This is an interesting nightclub style cover painted by Victor Olson for Donald Henderson Clarke's A Lady Named Lou. It would be amazing if it were actually about an entertainer who began life as a male, like mid-century trailblazers Coccinelle, Abby Sinclair, or Roxanne Alegria (if you've followed Pulp Intl. for a while you know we've written about all three—links supplied). In any case, the book is actually about a woman named, not Louanne or Louis, but Lulu Finn, who tries to make it big but marries a racketeer and gets into heaps of trouble. The cover blurb makes reference to her specialty, and you may be wondering what that is. Lulu has that intangible quality that makes people believe she can dance brilliantly, though she can't, and sing like a thrush, though she's average at best, and converse like a great wit, though she's not that bright. In short, Lulu is a woman who manages to fail upward, but—unlike in the hundreds of real world examples out there—only for a while before it falls apart. This was originally published in 1946 in hardback, with this Avon paperback coming in 1952. 

1952 Avon cover for Donald Henderson Clarke's The Headstrong Young Man, with a banner explaining said headstrong young man is a male hussy. Which would lead to this conversation:

Above and below you will find a large collection of pulp, post-pulp, and sleaze paperback fronts that have as their titles a character’s first name. There are hundreds of examples of these but we stopped at thirty-two. The collection really highlights, more than others we’ve put together, how rarely vintage paperback art focuses on male characters. The prose is virtually all male-centered and male-driven, of course, but because the mid-century paperback market was male-driven too, that meant putting women on the covers to attract the male eye. We tell our girlfriends this all the time, but they still think we just don’t bother looking for male-oriented vintage art. But we do. For this collection we found two novels that have male characters’ names as their titles, and we looked pretty hard. If we had to guess, we’d say less than 5% of all pulp art is male-oriented. In any case, the illustrations come from the usual suspects—Barye Phillips, Robert McGinnis, Jef de Wulf, Paul Rader, et al., plus less recognized artists like Doug Weaver. Thanks to all the original uploaders for these.

We found two nice covers for Murderer's Holiday by Donald Henderson Clarke, one from the original hardback (left), and one from the Avon paperback published in 1951. Clarke is not what you'd call well-known now, but during his heyday of the 1930s and 1940s he was one of the most popular pulp authors, writing a number of risqué thrillers, and seeing five of them adapted for the screen. He was born in the Northeast and became a journalist in New York City, where he socialized with some of Manhattan’s shadier characters, including Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, who is thought to be the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. Rothstein was murdered in 1928, and the next year Clarke published a biography entitled In the Reign of Rothstein. This was the book that really launched his literary career, leading to bestsellers like Millie and The Impatient Virgin. There isn’t much info on Clarke out there, but we’re going to dig up more.