, with Claudine Auger in the second panel, and more Adam coming soon.
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 16 2020 |
No secrets here—de Wulf is de best.
Above is a cover from French publisher Éditions R.R., for Secrets, by author René Roques. Easiest way to get published: own the publishing company. We discuss that and other things about Roques in a bit more detail at this link. The art here is by Jef de Wulf, whose work we've shared numerous times. We love him. There's a lightness and ease to his pieces that few paperback artists achieve. We'll have more from him later.
| Femmes Fatales | Feb 16 2020 |
Lady sings the blues and reds.
U.S. born actress and dancer Dee Turnell sports two accessories that have gone out of fashion—the ornamental headpiece, and opera gloves—and wears both well in this promo image made for her 1948 film Words and Music. Turnell appeared in about twenty movies between 1947 and 1956. Nearly all of those were musicals, and while she's considered to have been a real talent, all her roles were minor or uncredited except 1954's Brigadoon. We don't expect to run across her again in our excavations for gun toting femmes fatales, but we're glad we stumbled upon this rare color photo. It's by Tom Kelley—the same Tom Kelley who shot the most famous photo of Marilyn Monroe ever.
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 15 2020 |
Landis brings her usual touch of glamour to a not-quite film noir.
Above is a poster for the Carole Landis vehicle Behind Green Lights, a mostly forgotten film that she headlined in 1946. When the body of a shady private dick turns up outside police headquarters, the resulting investigation pulls in a prominent politician's daughter (Landis), and gets the city tabloids scenting scandal. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that influential people want Landis arrested so her father's re-election campaign will be derailed, which forces Gargan to fight his way upstream to crack the case. Landis may be top billed and better known than Gargan, but she's criminally underused and her role is one-note all the way. It's Gargan who gets most of the screen time and is tasked with bringing a tough edge to the movie. He mostly succeeds, and Landis is fine too, as far as she's allowed to go, but on the whole Behind Green Lights is nothing special. It's categorized on many websites as a film noir but—and you know what we're going to say next, because we say it all the time—it isn't really. Yes, it's on the borderline, but it's basically a procedural police drama with a few flashbacks shot in film noir style. The American Film Institute agrees—it categorizes the film as a police drama. Noir fans should approach this uncomplicated little thriller with tempered expectations. Behind Green Lights premiered in the U.S. today in 1946.
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 14 2020 |
Thank you for your service, girls.
We have a special treat for you on Valentine's Day (which doesn't exist where we live, but we're living up to the International part of Pulp International). Above is the cover of a 1951 photo magazine called G-Eyefuls, which was marketed in the U.S. to the Korean War generation, specifically soldiers. We suspect it was sold in drugstores in military towns, possibly in military base exchanges, and the like. It's credited to a guy named Bill Boltin, who also authored a little-known 1952 novel called Witch on Wheels. Boltin didn't write much for G-Eyefuls, just a foreword and some cheesy captions for the pix.
We consider it unfortunate that Boltin took time to write captions for nearly every photo, but identifed no models. Since the photos are almost certainly handouts, it's possible Boltin had no idea who most of the models were. However, burlesque queen Lili St. Cyr appears twice, which suggests he at least recognized her. We assume you do too, but if not she appears in panel seven below, with a close-up in panel eight, and she recurs in the third-to-last panel, with another close-up below that. At sixty-four pages, we ran out of patience to upload this entire magazine, but we have a representative selection of forty scans. Happy corporate holiday, Valentiners.
| The Naked City | Sex Files | Feb 13 2020 |
Prison guard gets Cocky, ends up behind bars.
Sexual relations between prison guards and prison inmates aren't that unusual. Stories appear at regular intervals. It takes a good hook to make the story go viral. In the recent tale of the sexual relationship between prison guard Stephanie Smithwhite and inmate Curtis Warren, the hook is a hole—Smithwhite cut a hole in her uniform pants so she and Warren could get down to business without having to strip. These assignations occurred over a period of months at Frankland Prison in Durham, England, where Smithwhite and Warren trysted in his cell, the prison kitchen, and the laundry facility. Smithwhite also reportedly sent Warren a photograph of herself wearing a catsuit, got tattooed with his name, and exchanged more than 200 calls with him thanks to an illegal phone he possessed.
