Above are the cover and some interior scans from Adam, published April 1977, the forty-fifth issue of this great Australian magazine we've shared here on Pulp Intl. This one has yet another story from Mike Rader. We can't imagine there's much more of his output to be found, but we'll find out—we have more than twenty more examples of Adam to show you. The previous forty-four issues we've looked at are all buried inside the website but you can find them by using the search box or clicking the keywords below.

We last wrote about Short Stories in December 2008 and said we’d get back to it soon. Seven-plus years? That’s about par for us. That last post was five covers from the British edition of the magazine, which lasted from 1920 to 1959. The covers here, featuring the familiar red sun motif or clever variations thereof, are from British and American editions. 

 

Two issues of Adam to share—one from Australia and one from the U.S.—proved too much work for one day, so we posted Aussie Adam yesterday, and today we’re on to the American Adam. These magazines have no relationship to each other apart from coincidentally sharing a name. U.S. Adam relies on photo covers rather than painted art, shows a dedication to cheesecake photography that far outstrips its Australian cousin, and also has less fiction. However, what fiction it does offer extends beyond Aussie Adam’s adventure and crime focus, such as the short piece from counterculture icon Harlan Ellison called, “The Late Great Arnie Draper.” We’ve scanned and shared the entirety of that below if you’re in a reading mood.

The striking cover model here goes by the name Lorrie Lewis, and inside you get burlesque dancer Sophie Rieu, who performed for years at the nightclub Le Sexy in Paris, legendary jazzman Charles Mingus, and many celebs such as Jane Fonda, Claudia Cardinale, Sharon Tate, and the Rolling Stones. There’s also a feature on the Dean Martin movie Murderer’s Row, with Ann-Margret doing a little dancing, and blonde stunner Camilla Sparv demonstrating how to properly rock a striped crop-top. We managed to put up more than forty scans, which makes this an ideal timewaster for a Monday. Enjoy.

This issue of Adam was published this month in 1977. It has a nice cover featuring a tussle on the Hudson River with New York City in the background, and Bernie Sanders looking very pissed off. And really who can blame him? This situation is inherently unequal and there’s no need for it because, clearly, there’s more than enough to go around. The story being illustrated here is Mike Rader’s “The Man They Killed at the Waldorf,” about a murder plot with national security implications. This is probably one of the last stories he published in the magazine, and it’s certainly one of his most fanciful, involving a weather control device, a kindly professor, Russian spies, and a murderous femme fatale. Also in this issue you get the usual assortment of great illustrations and pretty models. Rita Pennington stars in the feature, "Wide Awake Wendy," and in the final photo set, “Irish Eyes,” for some reason we prefer the last shot upside-down, maybe because there’s a Dorian Gray sort of weirdness to it. Scroll to see what we mean. Go on—Bernie would want you to.

Line-Up Crime Detective offers up a nice slate of true crime stories in this February 1952 issue, but the real crime here is that the cover art is uncredited. Curse you, lax editors at Astro Distributing Corp. Who could this artist be? We don’t think it’s George Gross—he generally liked women to have high, elegantly arched eyebrows. It could be the same artist that did this piece, posted at Sweetheart Sinner. The similarities are many, from the lacy outfit to the basic composition and perspective, but that piece is uncredited too. So the provenance of the above cover will remain a mystery for now. The inside content is also a bit of a mystery because it was posed by models. Did we mention that someone really needs to delve into the subject of crime magazine models? Not us, though. Please not us. Twenty scans below.

Just a bit more on Rear Window today. The movie was based on Cornell Woolrich's story "It Had To Be Murder," which appeared in Dime Detective Magazine of February 1942. As might be expected story and film are substantially different. Lisa Fremont doesn't exist at all and neither does the insurance company nurse Stella. They were both derived from one character—a valet named Sam who does all the hard work while Jeffries watches from his wheelchair. The relationship between these two is warm, but with strong overtones of status and race, with Jeffries at one point showing his pleasure with Sam by saying, "Go and build yourself a great big two-story whisky punch; you’re as close to white as you’ll ever be."

Screenplay choices are always interesting, and we can see the addition of Grace Kelly's Fremont character making sense (though this being Hitchcock, he'd have put a blonde in the movie no matter what, since they represented a fantasy woman for him), but we wish Stella had been left out and Sam kept intact. We understand that changing Jeffries into a rogue photographer from a rich Manhattanite meant taking away his valet, but Sam could have been transformed into the insurance company employee. But that's just our opinion. You can decide for yourself by reading or downloading "It Had To Be Murder" yourself at this link. It's well worth the time.

Above, assorted scans from Adam magazine of January 1971, with cover art illustrating Ross Alexander’s story “Struggle for Survival,” about two kidnap victims in Northern Australia who decide after days of captivity that their only route to escape is across a crocodile infested river. Naturally, what began as obstacles become allies, as the crocs eventually chow down on the villains. You get lots of photos, including one of Croatian born actress Femi Benussi, three panels from the bottom. You can see forty-two more issues of Adam by clicking its keywords just below.