 Long live the King—in Yellow, that is. 
The interesting cover above for Five Sinister Characters was painted by Paul Stahr and fronts a Raymond Chandler short story collection that appeared as an edition of Avon Publications' Murder Mystery Monthly series in 1945. The book is composed of Chandler's "Trouble Is My Business,” “Pearls Are a Nuisance,” “I'll Be Waiting,” “The Red Wind,” and “The King in Yellow.” H.P. Lovecraft fans probably know that last title. The King in Yellow is an avatar of one of Lovecraft's terrible gods Hastur, aka The Unspeakable One. Lovecraft in turn lifted it from Robert W. Chambers' 1895 collection of weird stories The King in Yellow, which you see below. However, Chandler's “The King in Yellow” is unrelated to Lovecraft and Chambers. Chandler's tale is a detective yarn, while Chambers' collection is, well, very weird, and within that weirdness The King in Yellow is a fictional play that drives those who it read it insane, or at least deeply despondent. Midway through Chandler's story a character says, “'The King in Yellow.' I read a book with that title once.” A clear nod to Chambers' work. But as we said, Chandler's “The King in Yellow” is a crime story. It follows hotel detective Steve Grayce, who evicts jazz trumpetist and lover of yellow clothing King Leopardi for unruly late night conduct. The King later ends up shot to death in a woman's bedroom across town, and Grayce—fired for tossing a famous client—tries to figure out why the murder happened, and to get the woman off the hook in whose bed the King bled out. It's an excellent story, as are the others. But you already know that. It's Chandler.
 Hey, Sarge, I'm ready for those nocturnal maneuvers you mentioned. 
Not long ago we put together a large collection of lesbian paperback covers from the mid-century period. This one—Harry Whittington's Rebel Woman, 1960, from Avon Publications—we held back. It was just too awesome to mix in with the fifty or so we posted earlier. As we mentioned before, since these were mainly written by men, they reflected male fantasies and assumptions, and this one is prototypical anti-lesbian sleaze. An American mercenary gets involved in a Latin American revolution and is captured by a squad of female rebels. When he realizes the leader of the group is an old flame he figures he has nothing to worry about. But when he “saw the way she looked at the girl Dolores [he knew] the twisted path she had taken.” He decides she'll need to be reconverted to the hetero team, but that may be harder than it seems at first glance. Whittington may have gone to hell for writing this one.
 That's right, I'm back. I'll have that fuzzy navel now and anyone who laughs this time is gonna regret it. 
Above, a nice cover for Return to Deadmans by Al Cody, who was in reality Archie Lynn Joscelyn, an author who wrote hundreds of westerns under pseudonyms such as Tex Holt, A.A. Archer, Evelyn McKenna, and Lynn Westland. This one involves a group of land thieves and the heroic cowboy who stands in their way. 1963 copyright, cover artist unknown.
 Nothing a little dying won't fix. 
Narrated from the deck of a boat floating on the crystalline Caribbean, The Root of His Evil is the tale of a money-hungry femme fatale who rises from greasy spoon waitress to NYC union organizer to wealthy woman, all by age twenty-four. James M. Cain originally wrote this tale way back in 1938 as “The Modern Cinderella,” and immediately sold it to Hollywood, where it spawned the 1939 movie When Tomorrow Comes. He ended up suing for copyright infringement when the filmmakers borrowed a scene from another of his novels without paying for it. You can read details of that incident here if you're inclined. Some Cain fans love The Root of His Evil; the more prevalent opinion is that it isn't among his best. We'll say this much—there's no focus on crime here, just on questionable deeds. But we like the cover of this Avon paperback. It's less sophisticated than some good girl art, but strikes the right tone. It appeared in 1952 and is uncredited.
 Don’t think too hard, my sweet. You might hurt that pretty head. Now off with the pants. 
From Chicago born author Edmund Schiddel comes The Other Side of Night, a chronicle of the troubles and trials of a group of diverse New Yorkers on a particular New Year’s Eve. The menagerie includes an heiress, an aging beauty, a morbidly obese woman, a facially disfigured vet, a nymphomaniac, and a piece of Ivy League man candy. Schiddel was gay, and while he does feature a gay character here, his participation is minimal. We gather this was the norm for Schiddel, inserting gay secondary characters, but never focusing on them in the narratives. He was more interested in peeling back the tawdry layers of accepted society with occasionally controversial results. The Other Side of Night appeared in 1954, and the cover art, which we love for the expression on the male figure’s face, is uncredited.
 Mom, why do all these strange men keep coming out of your bedroom buttoning their trousers? 
Guy de Maupassant gets updated with this 1949 cover for his 1884 novel Yvette. Unlike other repackagings of classic novels, the art here is actually appropriate for the subject matter, as the story involves a young woman who discovers the lush lifestyle she has led her entire life is due to the fact that her mother is high class courtesan—i.e. an expensive prostitute. How did she not know this before? Chalk it up to innocence. Needless to say, her naïveté soon goes out the window. The artist on this is Barry Stephens.
 Ma’am, we're highly trained professionals who can spot guilt a mile away… Okay, you’re clean. Have a nice day! 
