| Vintage Pulp | Sep 15 2023 |
It's you and me, baby, ’til death do us part. What's your name again?
Here's a quick quiz for you. Is the following passage from a crime novel or a romance? There was one truth between us, one truth that would never be untrue. Whatever this animal thing inside me was, there was something inside her that was a mate for it. I felt that nothing could ever change that. It had to be brought alive again. It had to live and burn its own fire and be electric with its own voltage.
Those lines are from Richard Himmel's 1950 thriller I'll Find You, aka It's Murder, Maguire, first in a series of books starring mobbed up Chicago lawyer Johnny Maguire. The passage illustrates something we've noted before—that crime novels and romance novels sometimes intersect. Fictional tough guys occasionally fall head over heels in love, and when they do, the prose describing that love—in some author's hands—can be as overwrought as what you'd find in any romance novel.
In this story, Maguire, who must be one of the dumbest smart characters in crime fiction, falls for a deceased friend's wife who later fakes her own suicide. While the police believe she's dead, he never buys it, and risks his career and safety to locate her. He finds her living under a new identity and refuses to let her get away from him again—which is exactly as stalkerish as it sounds, considering he barely knew her before she vanished. She eventually submits to his overbearing attentions, but sadly, malign actors may ruin their love story.
It's surprising to us that there was a sequel, but Himmel's crime-romance must have struck a nerve with the reading public. It didn't strike one with us, but we didn't dislike it. We felt that it was eye-rollingly saccharine, and we found Himmel's dialogue a bit stilted. On the plus side, Maguire is funny at times, and his friend-with-benefits relationship with a supporting character named Tina has the potential to be engaging, assuming she hangs around. We'll see what develops in book two.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 27 2023 |
You can't build an empire without breaking a few civilizations.
The Empty Quarter from 1962 is Lou Cameron's second novel, after his scintillating music and radio business drama Angel's Flight. Surprisingly, he leaves Southern California in the dust for the southern Arabian peninsula and the mid-century oil business, and the result is an excellent adventure dealing with a seismic surveyor who uses dynamite and aerial reconnaissance to pinpoint oil deposits. He's sent into Saudi Arabia's empty quarter to find what his backers hope is the motherlode of all gushers. Once out in the desert he deals with tough conditions and interpersonal conflict, while simmering in the background are religious zealotry, Sunni versus Shia rivalry, a race against looming war in the region, and much more. The scene of an oil worker running across the desert aflame stuck with us. Cameron can really weave a tale.
This is also a book with racial content that will make some readers cringe, with offensive slurs used possibly a hundred times by protagonists and antagonists alike. Of course, the attitudes reflected are certainly accurate for the time, but it's still hard to read these privileged characters viciously denigrating Arabs and Africans while hailing from countries that shattered the world as a result of unconscionable greed and disregard for human life. As fans of vintage literature you can guess where we stand on censorship. However, we also don't dismiss offended groups as simply thin-skinned. The language contained here, while giving the characters verisimilitude, also echoes centuries-old myths that were foundational to the genocides and slavery that killed hundreds of millions of human beings and led to the looting of entire lands.
So that's the elephant in the room concerning The Empty Quarter, and we wanted to address that. The killing and theft that fueled Western empires are hard for some to face, but it happened, and since this isn't Florida the facts can't be hidden or made illegal. We buy books with no detailed knowledge of what's in them. That would definitely spoil the fun. We don't even read the rear teaser text, for the most part. We buy books—only if the price is right—when we like the cover art, when the general opinion in the vintage book community is that it's a mandatory read, or when we've enjoyed previous efforts by the same author. We loved Angel's Flight, so another go-round with Cameron was on the cards. But because Angel's Flight was a bit saucy along racial lines, we weren't terribly surprised what was in The Empty Quarter. All in all, it's quite a book—for better and worse.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 19 2023 |
Would you go through a nightmare to make a dream come true?
Lawrence Block's 1961 novel Mona, which has also been published as Grifter's Game and Sweet Slow Death, is the old classic: a husband, a wife, and a lover talked into murder. The suspension of disbelief test here comes at the outset, when longtime grifter Joe Marlin steals a suitcase that happens to contain a fortune in heroin, then accidentally meets and starts an affair with the eponymous sexpot Mona, who's married to the suitcase's owner. Quelle coïncidence. Or not. Marlin has lived by wits and deceit for a long time, and his instincts scream for him to gallop out of town with the horse. Instead he braves organized crime retribution because he's fallen in love. Dames'll be your ruin every time. Good stuff from Block, fast and fun, with a crisp twist at the end. The cover art on this Gold Medal edition is uncredited.
| Vintage Pulp | Aug 17 2023 |
So that whole brains over brawn thing? I gather you're not a big believer.
