 You paid the cover charge to get in. Now you have to pay the uncover charge or get out. 
The brush behind this cover for Wade Miller's 1946 debut thriller Deadly Weapon was paperback vet Bob Abbett, and it's one of his better pieces in a portfolio filled with top efforts. The book is good too. It's about an Atlanta detective who drives to San Diego to avenge the death of his partner, and as befits such a concept, features excellent Sam Spade-like repartee between main character Walter James and a local cop named Austin Clapp. Some of the action is centered around a burlesque theatre and its headlining peeler Shasta Lynn, but the deadly weapon isn't a femme fatale, as implied by the art, but Walter James himself. The man is hell on wheels. He even uses his car to ram another auto and its occupants over a cliff. Overall, Deadly Weapon is well written, well paced, and well characterized (if a bit saccharine in the romantic subplot). Wade Miller—who was really Bob Wade and Bill Miller acting as one—started his/their career on a good note with this one.
 Do you see a woman half naked or half clothed? 
We've seen a lot of Joanne Arnold and here she is again starring on a 1955 pin-up poster, one of at least six published by the New Hampshire based company Life-Size. She's got almost everything here: fishnets, garter, corsage, bouqet, fur-accented high-heeled slippers—which are our favorite part—and opera gloves. Or maybe the opera gloves are our favorite. Regardless, she's missing whatever would go around her middle. That's fine, though. She doesn't need it, and her many memorable photo shoots as a nude model prove it. The Life-Size company's name was both a brand and a description—this item is sixty-two inches tall, only a couple of inches shorter than Arnold herself. You figure no woman would buy this and hang it, so it was a men's item, surely single men, those who never had to worry about dates coming by and seeing Joanne on the backside of the bedroom door. Or possibly other places. No need to be unimaginative. She could go in the kitchen. Bathroom too. Or, even expanding the bedroom possibilities, on the ceiling. That's the ticket. The other pin-ups in this Life-Size set that we've posted so far are here, here, and here. We say so far because we'll share more later. Meanwhile, you can see Arnold again here, here, and here. 
 Too bad life doesn't have a rewind button—you could go back to when you wouldn't let me seduce the information out of you. 
This is a fantastic piece of art for The Big Bite by Charles Williams. We'd be tempted to say frequent Pan Books illustrator Sam Peffer painted it, but he almost always signed his work in a place where it was not easily cropped or covered, the clever boy. Therefore we've seen only a few confirmed fronts by him where his signature was not present. Well, whoever was responsible for the art, we love this scene. You have a man recieving a severe beatdown as the femme fatale stands in the foreground barely interested. They do bore easily. In addition to the excellent art, this was an entertaining tale. We talked about it last year, and you can see what we thought at this link. It was originaly published in 1956, with this edition coming in 1960.
 Go in the water? That's the freaking North Sea you're talking about. 
It's been a few years, so we're returning to subject of German actress Karin Schubert today with this brilliant shot that first appeared as a centerfold in the West German magazine Sexy, a publication that did this sort of thing often. Schubert is a unique figure. She was born in Hamburg during wartime in 1944, debuted in cinema during the late ’60s, then, after establishing herself as a mainstream actress, went into porn. We talked about that in detail here, and we also mused on the relationship between mainstream erotic films and xxx movies, with her as an example, at this post. The latter link contains some of our ponderings concerning nudity on our website, so you may be interested in that, and if so, we go into more detail on that subject here, and talk about the entire purpose behind the site here. The above shot dates from 1971. And by the way, Germany does have some nice beaches—when they aren't covered by snow.
 Tired of checkers, chess, and cards? Has he got a game for you. 
Man hunted in the wild by a supposedly more intelligent and powerful foe is a concept used numerous times in Hollywood with great success, perhaps reaching its pinnacle with 1987's sci-fi actioner Predator. The idea goes all the way back to The Most Dangerous Game, a pre-Code chiller starring Joel McCrae, Leslie Banks, and Fay Wray. When a luxury yacht of upper crust types runs aground off the Pacific coast of South America, only McCrae survives. He's landed on a jungle island owned by a mad Russian named Count Zaroff, played with walleyed fervor by Banks, who hunts humans for kicks.
Zaroff's creepy ole stone mansion doesn't look like a place where one might hope to find aid, but McCrae has no choice but to go there. He isn't the only stranded raw meat hanging around. Boats occasionally crash because the Count moved the channel markers that are supposed to warn boaters away from the rocks. With each shipwreck he has new game to hunt. Wray is already on the island, having run aground before McCrae. She has an inkling things are not kosher, and she turns out to be correct.
The movie is stagy and clunky in its expository sequences, like most pre-Code productions, and Wray's acting is a sheer hoot, but there are positives. There's striking outdoor footage shot around Rancho Palos Verdes, which adds excellent imagery to a film that is indisputably a high visual achievement, and that in turn helps the action sequences come across as both gripping and believable. And of course the basic idea always works. Hunter and hunted, a battle of wits, a match to the death. The Most Dangerous Game premiered today in 1932.  *sigh* I'm getting mighty fucking bored on this island. Even my best formal wear doesn't lift my mood anymore.
 My God. I suddenly have the most dastardly idea.
 And now we shall play a very dangerous game! Staring like cats! We'll be in danger of enjoying ourselves!
 Stand against the wall and I'll throw this knife at you. I mean—not at you. Close enough to be dangerous. I mean— Okay, I can see you're not into it.
