We never want to go too long without an offering from the great French pin-up and paperback artist Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan, so above we have his cover for Macadam Sérénade, a thriller written by Paul S. Nouvel for Éditions de l'Arabesque. Nouvel was a pseudonym. The man behind it was French journalist/author/translator/editor Jean-Michel Sorel, who also wrote as Larry Layne, Arnold Rodin, Silvio Sereno, Tugdual Marech, Jan Mychel, Jean-Michel, Yvon Brozonech, Swani Abdul Hamid (we love that one), and many other identities. In all he produced more than one-hundred forty novels—and probably could have squeezed in a couple more if he hadn't been so busy thinking of pen names. 1955 on this.

Above, a very cool Éditions de l’Arabesque cover for Dick Barnett’s, aka Georges Heil’s, 1967 thriller Nettoyage par le vide, volume 367 of the publisher’s long running Collection Espionnage. Nettoyage par le vide means “vacuum cleaning,” which we suppose is how they’ll scrape the ballerina off the pavement once she’s flattened by that sedan. She isn’t named Carrunova, by the way, but it’d be better if she were. The art is by Jef de Wulf, who apparently despised the ballet. See more of his work by clicking his keywords below. 

Above is cover art for Nikou Dobry’s La griffe du démon, aka The Devil’s Claw, published 1956 for Editions de l’Arabesque’s Parme collection. Dobry published several other books, but it’s likely the name was a pseudonym. With these French pulp writers, that’s often the case. One website suggests Dobry was a person named Pruneyrol, but we got zero hits on that name, so a real identification may be hoping for too much. And the art? It’s signed simply M. Boero. With all the false and incomplete identities surrounding French mid-century literature, you’d almost think they were ashamed of their work, but remember that American authors played the same tricks. For instance, sleaze pulps were often written by moonlighting popular authors. The same is probably true with the French. But we will keep digging, and eventually we will unmask them. 

As long as we’re on the subject of Stanley Donen movies, here are two one-sheets painted by Robert McGinnis for the 1966 caper Arabesque, starring Gregory Peck and the great Sophia Loren. Donen was trying to capture the mod magic of his earlier feature Charade, which had starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. We can’t say he fully succeeded there, but he did make an adventure romance full of joie de vivre that’s well worth seeing. The two posters differ in one fascinating aspect—Gregory Peck’s lower body has been transplanted in the bottom version. We know the dancing pose at top was the original, but we think the upright stance in the re-do is an improvement, as is the cool magenta background. It’s killer art for a killer flick, and we recommend you check it out.

Four pulp novels from Editions de l'Arabesque, the Parme collection, with covers painted by Alain Gourdon, who achieved considerable artistic fame under the pseudonym Aslan.