Above you see a cover for Peter Rabe's 1955 thriller Benny Muscles In. Rabe had previously debuted with Stop This Man! and would go on to write thirty novels, but he's still green here, and it shows. In the story, Benny Tapkow, a collector for the mob, decides to kidnap his boss's daughter Pat for a rival mobster. Everything goes ridiculously wrong, starting with the rival's henchmen making off with the wrong woman, and continuing with Pat getting hooked on heroin. Overall the book felt like Rabe, early in his authorial career, didn't know quite where to go with these ideas. There's plenty of grit, but not enough precision. We did like the bit, though, where Benny got all quantum: [She] isn't dead. And she isn't alive. She's right between, and the more Pendleton stalls, the worse it'll be for her. Well, maybe that isn't exactly quantum, but it's close, if unintentional. But Rabe would make legit quantum leaps with later works. The art on this Gold Medal edition is by Lu Kimmel.
| Vintage Pulp | Jun 30 2023 |
He definitely isn't one of the great apes.
Bruno Fischer's 1950 novel The Lustful Ape has a strange title, which comes from an even stranger character, Ape Jones, so nicknamed not only because of his appearance, but due to his behavior. The protagonist, though, is a detective named Dirk Hart, whose amoral estranged wife is murdered. Explicit photos of a high society woman point to the killing being revenge for blackmail, but subplots abound as Dirk tries to solve the crime. He lives with a sister who's mixed up with the local crime lord's top henchman, has a best friend who knew his dead wife far better than he ever admitted, employs a secretary who's in love with him, and is hired by a client who commits suicide under suspicious circumstances. It's all in a day's existence for a mid-century private eye. Fischer weaves the threads together adequately and makes a readable mystery of it all, surprisingly punctuated by an extended sequence of cruel and somewhat sexualized torture. The episode makes sense, in terms of the narrative, but you don't usually come across stuff so uncompromising in tales from 1950. Our edition is from 1958 for Red Seal Books.
| Vintage Pulp | Jun 28 2023 |
The cover art for Murder in the Wind changes like the weather.
The copy we read of John D. MacDonald's natural disaster thriller Murder in the Wind a while back had a front painted by George Gross. The two covers you see above were painted by Bob Abbett and Robert McGinnis. Their art goes in different directions. Abbett's shows nothing related to bad weather but uses a dilapidated background to imply that his cover figure is stranded, while McGinnis went for an outdoor setting cut by slanting rain, also using a dilapidated house motif. Both efforts are excellent, and the book is good too, as we mentioned here.
Fawcett PublicationsGold Medal BooksDell PublicationsJohn D. MacDonaldBob AbbettRobert McGinniscover artliterature
| Vintage Pulp | May 22 2023 |
If it helps to persuade you, when you're an old woman you'll look back on even your worst one night stands with nostalgia.
Vintage thrillers and films often used Mexico as a setting, and we very much enjoy when that happens, due to our own numerous trips to the country and the many fond memories they produced. Wade Miller's 1950 novel Devil May Care takes readers to Mexico and does a better job of it than most books we've read. The trip happens when soldier of fortune Biggo Venn is sent to Ensenada on a mission that promises to profit him $10,000. Unfortunately, Biggo's contact turns up murdered, and out of caution he decides the smartest move is to wait for the unknown killer or killers to reveal themselves. He lays low and plays the role of gringo tourist. While doing so he meets up with a hard luck American named Jinny and a beautiful local named Pabla, both of whom are romantic interests, though in Jinny's case it's a love-hate dynamic.
Plenty happens with Jinny and Pabla, but Biggo's most portentous encounter is with fellow soldier of fortune Lew Hardesty, who's not only a rival suitor for both women, but keeps trying to horn in on Biggo's caper. The two eventually get into a vicious fight that settles nothing except that Biggo, who's ten years older, is losing his edge (though he dislocates Hardesty's jaw before the man pushes it back into place and comes at Biggo like a whirlwind). It's a good scene in a fun book. In fact, we think Devil May Care is Wade Miller (a pseudonym for authors Bob Wade and Bill Miller) at his/their best. The story is well paced, exciting, sometimes sad, and often funny. The authors use the rough-edged mercenaries-at-large premise brilliantly, as in this exchange between Biggo and Hardesty:
Biggo growled, “I thought you were in Bolivia.” Just because he had met one of his own kind made the outlook no brighter. Hardesty was a comrade but something less than a friend. He had a knack for showing up where he wasn't wanted.
