Above, a cover from the Aussie men’s mag Adam, April 1955, with art depicting a tense moment on the road in Lester Way’s short story “…the Dotted Line.” Below are some interior scans, including one containing the immortal Bettie Page, identified by the editors only as “this brunette”. But even if they didn’t name her, they certainly knew of her. By 1955 she was extremely famous. Her image had been used in dozens of magazines, including Playboy in January of that year, and she had appeared on The Jackie Gleason Show, in the burlesque films Striporama, Varietease, and Teaserama, and had acted in two off-Broadway plays. Page is in panels twelve and thirteen below, and you also get other pin-ups, some nice art, cartoons, and an interesting ad. 

From Sydney, Australia’s Kenmure Press, who are the same folks who published the great magazine Adam, here’s one of their other imprints—the succinctly named Man. The name leaves no doubt what the magazine is about, and indeed this issue from February 1950 features cover art of an available woman strutting her stuff for some virile sailors, and inside you get pin-ups, pulp style illustrations, fiction, and humor. We found this Man and a few others in an online archive. Below are some scans from today's, including a black and white photo about midway down of American actress Angela Greene. We'll have more coming from the others later. 

Above is an excellent Barye Phillips cover for Carter Brown’s 1961 thriller The Ever-Loving Blues, which is a re-write of Brown’s 1956 novel Death of a Doll. The re-work made a few plot changes, and replaced a main character named Barney Slade with the running Brown character Danny Boyd. We can’t be certain why that happened, but since Brown wrote and published in Australia, perhaps when U.S.-based Signet acquired the rights to Death of a Doll for its first American printing the company urged Brown to make it more commercial by folding it into the Danny Boyd oeuvre. Three-plus years working on this site and we finally get to use the word “oeuvre”. We feel so complete now. 

Above are two covers for Carter Brown’s, aka Alan G. Yates’ thriller Who Killed Dr. Sex? Robert McGinnis painted the cover art at top in 1964 for the Signet paperback, and in 1965 another artist painted a dupe of the cover for Horwitz International’s release. You probably shouldn’t get any credit for copying work, but we have to confess we like the second version quite a bit. McGinnis is a master figure painter, of course, and his reclining woman beats the dupe, but the second version’s wall filigrees and iridescent green bed are nice additions. The other main difference is the direction of the woman’s gaze. McGinnis painted her looking slightly away, while the copycat painted her looking directly at the viewer. It’s a major shift in mood, and an interesting choice. We discussed this copying practice in relation to Carter Brown’s paperbacks before, and we assume it has to do with rights issues between the American and Australian publishers, and Robert McGinnis, but we’d love to know the details. Hopefully, more information will become available down the line. 

Above, an eerie shot of the French nuclear test Betelgeuse, one of more than two-hundred tests conducted by France over the course of thirty-six years. This one is from 1966, and took place on September 11, but we posted it today rather than in September because it’s incorrectly listed on many websites as occurring today. The location is French Polynesia and the event was strongly protested by the potentially downwind nations of New Zealand, Australia, and Japan, but those complaints were ignored. This exposure was made near the instant of detonation, and the brightly lit protrusions are stabilizing wires attached to the bomb platform vaporizing. You can see a better example of the same phenomenon here. 

This cover of Australia’s Adam magazine from October 1963 has a vivid bullfighting illustration for Damon Mills’ short story “Return To Glory,” the tale of a washed up Mexican bullfighter lured back into the ring by the promise of an easy bull, but who instead finds himself trapped with an exceptionally large and dangerous “bragado”. In the story the hero is wounded by the bull but through sheer determination and bravery still wins the fight, and then walks off into the sunset to run a cattle farm with his beautiful girlfriend. Good thing he wasn’t gored like Spanish matador Juan José Padilla, who six days ago didn’t walk off into a sunset, but rather was carted off into a hospital to have his eye removed and his jaw reset (a link here—only for the bravest among you). Regarding the cover art, the girlfriend in “Return To Glory” is brunette, but the artist obviously opted for red hair to echo the color and shape of the matador’s muleta, or cape. Good decision, we think. Eighteen more scans from Adam below.    

