| Vintage Pulp | Jun 29 2018 |
You two stop fighting or I won't let either of you rub sunscreen on my back.
We got lazy about scanning again, but today we're back to Australia's Adam magazine with an issue published this month in 1970. The cover illustrates Mark Bannerman's sea adventure “Day of the Knife,” in which a habitual troublemaker is released from an island prison by a connected police official on the condition that he recover a cache of Spanish gold. The gold happens to be aboard a ship that sank a hundred years ago in shark infested waters. This isn't actually the major problem. The more serious issue is that he strikes up an affair with the wife of the rich man sponsoring the expedition, and quickly learns the wife wants her husband dead. Since they'll be at sea together, what better time to do it than during the diving operation? But when he eventually feeds the husband to hungry sharks the femme fatale reverses course, accuses him of murdering her husband out of jealousy, and gets him tossed back in jail. It's only when he's sentenced to death at his trial that he realizes it isn't just the wife who set him up, but the police official too—the pair had been lovers all along. It's pretty straightforward stuff as adventure fiction goes, and not well written, but enjoyable just the same. Other tales in the magazine are better. We have dozens of issues of Adam in the website, so if you want to see more from this publication just click the keywords at bottom.
| Vintage Pulp | Mar 18 2017 |
You brute! Why don't you enslave someone your own size!
Above, more Down Under goodness from Australia's Adam magazine, with a cover from this month in 1969 depicting a scene from Mark Bannerman's “Murder in Marseilles.” It's a tale of kidnapping and slavery, or as the author constantly puts it, “white slavery.” This is a term you run into often mid-century and pulp literature, and of course the idea is that enslaving white people must be specially pointed out, as it's presumed to be orders of magnitude more evil than just plain slavery. In this case, a “swarthy Algerian” is the villain, and a Marseillaise beauty is the target. Do we need to tell you this plot is foiled? Of course not.
Adam offers another interesting feature—a piece of factual journalism entitled “Wild Girls of the American Suburbs.” It's about apartment complexes for singles, which are described as if they're twenty-four hour sex parties. All of this being well before our time, we weren't sure if such places actually existed, but it seems they did, in locales all over the U.S., particularly San Francisco, the Jersey Shore, Myrtle Beach, and Fire Island. Apparently Los Angeles had a famous one called Villa Dionysus, which we can't help noticing would be initialed V.D. Hopefully a walk-in-clinic was somewhere in the same zip code. Twenty-seven scans below.
