“… swing your partner round and round, till the room is a blur and her skull hits the ground, doe-si-doe and don’t you know, shake her round till she bleeds out her nose, swing her round just a little bit more, till she loses her bra and her hair sweeps the floor, promenade and go round the hall, crazy zebra skin on the wall…” 

Either the stud on the cover of William Moore’s 1976 erotic opus The Hustitute has a wolverine in his g-string or he’s taking the white man’s afro to a whole new level—a lower level, filled with dander and pheromones. The artist is uncredited, so we don’t know from whose fevered imagination this creation came, but we can still use it to illustrate why there are so many sexually provocative women on Pulp Intl., and very few provocative men. The reason, amply illustrated here, is because with rare exceptions, the relatively low sales figures on erotic male pulp necessitated the employment of, shall we say, less-than-stellar artists. And we generally don’t like less-than-stellar art, even when the artist has an outstanding sense of humor like this guy. There are exceptions to what we just said. Guys like George Quaintance did top notch erotic male art, but he did his work under the guise of illustrating bodybuilder magazines. We bring all this up not for you, but for our girlfriends, who were somewhat nonplussed by yesterday’s post. But whenever they start beating the drum for beefcake, we remind them that they thought this guy was only so-so. Pretty much kills their credibility, don’t you think? 

You know we like to share these pulp style covers certain publishing houses cooked up for reprints of serious pieces of literature. Today, it’s William Faulkner’s turn, and the subject is his 1931 novel Sanctuary, which Signet released in 1950 with this cover. Sanctuary was Faulkner’s fifth book and first success, but he wasn’t particularly fond of it, dismissing it as commercial claptrap written purely for financial reasons. If that was truly his intention, it seems like leaving out all the depravity and violence would have been a better way to go about it. In any case, critics did not consider the book lightweight in the least, and a central rape scene involving a corncob understandably generated quite a bit of controversy. When the book was adapted into a 1933 movie entitled The Story of Temple Drake starring Miriam Hopkins, the corncob was removed, but the film still caused a stir and helped bring about the introduction of the Hays Code—the censorship doctrine that predated the establishment of the MPAA. In 1961 Sanctuary was adapted again, and this time not only was the corncob removed, but a sizeable chunk of Faulkner’s original plot. Despite his professed distaste for commercialism, Faulkner had by then worked on dozens of movie projects. He wrote screenplays for To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, and also became a sought after script doctor, massaging projects like Mildred Pierce, The Southerner and Gunga Din. We have a collection of posters from some of his projects below. If you’ve neglected to see any of these films, we highly recommend them and, of course, his novels are well worth a read. 

Above is the entire series of Dirty Harry book covers, nicely capturing Clint Eastwood’s famous don’t-fuck-with-me glint. The series, which is known collectively as The Further Adventures of Harry Callahan, was authored from 1981 to 1983 by several people using the psuedonym Dane Hartman. You can find brief descriptions/reviews here.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday again over in the States, and we expect the key to today’s game to be penetration. Repeated penetration. If either side fails to apply significant pressure, look for the passers to go deep early and often, but also expect both to use their tight ends. Once in the red zone, it’s crucial to stick it in for seven, because we all know three just ain't gonna cut it. Whoever gets up first will have an advantage, since coming from behind can be a stiff test unless the other side mishandles some balls. We’re thinking that after the last couple of very tight ones, this year’s match up could be a bit of an anti-climax. Expect the thing to get blown wide open in the third fourth. Colts Saints by two touches. 

This is a brilliant cover for Jerome Weidman’s 1938 novel What’s in it for Me?, with its grinning sleazeball seeming to offer a free breast exam to a nubile young acquaintance. But the book was actually serious, depicting greed and amorality in New York City’s garment industry. Weidman went on to write the scathing Too Early To Tell about the Office of War Information, an American propaganda agency where he was employed during World War II, and then tackled the newspaper business with The Price Is Right. In Weidman’s fiction everything was a commodity to be bought, whether fabric or facts, and all humans were deficient. In 1960 he co-wrote a book of the popular musical Fiorello! about NYC mayor Fiorello Henry LaGuardia, and along with his collaborator won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. He drifted into a distinguished literary twilight, serving as president of the Author’s League of America, publishing his memoirs in 1986, and eventually passing in 1998. Though virtually unknown now, Weidman was an author in the class of John Updike or Ernest Hemingway. There are many bios of him on the Web, but we like this one. 

Assorted Turkish language pulps published by the pop culture magazine Hayat, circa 1960s and early 1970s. The authors are, top to bottom, Allison L. Burks, Gerald de Jean, William McGivern, Ngaio Marsh, William Irish, Mignon G. Eberhart, Nora Roberts, Ellery Queen (aka Daniel Nathan and Manford Lepofsky), John Dickson Carr, and Robert Bloch. 

We posted a couple of Michael Avallone covers a while back and decided to return to him today for a more detailed treatment. Avallone called himself the fastest typewriter in the east, cranking out nearly two hundred books between 1953 and 1989, including entries in the Hawaii Five-O, Planet of the Apes, and Man from U.N.C.L.E. series. But speed exacted a heavy toll in quality, which may be why Avallone is considered by some to be one of the worst writers of all time. We can’t possibly dispute that—after all, he wrote the novelization of Friday the 13th in 3D—not exactly a résumé highlight. But even if he was undiscriminating, he was also bold. His output eventually shifted from detective fiction to pure flights of fancy. In the surreal Shoot It Again, Sam a group of Chinese brainwashers disguised as old Hollywood stars make lead character Ed Noon believe he’s Sam Spade. The series grew even weirder, and by the last few books Noon was trying to thwart an alien invasion. Quality of the prose aside, Avallone was a unique—if occasionally obnoxious—member of the pulp pantheon. Check him out yourself and you’ll see what we mean. 

Mignonette Eberhart was an acclaimed mid-century crime writer who was the first to create a female sleuth, which she did in her book The Patient in Room 18. This was a year before Agatha Christie created her immortal sleuth Jane Marple in Murder at the Vicarage. Eberhart soon veered away from pure whodunits and into romance-mysteries that usually centered on good women involved with bad men. The tagline of 1940’s The Hangman’s Whip—“Death is quicker than divorce”—gets that idea across succinctly. It was in these writings that Eberhart flourished, becoming internationally known and highly paid. She authored fifty-nine books, six of which were adapted to film, along with three of her short stories, and in 1971 she earned the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award. Eberhart died in 1996, but she changed the romance genre and entertained millions while doing it. Her books—including The Hangman’s Whip—remain widely available.