 How about a little Russian roulette? That's a fairly dangerous game.
 Erm... Joel? I think we should flee before he gets to the most dangerous game.
 We're lost aren't we? I said flee. I didn't say flee with no goddamn idea which way you were going.
 Are you sure we shouldn't have turned left back there at the bog of doom?
 Just admit you're lost, Joel. And not to add to your worries, but I'm getting pretty hungry. If I'm snippy it's your fault.
 Okay, now we're just going in circles.
 See? He's found us! You never listen!
 Count! Can you hear me? I'll make you a deal! Take her, and let me leave!
              
 He was bound to get burned.  
Just in case you haven't had any gruesomeness in your week, above you see mobster Irving Feinstein after he was burned by Murder, Inc. today in 1939. What do you have to do to meet this fate? Feinstein tried to horn in on territory that wasn't his, but that wasn't why he was torched. His error was in trying to stay alive. Feinstein was in the process of being repeatedly ice picked by hitman Harry Strauss, and bit Strauss's finger. Strauss and associates called a halt to the ice picking and instead bound Feinstein, his legs stretched backward and a rope running from ankles to neck. This killed him by the more protracted method of slow strangulation. Then afterwards, just for the hell of it, the killers transported the body to a vacant lot in Brooklyn and did what you see above. There's a lesson in this: don't bite the hand that bleeds you.
 Cancans de Paris is always uncanny.                   
Above: a few pages from the French burlesque publication Cancans de Paris, the seventh time we've taken a look at this mag, with this example dating from September 1965. As always there are mainstream celebrities mixed in with the peelers, including Carroll Baker, Brigitte Bardot, Elke Sommer, Kim Novak, Sean Connery, Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, and French born ballerina Ludmilla Tchérina. At the top of panel two there's also a minor Raymond Brenot illustration. See some major ones here, and just click the Cancans keywords below if you want to see more issues.
 Gunman goes to club to murder mob boss but changes mind and shoots terrible singer instead. 
Sometimes you win with these obscure old novels, and sometimes you lose. Since there's so little info on many of them, for us the most important reason whether to buy one is its price. We often pay more for ones we really want, but if it's cheap and the cover art is interesting, we pull the trigger. Hal Braham's 1957's mystery Call Me Deadly was eight dollars, which is a nice bracket, and as a bonus it has an excellent cover by Walter Popp. His dramatic nightclub tableau doesn't correspond to any scene in the story, but purely as an illustration we love it.
What we don't love is that, literarily, there's nothing special here. Ex-cop and recent widow Jim Dillon has been off the L.A. beat for two years and is now an insurance investigator with American Reporting Service. He's ordered to look into the death of a man named John Jasnich who had a large double-indemnity policy with a company—National Casualty—that doubts their client really went over the rail of a ferry into the Pacific Ocean to drown. His corpse hasn't turned up, and as you'll start to suspect early on in the proceedings, it never will.
Close calls with vicious thugs, interludes with three women of very different types, and hard-boiled repartee with various police ex-colleagues and current insurance industry competitors bring Dillon, long and windingly, to a twist ending that pushes into similar territory Chinatown would use seventeen years later. Despite that, the appropriate word for Braham's work here is, we think, perfunctory. There's plenty of mystery, but far less plot impetus than we'd have liked. He published seven other books under his name and the pseudonym Mel Colton, but Call Me Deadly had nothing to encourage us to buy again. Unless it's eight dollars or less.
 A little of the old razzmatazz. 
U.S. actress Janet Blair does the top hat and cane routine in this promo image made for her 1942 movie Broadway. It was one of her early roles, and she starred opposite George Raft, who portrayed himself in the film. Blair went on to amass many screen credits, but for our money her best effort is I Love Trouble, which we discussed a couple of years ago. You can read about it here.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1949—Rainier Becomes Prince of Monaco
In Monaco, upon upon the death of Prince Louis II, twenty-six year old Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand Grimaldi, aka Rainier III, is crowned Prince of Monaco. Rainier later becomes an international household name by marrying American cinema sweetheart Grace Kelly in 1956. 1950—Dianetics is Published
After having told a gathering of science fiction writers two years earlier that the best way to become a millionaire was to start a new religion, American author L. Ron Hubbard publishes Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. The book is today one of the canonical texts of Scientology, referred to as "Book One", and its publication date serves as the first day of the Scientology calendar, making today the beginning of year 52 AD (After Dianetics). 1985—Theodore Sturgeon Dies
American science fiction and pulp writer Theodore Sturgeon, who pioneered a technique known as rhythmic prose, in which his text would drop into a standard poetic meter, dies from lung fibrosis, which may have been caused by his smoking, but also might have been caused by his exposure to asbestos during his years as a Merchant Marine. 1945—World War II Ends
At Reims, France, German General Alfred Jodl signs unconditional surrender terms, thus ending Germany's participation in World War II. Jodl is then arrested and transferred to the German POW camp Flensburg, and later he is made to stand before the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials. At the conclusion of the trial, Jodl is sentenced to death and hanged as a war criminal. 1954—French Are Defeated at Dien Bien Phu
In Vietnam, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu, which had begun two months earlier, ends in a French defeat. The United States, as per the Mutual Defense Assistance Act, gave material aid to the French, but were only minimally involved in the actual battle. By 1961, however, American troops would begin arriving in droves, and within several years the U.S. would be fully embroiled in war.
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