 A case of the permanent blues. 
The lyrically titled Blue Mascara Tears is a dark one from James McKimmey, author of able efforts such as The Long Ride and Cornered. In the tale a San Francisco cop named Jack Cummings can't nail crime kingpin Knocko Cutter because the fix is in at the police department. Cutter also employs two vicious and efficient torturer-killers to silence witnesses, which works for a while, but as Cummings notes, “The collapse was coming from the fault in the structure itself.” In other words, the kingpin's sociopathic nature compels him to mistreat his most trusted henchmen, and even henchmen have a breaking point.
Two events are threaded through the plot: the robbery and murder of a man who had $65,000 in his possession; and the rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. The crimes quickly tie together, reveal twists and lies, and the kingpin's search for the missing cash presents the most meager of openings for Cummings to possibly nail him. But that's easier said than done when the police department is corrupt from top the bottom. Realizing the odds are long, Cummings grows more determined—and more willing to cross the line. It all leads to a climax that's expertly dragged out to the final paragraph.
And speaking of experts, the front on this 1965 Ballantine paperback was painted by Ron Lesser, one of the more accomplished illustrators of the mid-century period. Occasionally everything dovetails perfectly with cover design. Here you have excellent art from Lesser, a unique choice for a font, and a perfect blue teardrop, which we assume was an inspiration from Ballantine's art director. Add them together with McKimmey's story and Blue Mascara Tears is a through-and-through success.
 You can make it, honey. Just imagine the future satisfaction you'll get blaming me for coming here in the first place. 
This is a dramatic piece painted by Ed Emshwiller for Frederik Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth's 1955 novel A Town Is Drowning. Did Emshwiller run out of paint, or is the fact that the town in the background is a mere ink drawing symbolic of its fragility and impermanence? We're pretty sure it's option two, and the result is a very striking cover, with some nice color bleeds as one of its main features. The story is exactly as the title suggests, with fictional Hebertown, located somewhere in the American northeast, being hit by precipitation from a hurricane that sends the local river well over its banks to destroy large portions of the town. The rains and flooding are over by the halfway mark, at which point Pohl and Kornbluth focus on various aspects of social collapse, from infrastructure breakdown to looting.
Disaster-triggered social regression has been written many, many times. Some of the best efforts along those lines kill the soul to even read. A Town Is Drowning is a decent pop fiction undertaking on a non-apocalyptic but still somewhat harrowing scale. It isn't bad, but we think it's a little too impersonal. We'll concede that the authors' ambitions were to have a large array of people to show many different perspectives, but that makes getting to know them—hence caring about them—difficult. At least two characters could have been ditched to allow others to come to the fore. But what do we know? Pohl and Kornbluth collaborated half a dozen times, so they clearly loved the result. They would go on to much acclaim, with Pohl peaking with the Hugo and Nebula Award winner Gateway, and its sequel Beyond the Blue Event Horizon. A Town Is Drowning is not on that level but it's interesting to catch Pohl here early in his career.
 Are you absolutely sure the place we're staying is this way? 
Smartphones have certainly made this situation less likely to occur, but on the other hand, when you come back from a trip which story do you tell your friends? The one about how you got exactly where you wanted to go, or the one about how you got lost and thought you were done for? Hammond Innes sets The Naked Land in French Morocco, as it was called then, and we can really sympathize with the two figures on the cover art because, as some of you may remember, we've been lost in Morocco too. One of the main characters here is a missionary—and we know that always goes well—who heads down to the Magreb and ends up trying to secure a mineral rich patch of land. You know the drill. Westerners trying to claim their divinely appointed riches while benighted locals stand in the way. You also get the added elements of assumed identity, spywork, communism, a murder mystery, Marrakech's mazelike central souk (awesome, by the way), and finally, an actual element—silver. The book was originally published in Britain as The Strange Land, with this U.S. edition coming in 1954 fronted by cover art from Ed Valigursky.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1992—Sci Fi Channel Launches
In the U.S., the cable network USA debuts the Sci Fi Channel, specializing in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and paranormal programming. After a slow start, it built its audience and is now a top ten ranked network for male viewers aged 18–54, and women aged 25–54. 1952—Chaplin Returns to England
Silent movie star Charlie Chaplin returns to his native England for the first time in twenty-one years. At the time it is said to be for a Royal Society benefit, but in reality Chaplin knows he is about to be banned from the States because of his political views. He would not return to the U.S. for twenty years. 1910—Duke of York's Cinema Opens
The Duke of York's Cinema opens in Brighton, England, on the site of an old brewery. It is still operating today, mainly as a venue for art films, and is the oldest continually operating cinema in Britain. 1975—Gerald Ford Assassination Attempt
Sara Jane Moore, an FBI informant who had been evaluated and deemed harmless by the U.S. Secret Service, tries to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford. Moore fires one shot at Ford that misses, then is wrestled to the ground by a bystander named Oliver Sipple.
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