| Vintage Pulp | Jun 19 2024 |
Chaos thy name is woman.
Above you see a Mitchell Hooks cover for the 1951 Robert Standish novel Storm Centre, and yes, from the art alone you can see that once again we've taken the plunge into tropical island fiction. It's impossible for us to resist the stuff. This one is about what happens when a devastatingly beautiful woman named Diana Maynard shows up at an isolated British plantation community in Malaysia. Everyone immediately covets her, particularly John and Adrian, friends and business partners who turn against each other. Even the local orangutan Jimmie is driven to distraction, theoretically because he senses something “primal” in Diana.
The consequences of all this lust are serious. An eye is lost. A skull is fractured. A face disfigured. A suicide completed. It's an interesting story in that there are no villains at first, but rather good people acting increasingly out of character due to obsession. Diana, the titular “storm centre”, is up front from the beginning about not wanting any of the men. Well, until a charming rogue of a Frenchman turns her head. Storm Centre is a surprisingly forward-looking tale by Standish about male toxicity and aggressive attitudes toward beauty. Because he's writing about women to depths that seem a bit beyond him, the story may not ring entirely true for some. But it certainly rings.
| Vintage Pulp | Jun 5 2024 |
West Virginia town develops a miner problem.
Dorothy Salisbury Davis entertained us with her debut novel The Judas Cat, so we decided to jump ahead to see how she fared after a few years of literary seasoning. The Clay Hand, which Bantam published in paperback in 1952 with uncredited cover art, is set in a coal mining town where a famous journalist is found dead. His pal Phil, who writes for the Columbus Dispatch, shows up for the inquest and starts to dig into the circumstances of the death, as well as his own complicated feelings for his friend's beautiful widow Margaret.
Davis was good with characterizations in her first novel. Here, instead of the usual mutual affection between the male and female leads, she opts for a love/hate relationship. Owing to the tension they feel toward each other, both characters can sometimes be unpleasant. It makes for a few jarring moments, but certainly presents interesting backstory as the two try to unravel the mystery. Eventually they figure out both the journalistic angle, the reasons for the death, and their own feelings. All in all, another good result from Davis.
| Vintage Pulp | May 16 2024 |
It's characterized by a rise in freak events and a general increase in harming.
We used the term “swooning flowers of maidenhood” last time we read a Mignon Eberhart novel, and she holds true to form with 1949's House of Storm. It's set on a small Caribbean island—so small in fact that it's named for the family that runs a plantation there. Murder occurs as a tropical storm shuts down transport and strands swooning flower and bride-to-be Nonie Hovenden with others in a large house. The real storm is (of course) emotional and deals with a weighty romantic subplot centered around her wishing to escape her pending nuptials so she can marry the man she really loves—who soon becomes murder suspect number one.
It's less complicated than it sounds. The murder plotline is interesting enough and the atmosphere is reasonably well rendered, but all you really need to know is that Eberhart operated at the nexus of suspense and romance, and here Nonie's breathless flutterings are almost intense enough to riffle the book's pages. If you can take that sort of thing, you'll like House of Storm. We kept making moments to finish it despite our reservations, so we have to call it a success. But we're suckers for tropical island fiction—even when there's breastbeating romance at its core—so take our endorsement with a grain of salt.
| Vintage Pulp | Dec 10 2023 |
I can see the forest for the trees just fine. What I can't see is how you got us lost.
Above: Robert Maguire art for Conrad Richters's 1940 novel The Trees, which Bantam Books issued in this paperback edition in 1951. This was a serious novel, the first in an Ohio frontier trilogy known as The Awakening Land. The third novel, The Town, won Richter a Pulitzer Prize in 1951, which may have precipitated Bantam's pulpy re-issue. This isn't one we'll read, but we do like the art.
| Vintage Pulp | Sep 24 2023 |
If you don't get me out of here I'm a dead woman. The sheets are like sandpaper and the toilet has no seat.
Above is a cover painted by Bert Lannon for the 1948 novel Love Is a Surprise! by Faith Baldwin, a major author of romance flavored fiction who produced around one hundred books in a career than ran six decades, from 1921 to 1977. Lannon is a new illustrator for us. We like his style. The moment he's used for his illustration is also highlighted by editors in the intro page:
She stood in the prison cell, a steel bar in either hand, her face pressed against the metal. He bent his head, and before she could pull away, just managed to kiss her startled lips. “My fee,” he remarked – and went toward the waiting sheriff.
We haven't read Baldwin, but we expect we'll run into something of hers we want to check out eventually. In addition, some of her work was translated to the silver screen, resulting in such films as 1937's Portia on Trial and 1938's Men Are Such Fools. Lannon, conversely, doesn't seem to have been very prolific. There's a little gallery of his work at Flickr, which you can see at this link.
| Vintage Pulp | Jul 11 2023 |
There aren't any bars, but there's no way out.
