The Marijuana Mob, originally published as Figure It Out for Yourself, is another Orchid City caper from James Hadley Chase starring franchise tough guy Vic Malloy, his sidekick Kerman, and of course Paula Bensinger, his girl Friday—because you're not a real detective until you have a sizzling hot office assistant who reluctantly plays the spinster while you romance femmes fatales. Malloy runs a fixer agency called Universal Services, and this time the gig is to help a society woman pay a kidnapping ransom. Secondarily, he also tries to extricate a gambler acquaintance from a frame for murder. Drug dealers do feature prominently in the plot, but there are also many other layers and players. This tale isn't quite on the level of You're Lonely When You're Dead, in our opinion, but it's colorful and surprising. 1952 copyright, with art by Victor Olson. 

This 1961 Panther Books edition of James Hadley Chase's debut novel No Orchids for Miss Blandish labels it a bestseller that exploded into world headlines. That's quite a claim, but it's true. The book provoked a strong response when first published in 1939 due to its sexual frankness. Written in spare, hard hitting fashion, it's the multi-layered, uncompromising tale of the kidnapping of and search for the titular Miss Blandish, whose first name is never given despite her presence from beginning to end. There's violence, drugs, sexual content, and a lot of very low characters. Since we're pulp fans but not literary historians, we went into the book with no idea what it was about or that it was in any way significant, and came away immensely entertained and impressed. The highest compliment we can give it is that we were never sure who would win, or who would survive. Pair that with propulsive plotting and you end up with a must-read. World headlines? We believe it. Mitchell Hooks cover art? All the better. 

Above, a beautiful black dust jacket for James Hadley Chase's thriller Believed Violent, 1968, from British publisher Robert Hale Limited. Chase gets right into this one with an adulterous sex scene on the opening page, and serious repercussions resulting from the subsequent murder. The book evolves to become an espionage caper, with Russians willing to pay a fortune for the secret formula behind the manufacture of a revolutionary new metal. Against that backdrop you get the broken man behind the formula, a sadistic professional killer, a one-eyed henchman, a sex slave heroin addict whose eventual rebellion has pivotal consequences, and Chase's franchise character Frank Terrell. The art here, which is what we really wanted to show you, is from Barbara Walton. We've mentioned her only briefly but as you can see she was a top talent. We're going to get back to her a little later.

This cover of Peter O’Donnell’s Sabre Tooth, part of his popular Modesty Blaise series, shows Italian actress Monica Vitti as the title character, and it got us thinking about all the paperback covers that feature photos of women with guns. Of course, we realize that, as far as the gun-crazed U.S. is concerned, thinking of armed people as enticing or artistic may seem a little tone deaf, but we're talking about book covers, that's all. So we decided to put together a collection. We should mention that the Blaise series is worth reading if you’re looking for something along the lines of light thrills. It’s breezy and sexy as only 1960s spy literature can be, and Blaise herself is an interesting character, born in Greece, raised by a Hungarian scholar, trained in martial arts, and proficient in piracy, theft, and all around sneakiness. In Sabre Tooth she finds herself trying to thwart an invasion of Kuwait by an Afghan warlord. Below we have a dozen more photo covers featuring heat-packing women. As always with these collections, thanks to the original uploaders, most from Flickr, but particularly Muller-Fokker and Existential Ennui.

We love vintage paperback covers featuring armed women. But we especially love them when the women are directing their attention toward the viewer. Since pulp style literature is read primarily by men, such illustrations speak implicitly about a man’s thwarted expectations, and conversely of threatened women turning the tables to become empowered. We see this above, where a beleaguered woman defends her helpless man against an enemy we can't see because we're living inside his body. Below are thirteen more examples of women menacing you the viewer, with art by James Avanti, Robert Maguire, Harry Schaare, Rudolph Belaski, Harry Barton, and others. Thanks to flickr.com for some of these.

Above you see the cover of British author James Hadley Chase’s 1953 revenge thriller I’ll Bury My Dead. It has what we consider unusually downbeat art, but with the body count in the story being so high maybe that’s to be expected. Basically, a shady P.I. dies of an apparent gun suicide, but his brother is convinced it’s murder and decides to investigate. He ends up uncovering a blackmail racket, getting on the wrong side of the police, and being connected to more corpses, including that of his brother’s wife, depicted in George Erickson’s cover art. Were these murders or suicides? This book was savagely reviewed for the most part but was reprinted as recently as 2009, which goes to show that pulp is critic proof.