Cats always get in the way at the worst moments.
The above cover from the Milan based publishers Longanesi & Co. features U.S. glamour model Virginia Gordon fronting a 1959 translation of Ed McBain's The Pusher. McBain is basically a legend, but is it a stretch to call Gordon legendary too? We don't think so. She was Playboy magazine's January 1959 Playmate of the Month, and because of that her photos are highly collectible and expensive. You'd see two important reasons why if not for a mischievous cat, but you can outmaneuver him by clicking here or here. Below we have a few more fronts from Longanesi, including Jonathan Craig's Case of the Village Tramp, which also has Gordon on the cover, and John Jakes' detective novel Johnny Havoc, featuring Carol Baker giving a nice over-the-shoulder glance. Like Australia's Horwitz Publications and several other non-U.S. companies, Longanesi used (probably) unlicensed images of Hollywood starlets and glamor models as a matter of habit. We'll show you more examples of those a bit later.
Actually, the flap on my bikini does slim the hips. It also hides pistols. Now get your hands up, idiot. William Ard's Like Ice She Was stars his detective creation Lou Largo in a missing persons case. He's looking for a former prostitute who robbed a Montreal casino owner and fled to Miami. He finds her, but the situation escalates to murder and an attempted frame-up. This character was supposed to tentpole a series, and it did, but this was the second and last Largo written by Ard, as he died after writing it. The books thereafter were ghost written by Lawrence Block, and later John Jakes. Like Ice She Was is copyright 1960, and the Monarch Books cover guide has the art as uncredited, which is a shame.
There's nothing like a long soak in the tub. Don Holliday was yet another 1960s sleaze author who existed only as a pseudonym. This one was inhabited by Hal Dresner, Lawrence Block, John Jakes, Victor Banis and other sometime sexploitation writers. We don’t know which one wrote The Sin Conspirators for Greenleaf Classics' sleaze imprint Leisure Books, but with a cover this brutal, it’s probably good he distanced himself. Unless the man is only demonstrating how in high school the other kids used to give him swirlies, it isn’t going to be just a bad hair day for his companion, but a bad air day. We’re working up a more comprehensive post on these Greenleaf paperbacks, so keep an eye out.
My gosh, are those Vivier stilettos you’re wearing? How extraordinary. Don Bellmore, whose Hot Pants Heiress you see above, was one of many prolific smut authors during the 1960s. He wrote Shame Agent, Sin Dealer, Prey for Rape, The Dyke Department, The Twins’ Initiation, and many more. It all sounds pretty low rent, but you’d be surprised how robust the market is for vintage sleaze. We saw The Twins’ Initiation going for $49.95 on one site. Pretty good for an author that wasn’t even real. Bellmore was one of those names shared by a number of writers, including George H. White, who also wrote as both Jan Hudson and J.X. Williams, though the J.X. pseudonym was also used by John Jakes among others. White/Bellmore also may have filled in as Alan Marshall when Donald E. Westlake wasn’t inhabiting the role. It all gets pretty confusing. But what isn’t confusing is this humorous cover art, featuring a bottomless vixen doing the upside down bicycle exercise and her friend with a shoe fetish. We have some more Bellmore covers below. Enjoy.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1986—Otto Preminger Dies
Austro–Hungarian film director Otto Preminger, who directed such eternal classics as Laura, Anatomy of a Murder, Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm, and Stalag 17, and for his efforts earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, dies in New York City, aged 80, from cancer and Alzheimer's disease. 1998—James Earl Ray Dies
The convicted assassin of American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., petty criminal James Earl Ray, dies in prison of hepatitis aged 70, protesting his innocence as he had for decades. Members of the King family who supported Ray's fight to clear his name believed the U.S. Government had been involved in Dr. King's killing, but with Ray's death such questions became moot. 1912—Pravda Is Founded
The newspaper Pravda, or Truth, known as the voice of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, begins publication in Saint Petersburg. It is one of the country's leading newspapers until 1991, when it is closed down by decree of then-President Boris Yeltsin. A number of other Pravdas appear afterward, including an internet site and a tabloid. 1983—Hitler's Diaries Found
The German magazine Der Stern claims that Adolf Hitler's diaries had been found in wreckage in East Germany. The magazine had paid 10 million German marks for the sixty small books, plus a volume about Rudolf Hess's flight to the United Kingdom, covering the period from 1932 to 1945. But the diaries are subsequently revealed to be fakes written by Konrad Kujau, a notorious Stuttgart forger. Both he and Stern journalist Gerd Heidemann go to trial in 1985 and are each sentenced to 42 months in prison. 1918—The Red Baron Is Shot Down
German WWI fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen, better known as The Red Baron, sustains a fatal wound while flying over Vaux sur Somme in France. Von Richthofen, shot through the heart, manages a hasty emergency landing before dying in the cockpit of his plane. His last word, according to one witness, is "Kaputt." The Red Baron was the most successful flying ace during the war, having shot down at least 80 enemy airplanes. 1964—Satellite Spreads Radioactivity
An American-made Transit satellite, which had been designed to track submarines, fails to reach orbit after launch and disperses its highly radioactive two pound plutonium power source over a wide area as it breaks up re-entering the atmosphere.
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