In pulp you're always on the wrong side of the tracks.
We're train travelers. We love going places by that method. It's one of the perks of living in Europe. Therefore we have another cover collection for you today, one we've had in mind for a while. Many pulp and genre novels prominently feature trains. Normal people see them as romantic, but authors see their sinister flipside. Secrets, seclusion, and an inability to escape can be what trains are about. Above and below we've put together a small sampling of covers along those lines. If we desired, we could create a similar collection of magazine train covers that easily would total more than a hundred scans. There were such publications as Railroad Stories, Railroad Man's Magazine, Railroad, and all were published for years. But we're interested, as usual, in book covers. Apart from those here, we've already posted other train covers at this link, this one, this one, and this one. Safe travels.
Her final stop is the intersection of deep trouble and hot water.
Detectives and their partners are considered to be a common motif in mid-century fiction, but actually you don't run into pairings as often as you'd expect, and when you do, one character usually dominates the narrative. End of the Line, by Bert and Dolores Hitchens, features two detectives in a story that's almost equally divided. Maybe that's what happens when spouses collaborate. The two detectives work for a railroad company and are tasked with investigating a cold case—the Lobo Tunnel crash of five years earlier, in which a train was derailed by a deliberately placed obstruction. The mystery is fine, but the fun part is reading how the two sleuths—one a mama's boy and the other a heavy drinker—try to work together. The Pocket Books paperback you see here has beautiful cover art by Jerry Allison that suggests the story is about a girl in trouble. That's true too, but it's the dicks that make this one swing. Pretty cool stuff, copyright 1959.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1910—First Seaplane Takes Flight
Frenchman Henri Fabre, who had studied airplane and propeller designs and had also patented a system of flotation devices, accomplishes the first take-off from water at Martinque, France, in a plane he called Le Canard, or "the duck." 1953—Jim Thorpe Dies
American athlete Jim Thorpe, who was one of the most prolific sportsmen ever and won Olympic gold medals in the 1912 pentathlon and decathlon, played American football at the collegiate and professional levels, and also played professional baseball and basketball, dies of a heart attack. 1958—Khrushchev Becomes Premier
Nikita Khrushchev becomes premier of the Soviet Union. During his time in power he is responsible for the partial de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union, and presides over the rise of the early Soviet space program, but his many policy failures lead to him being deposed in October 1964. After his removal he is pensioned off and lives quietly the rest of his life, eventually dying of heart disease in 1971. 1997—Heaven's Gate Cult Members Found Dead
In San Diego, thirty-nine members of a cult called Heaven's Gate are found dead after committing suicide in the belief that a UFO hidden in tail of the Hale-Bopp comet was a signal that it was time to leave Earth for a higher plane of existence. The cult members killed themselves by ingesting pudding and applesauce laced with poison.
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