“I was. Now I'm here.”
“What happened?”
“Have you ever spent a summer in Bolivia? Very hot.”
Biggo understood the old pattern. Hardesty had been on the wrong side, whichever side happened to be losing that year. “Yes, Lew, I was thinking about you only the other night.”
“I love you too.”
“I know that. I remember the time you let me go out after that tiger in the Malay with a jimmied gun.”
Hardesty laughed. “That was a fine joke. Those man-killers are always old tigers, anyway. You've got more teeth than he had. Was that any worse than shipping me that opium in Transjordan? I sat in that mud jail for two months until one of your shells knocked out a wall.”
Biggo laughed in turn. “That was the gunner's fault. He'd promised me a direct hit.”
Much of the dialogue features similar banter, and not just between the soldiers. Hard luck Jinny can quip with the best of them:
Jinny said faintly, “I thought you went to jail.” She looked ready to be sick. She held a cracker halfway to her mouth, forgotten.
“Can't keep a good man down, honey.”
“What's that got to do with you?”
In the end the killers reveal themselves and Biggo—by now seeking revenge as well as a payoff—brings hell directly to their doorstep, or in this case to their yacht in the harbor. The climax brings a surprise or two, and Biggo's fate hinges upon who to trust, and who not to. Devil May Care is a wide-open sort of tale about dangerous men, but its title proves to be contradictory. Biggo pretends not to care about anything except the next mission and the next exotic port of call, but his acceptance of his own aging and his slim hope for retirement and a restful old age matter—in the end—more than anything else. The book has some moments that might make modern readers quail, but all the portrayals and reactions make sense in context. We loved this one.
| Vintage Pulp | Apr 6 2023 |
Except for a few quaint customs she clings to, she's a typical conservative society lady.
Love at first sight, and marriage on first night. At least a few mid-century writers worked this theme, and readers seemed to buy it. A few descriptions of how beautiful the woman was and voilà—hearts and wedding bells. But whether it actually worked as a device depended upon plot and writing skill. Eric Hatch, in his 1952 novel The Golden Woman, uses the exotic surroundings of Port-au-Prince, Haiti to weave the spell needed to make readers believe a fantastically rich young virgin named Yvette du Chambrigne and a naval officer named Walter Moore meet, fall in love, and marry over the course of a night and day. The romantic but reckless decision brings them into conflict with the Haitian elite, as Yvette has defied her powerful father's wishes to marry her off for political gain to a cruel army general named La Borde.
Yvette is Haitian, but she's also white. Well, near enough to count, though as Hatch writes the character, her smidge of African blood makes her—in some mysterious way that must have made sense to readers back in the day—primitive. We know, we know. We didn't write the thing. We just work here. Hatch's protagonist Walter Moore says he wouldn't care if Yvette were fully and visibly black, but since she's by any realistic measure fully and visibly white, he would say that, wouldn't he? Whether the young lovers are culturally compatible becomes a key question of the story, and this brackets a central plotline in which Moore becomes swept up in—you guessed it—revolution. We've read a few books now that have used the same idea. In this case, Moore basically leads the revolution. While riding a horse. And carrying a sword. While under the protection of the voodoo god Mala. Sounds silly, right? It is. But we have to admit it's also fun.
Eric Hatch is remembered today for his books 1101 Park Avenue (filmed in 1936 as My Man Godfrey) and The Year of the Horse (filmed as The Horse in the Gray Flannel Suit). With The Golden Girl he reminds readers that if you got one drop of ink in the milk, the milk was perceived to be fully ink. Even today, someone who is three quarters white and one quarter black is going to be seen as black. The Golden Woman is, in the Year of Our Division 2023, a reminder that ideas around "purity" still predominate—even if unconsciously—for many people. But leaving that fraught discussion aside and judging the book solely as a thriller, it's worth a read, absurd though the story may be. If you're interested in island adventures in general, or Haiti in particular, we say go for it. The art on this Gold Medal edition is by Barye Phillips, influenced by a Life magazine photo from 1948, which you see below.