Warren had the nickname “Cocky,” and no wonder. Turning a tough-as-nails prison guard into a slinky catgirl takes skills of all sorts, both above the neck and below the waist. It also takes the right environment. Other stories haven't noted it, but by environment we mean—and this isn't to sell Smithwhite's burning need for Cocky short—there's no possibility she would have felt she could take the risks she did unless there was a generally corrupt atmosphere at the prison. In other words, we bet other guards were breaking rules too. Not necessarily to the extent of cutting a glory hole in their pants to get freaky with prisoners, but when cellphones start making it into cellblocks, you tend to suspect it's because incoming contraband is not a rarity.
Smithwhite's colleagues finally became suspicious and began surveilling her, and they were probably plenty mad too. After all, she had chosen a drug felon named Cocky over all of them. Which, if one were inclined, might cause a neutral observer to draw conclusions about the sexiness quotient of the average prison guard. They finally caught Smithwhite committing the most innocuous of offenses—passing a note. Confronted in his cell, Warren tried but failed to eat the evidence, which we imagine said something like, “I heart drug felons. Do you heart the carceral state? If so check this box. Meooow. Purrrr.”
All these tawdry details came out during court proceedings that concluded this week. Smithwhite denied that the hole in her pants was to there to facilitate access for Cocky, but the sentencing judge said it was hard to imagine why 
else she'd have a hole there. Smithwhite was then hit with a two-year jail sentence for misconduct in a public office.
else she'd have a hole there. Smithwhite was then hit with a two-year jail sentence for misconduct in a public office.Since Smithwhite isn't in the same prison as Warren, the two will need something less like a hole and more like a long tunnel to maintain their affair, but if they split it won't be due to lack of commitment on Smithwhite's part. She's said she hopes the relationship will continue. Warren, meanwhile, was unavailable for comment due to being in the prison laundry room for an unusually long period of time, which will be investigated as soon as Frankland guards locate one of their missing colleagues.
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 12 2020 |
Instead of fighting about this, let's compromise. My soul will go to church with you while my body stays in bed.
Julian Paul does top work on this cover for Richard Matheson's 1953 thriller Fury on Sunday. Paul painted some nice covers for men's adventure magazines as well, two of which we showed you here and here. We read this novel, and from a complex intro that hurries to introduce five main characters, it settles into a streamlined narrative of people stalked and held hostage by a madman. Of the captives—the coward, the tart, the everyman, and the good girl—we knew right away who would be killed, which dampened some of the suspense. Another problem is that the characters do not make the smartest decisions, sometimes to the point of straining credulity. If Fury on Sunday were a horror movie they'd all be murder bait, pretty much. For those reasons the book, Matheson's second, resides in the same not-fully-realized territory as his first, Someone Is Bleeding, also published in 1953. But in 1954 he would strike gold. That year he published I Am Legend, which is a sci-fi classic and became a movie four different times. We have that book lined up for later.
| Femmes Fatales | Feb 12 2020 |
She's the reason you should have disaster insurance.
Above, a great promo image of U.S. actress Gail Russell from the 1957 drama The Tattered Dress, in which she co-starred with Jeff Chandler, Jeanne Crain, and Elaine Stewart. We aren't kidding about disaster insurance, by the way—she once crashed her car into a bar.
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 11 2020 |
That was a real interesting story. I bet the cops would've loved to hear it.
Louis Malley's 1953 cop thriller Stool Pigeon might better be called “Stool Pigeons,” because it's about how crime solving hinges on a network of informants, and how reliable snitches make average detectives great. All the detectives in the book have their own, and they're sometimes kept so secret that nobody else on the police force knows who they are. If an informant's identity ever gets out they usually go from stool pigeon to cooked goose, as shown in the cover scene painted by James Meese. As we read this book we kept expecting one of the multiple stool pigeons to emerge as pivotal, and that's exactly what happens. We won't tell you which one proves most important, but we will say Malley takes a fresh angle on the typical cop novel and does it reasonably well.
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 10 2020 |
Lindberg gets full exposure in Japan.
This is a very interesting Japanese poster for the Swedish sexploitation flick Exponerad, which premiered in Japan today in 1972 as 露出 or Roshutsu, which both mean “exposure.” The film was known in English speaking countries as Exposed and (misleadingly) Diary of a Rape. There are some scans of this piece online, but not of this quality. We talked about the movie last year. Check here.
And as a bonus, because Exponerad is a movie that deals with daydreams, we have below all of our most dreamlike images of Lindberg. No surprise, right? If you visit our site often, you know she's a mainstay, so today we're just adding to what was already a substantial treasure trove. All of these ethereal shots are Exponerad promos, and all are striking. We have many more Lindberg rarities, and you can bank on us sharing those down the line.
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