Night Cry is a thriller about a cop who accidentally kills a murder suspect and covers it up by dumping the body in a river. For a cruel guy like him it's not a big deal, until he learns the suspect was innocent. That'll fray the nerves of even the meanest cop a bit. He continues trying to pin the original murder on the presumed-missing-but-actually-dead man, but then the body is found. Whoops. The fact that he ever thought the dead man was just missing starts to look borderline incompetent to his colleagues, but there’s more—the beautiful girlfriend of the deceased now becomes everyone’s prime suspect. We liked this book, so we weren't surprised to learn that it's highly regarded. It inspired the movie Where The Sidewalk Ends, directed by Otto Preminger. The 1954 Avon paperback front above followed an earlier version from 1949, and the art is uncredited.
 Well, I suppose we can. But only as long as you keep a peel on it—I don't want those little seeds of yours taking root. 
You ever get the feeling publishers sometimes used whatever art they had sitting around? You certainly would in the case of David Dortort's 1948 paperback Burial of the Fruit, which is a “gripping novel of youth in the slums.” A slum that had a nice expanse of wetlands and recreational boating, apparently. Yes, there's nature around Brooklyn, where the novel takes place and the anti-hero takes his sweetheart out there, but you'd think this was a rural saga if not for the cover blurb. Later editions had more appropriate art. The book tells the story of Honey Halpern—a male—who becomes the leader of a gang of killers for hire. Basically, it's the story of Murder, Inc., turned into fiction. This was Dortort's debut and it got rapturous reviews and earned him comparisons to some of the greatest contemporary authors alive. But he wrote only one other novel and never did become an immortal in the literary world. Instead he's remembered for creating the television show Bonanza. Maybe that isn't as respectable as being a master novelist, but we bet he made way more money. The cover artist here is Ann Cantor.
 The meek shall inherit starvation wages. 
Originally published in 1949 as Spit and the Stars, which is a title we really like, Tough Kid from Brooklyn is the story of a Jewish youth who seeks love and gets involved in union organizing only to see owners strike back violently via the usual methods. The book is a reminder of two important facts—organizing or striking for better pay is often illegal, and that puts cops on the wrong side of justice, as well as literary protagonists. This was Mende’s only novel, though he apparently had thirteen others tucked away in a trunk. The first abridged edition from Avon appeared in 1951. The one you see here is from 1955, with a slightly different logo treatment than the 1951 paperback, but with the same uncredited cover art.
 Avon Publications dared to ask—will readers pay to be turned on?       
Avon Publications launched in 1941 as a direct competitor to the revolutionary Pocket Books. But while Pocket was basically a literary house, Avon directed itself toward the popular market, working with lesser known authors focused on pure entertainment, and promoting books by featuring more visually arresting covers. The company veered further in the mass market direction when it launched a subsidiary called Novel Library, which saw it begin experimenting with racier fiction. Jack Woodford, born in 1894 as Josiah Pitts Woolfolk, was one of the early practitioners of what would later become sleaze fiction. His books, mostly written during the 1930s and 1940s, were pretty chaste by later standards, but helped prove that pulp readers would pay for sexual thrills. Above are seven of the eight Woodford books published by Novel Library between 1948 and 1950. Some originally appeared under other titles, for example Free Lovers, which was aka Fiddler's Fee. The cover artists here are, top to bottom, J. Biernacki, Perlowen (not Perl Owen, as seen on many sites), D. Trager-Phillips, Ann Cantor, and unknowns. You can see Woodford's eighth Novel Library book in this group.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1974—Police Raid SLA Headquarters
In the U.S., Los Angeles police raid the headquarters of the revolutionary group the Symbionese Liberation Army, resulting in the deaths of six members. The SLA had gained international notoriety by kidnapping nineteen-year old media heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley, California apartment, an act which precipitated her participation in an armed bank robbery. 1978—Charlie Chaplin's Missing Body Is Found
Eleven weeks after it was disinterred and stolen from a grave in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland, Charlie Chaplin's corpse is found by police. Two men—Roman Wardas, a 24-year-old Pole, and Gantscho Ganev, a 38-year-old Bulgarian—are convicted in December of stealing the coffin and trying to extort £400,000 from the Chaplin family. 1918—U.S. Congress Passes the Sedition Act
In the U.S., Congress passes a set of amendments to the Espionage Act called the Sedition Act, which makes "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces, as well as language that causes foreigners to view the American government or its institutions with contempt, an imprisonable offense. The Act specifically applies only during times of war, but later is pushed by politicians as a possible peacetime law, specifically to prevent political uprisings in African-American communities. But the Act is never extended and is repealed entirely in 1920. 1905—Las Vegas Is Founded
Las Vegas, Nevada is founded when 110 acres of barren desert land in what had once been part of Mexico are auctioned off to various buyers. The area sold is located in what later would become the downtown section of the city. From these humble beginnings Vegas becomes the most populous city in Nevada, an internationally renowned resort for gambling, shopping, fine dining and sporting events, as well as a symbol of American excess. Today Las Vegas remains one of the fastest growing municipalities in the United States. 1928—Mickey Mouse Premieres
The animated character Mickey Mouse, along with the female mouse Minnie, premiere in the cartoon Plane Crazy, a short co-directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. This first cartoon was poorly received, however Mickey would eventually go on to become a smash success, as well as the most recognized symbol of the Disney empire.
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