HaitiPort-au-PrinceFawcett PublicationsGold Medal BooksLife MagazineMy Man GodfreyThe Horse in the Grey Flannel SuitEric HatchBarye Phillipscover artliterature
| Vintage Pulp | Mar 15 2023 |
I am with child. Your diving for lobsters and snaring rabbits must end. I hear the new Burger King on the island is hiring.
We appreciate when genre authors think outside the box, so first off we have to give credit to Charles Runyon for trying to throw readers a curve with his thriller Color Him Dead. It was published in 1963 and has a premise that's unusual. A man breaks out of prison and flees to the fictional Caribbean island of St. Patricia, set on revenge against the person who framed him and got him a life sentence for murder. That person is Edith Barrington, wife and virtual prisoner of her husband Ian. Our anti-hero, whose name is Drew Simmons, plans to murder Edith.
But when Drew finally finds her, he discovers she has total amnesia, the result of a breakdown and electroshock treatment. So he decides he can't kill her until she remembers what she did to him. He needs that recognition to make his revenge sweet. That means restoring her memory. And the only way he can figure out to do that is to have an affair with her. Maybe some deep dicking from a penis out of her past will jog her memory. Offbeat, no?
The plan hinges on one of the hoariest clichés in genre fiction: we'll call it the beat-and-switch. Ian keeps Edith guarded around the clock by a fearsome brute named Doxie. The end product of a century-old slave breeding experiment (we won't even get into that), Doxie is supposed to keep Edith from enjoying any extracurriculars with island visitors, and since he's castrated he's perfect for the job. But when Drew beats the shit out of Doxie, Ian fires his loyal aide and gives Drew the job of guarding his wife.
That's a completely stupid move, not least because Drew has a penis that works, yet more than a few thrillers are built around the device of a foolish man placing an enemy in control of that which he wants most protected. It rarely passes the credulity test, and it doesn't pass here either. In addition to this, Drew gets caught up in a revolution. In fact, he somehow becomes central to it, as often happens to tough guy protagonists in mid-century fiction. We won't get into that either, because it's stupid also.
Runyon tried something different, and we'll also note that he took advantage of the loosening censorship standards of the 1960s to write a tale that's more sexual than most, but he needed better conceptualizing and execution—particularly to get at the core of Drew's conflict over using sex as an avenue to murder. At least the paperback has nice Robert McGinnis cover art—which in mood is very much like this one. McGinnis goes topless with his female figure, probably one of the earlier instances of nudity on a Gold Medal novel.
| Vintage Pulp | Jan 5 2023 |
There's no plan B. There's only payback.
Above you see a cover for The Avenger, written by Matthew Blood and published in 1952. It's a detective novel that reads like a parody. It was the first of two starring hard-boiled private dick Morgan Wayne, and it's immediately clear why the character lasted only two outings. In many hard-boiled detective books the hero is unrealistically tough and the women unbelieveably pliant, but here that's taken to a ridiculous extreme, only with poor writing that makes clear that this is not a parody, but a serious attempt at urban crime drama in the Spillane mold. At one point the anti-hero Wayne bites the head off a crook's prized goldfish then shoots him. This is all in pursuit of the person who killed Wayne's new secretary Lois, who he'd been looking forward to laying:
He concentrated fiercely on visualizing her as she must be waiting for him now. That was the only drawback to this affair. There hadn't been enough build-up. Not enough expectation. Nothing at all of the slow and delicious burning that gradually takes complete possession of a man during the period of delightful dalliance that generally precedes the consummation of a civilized love affair.
So much wrong with that paragraph. Delightful dalliance that precedes consummation? But we'll let it pass:
She must be waiting for him in her apartment now, damn it. Soaking up the warmth of a hot bath while she waited for him and anticipated his coming. He savagely cursed the circumstances that were keeping them apart, and unconsciously trod the accelerator closer and closer to the floor boards...
That's pretty bad too. Anyway, Wayne arrives at Lois's apartment to find her dead and mutilated, and along the road to solving the crime he's pursued sexually by a sixteen-year-old, her mother, and various other cock-starved characters, before climbing the ladder to the person who ordered the murder and taking care of business. It's all written in the same graceless fashion as the above examples. The amazing part is that Matthew Blood was a pseudonym for W. Ryerson Johnson and David Dresser. There's no excuse for two brains producing a half-witted book. We do like the cover art, though, and no wonder—it's Barye Phillips again.
Fawcett PublicationsGold Medal BooksMatthew BloodW. Ryerson JohnsonDavid DresserBarye Phillipscover artliterature
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