One of Pulp Intl.’s sharp-eyed readers sent us a link yesterday to a collection of early twentieth century mugshots compiled by Australia-based Historic Houses Trust. The photos are glass plate negatives from New South Wales police stations and were mostly taken between 1920 and 1930. Above you see a typical mugshot, this one of Eugenia Falleni, who was arrested in Sydney in 1920. Her crime is detailed as follows: When Harry Leon Crawford, hotel cleaner of Stanmore, was arrested and charged with wife murder he was revealed to be in fact Eugenia Falleni, a woman and mother, who had been passing as a man since 1899. In 1914, as Harry Crawford, Falleni had married the widow Annie Birkett. Three years later, shortly after she announced to a relative that she had found out “something amazing about Harry,” Birkett disappeared. Crawford told neighbors that she had run off with a plumber. In 1919 Birkett’s young son, who had remained in Crawford’s custody, told an aunt of attempts made on his life by his drunken stepfather. The aunt contacted police. A charred body which had been found in Lane Cove in 1917 was belatedly identified as Birkett’s. Crawford’s astonished second wife, when finally convinced of Falleni’s true gender remarked, “I always wondered why he was so painfully shy...”

More examples with descriptions of the perpetrators’ crimes appear below. You’ll notice the compositions are often quite nice. That’s partly because of the glass plate photography, but also because the subjects were allowed to compose themselves however they pleased. To see more go to the Historic Houses Trust website. Because it isn’t very user-friendly, we’ve linked you past the home page and directly to the mugshot archive, but the rest of the site is worth visiting as well.

Vera Purcell, 7 September 1926, aged 25, stole a large quantity of clothing from a house in Darlinghurst and was sentenced to six months hard labor at the State Reformatory for Women at Long Bay.

Mrs. Osborne, circa 1919, details unknown.

Giuseppe Mammone, aka G. Mammona, 15 February 1930, arrested for suspicion of the murder of Domenico Belle. Mammone ran a barbershop in Leichhardt and owed Belle money. Despite police suspicions, Mammone was never charged with the crime.

Albert Sing, 31 March 1922, received stolen goods, including fountain pens, cutlery and clothing, and was sentenced to eighteen months hard labor.

Barbara Turner, aka Tierney, Tiernan, Taylor, Florence Gillespie, Jessi Turner, et. al., 10 October 1921, Central Police Station, Sydney, was a confidence woman who operated widely across Australia and was arrested for defrauding a man named Henry Placings of 106 pounds by borrowing against a forged check. She served a year in prison.

John Walter Ford and Oswald Clive Nash, June 1921, both aged sixteen, were arrested for breaking and entering.

Masterman Thomas Scoringe, 29 November 1922, Central Police Station, Sydney, was a house thief who specialized in robbing the residences of Chinese people.

May Blake, 1 September 1930, Central Police Station, Sydney, charged with cocaine possession and sentenced to one year in jail.

Ruby Furlong, 15 November 1920, State Reformatory for Women, Long Bay, arrested for malicious wounding. Furlong was a feared criminal, and during an argument with a Newtown man she pulled a razor and cut his face open. 

This issue of Kenneth G. Murray’s Adam from September 1963 has a lovely cover illustration for W. H. Percival’s tale of danger and treasure hunting in Ceylon, “Cult of the Snake God,” as well as plenty of nice treats inside. As for the cover girl’s inappropriate crypt digging garb, well, she’s a slave and as any pulp aficionado knows, they’re usually sexy and very rarely have enough clothing to wear. In the story, the main character (with the unlikely name Rex Scarbe) decides to rescue the girl Mora from her evil master, but it turns out she’s setting a trap to sacrifice him to a giant python. Scarbe kills the python only to have Mora try to stab him in the heart. So the lesson is that the trustworthiness of a woman is directly proportionate to the amount of clothing she wears. Like you didn't already know that. 

Above is the cover of Adam from August 1955, which makes it the second oldest copy of the magazine we’ve located. We have twenty-nine scans below, seventeen other issues of Adam buried inside our website, and more coming soon. 

Sad to say, our issues of the wonderful Aussie post-pulp mag Adam are beginning to run low. Not only that, but the prices for them online have been steadily rising and are reaching a point where we can’t really buy them economically anymore. We don’t know what the hell is going on but it truly sux. But we’ll focus on the positive, which includes this June 1976 issue, with cover art for Michael Young’s story “The Urandangie Track.” Sayeth the intro: “He stole a bushman’s wife. Surely a Nissan utility could outrun a horse?” And the answer is no it can’t, not when there are no roads and the guy on a horse is shooting at you. We have twenty-four scans below, and several issues of Adam remaining.