A few years ago we read a thriller by Ben Benson titled The Venus Death, the first of a series featuring his franchise character Massachusetts state trooper Ralph Lindsay. It was good enough that we wanted to return to Benson, so here we are with his second Lindsay novel, 1954's The Girl in a Cage. Benson writes in a style more akin to novels from the mid-sixties and beyond, which is to say things happen in his books. There's excellent pacing. The stories aren't built solely around dialogue. By a quarter of the way through this one there's a fistfight, a second fistfight/brawl, and a few other attention getting moments. Amidst all this trooper Lindsay is working undercover to bust a car theft ring, but finds himself dealing with an unusual brand of sociopathic kingpin. The caged girl of the title is Leta Nofke, who the villain considers his personal property, so much so that he's branded her. Lindsay thinks he can help her, but only if she wants to be helped. And there's the rub. Another nice effort from Benson, who we'll read again.
| Vintage Pulp | Jun 20 2023 |
Yeah, you're right, that was pretty evil of me. But I find that a swift kick in the nuts works better than plain old no.
In detective yarns the MacGuffin—the thing everyone is chasing—might be a suitcase of money, or diamonds, or bearer bonds, or a shipment of heroin. In John Evans', aka Howard Browne's, intriguingly titled Halo for Satan the thing being pursued is an ancient parchment allegedly written by Jesus Christ. Its discoverer wants to sell it to the Catholic church for $25 million (that would a third of a billion in today's money), but disappears without a trace. A high ranking Chicago bishop hires private dick Paul Pine to find the missing man and document. Pretty soon others want the artifact too. One of them is a former top gangster who's near death and believes he can make his way into the good graces of the church—and thus into heaven—by donating the parchment. That's where the unusual title comes into play. A criminal Satan wants a halo.
Naturally, the question of authenticity is important to the story, but the central themes here are greed and ruthlessness. As Pine puts it: “You have to be a violent person to make money. I don’t necessarily mean the stab-and-shoot kind of violence. I mean the kind that will let you kick other people aside to get your hands dipped in gold.” Since the parchment is a classic MacGuffin, it doesn't appear until the end—like the Maltese Falcon. Meanwhile betrayals abound, bodies accumulate, and Evans turns numerous hard-boiled phrases while leading readers to a bloody resolution. We found Halo for Satan reasonably fun, even though it would be pretty thin without its gimmick. It was originally published in 1948, with this Bantam edition coming in 1950. The cover art is uncredited.
| Vintage Pulp | Apr 21 2023 |
If cats could talk they'd mostly threaten murder.
Above: a cover for the 1951 mystery The Judas Cat by Dorothy Salisbury Davis. We already discussed the book. Bantam occasionally released alternate covers for its paperbacks, so here's a second effort, with the uncredited artist going all-in on the creepy cat vibe.
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 25 2023 |
So here's the thing I prefer about indoor cats. You never have to do this.
The Judas Cat by Dorothy Salisbury Davis is an unusual mystery about a ninety-two-year old toymaker and engineer found dead in a locked room with a terrified expression and scratches on his face. A few reviews of the book say the main suspect is the man's cat. Not really. Davis makes clear from the beginning that some malefactor may have used the cat in a mysterious way to facilitate the murder. The police chief Fred Waterman, who was so intimidated by the cat's aggressive behavior that he shot it just before discovering its owner's body, has it sent for a post-mortem to determine whether it was sick, had been posioned, or perhaps had poison on its claws. Local newsman Alex Whiting is the one who first notices something unusual about the animal's body. Thus begins the novel-length team-up between chief and reporter as they try to unlock the puzzle. While the method of murder continues to baffle them, the motives slowly coalesce around valuable patents, a will with a recent codicil, and hidden connections between various townspeople.
In general we liked the book. The characterizations are pretty sharp and the portrayal of life in a town where everyone knows everyone else's business is both fascinating and frustrating, as Davis intends. The story may not contain enough menace or action for some readers, but it's a pretty good example of a rural mystery, a decent examination of the effects of murder on a supposedly wholesome community, an interesting look at the quaint courtship rituals of the immediate post-war period (where a woman must simply wait to be noticed and courted), and a reminder of how political power was wielded in a time when those in control had fewer fears of exposure. We would read Davis again without hesitation, especially considering The Judas Cat was only her first novel. She probably got better with experience. We'll find out. We have another of her books. The nice purple cover on this 1951 edition from Bantam was not credited, and as we always say, that's a crime in itself.
| Vintage Pulp | Feb 21 2023 |
If you want to kill something, how about you knock off that pile of dirty dishes in the kitchen.
Above: a cover for The Hunter, by Hugh Forsburgh, for Bantam Books, 1951. This one is Hemingway with a geographical shift—big game hunter Monk Taylor lives and shoots in the Rocky Mountains instead of Africa. It's man, nature, and love, as Taylor is presented with the possibility having his macho fun ruined by a normal existence with faithful Marge Davies. We were tempted to buy it, but we already have other hunting novels on tap. The art on this is uncredited.
