Above, a collection of covers from the U.S. artist Walter Popp, who illustrated numerous pulps before moving into paperback art, men's adventure magazines, and commercial package design. We've featured quite a bit of his work, including this cover and this one. You can be sure he'll Popp up again. 

It's a good thing the real world isn't like the worlds of pulp and mid-century crime fiction. In those realms, when a woman receives an unexpected visitor the result is often disastrous. Bad cops, evil crooks, ruthless blackmailers, lecherous uncles, and all sorts of nasty characters usually await on the other side of the door. Above and below you see a collection of mid-century paperback fronts showing those fraught moments just after a woman opens her door to trouble, or trouble takes matters into its own hands and busts its way in. Our recommendation: in the event of an unexpected knock just go out the window.

Two years ago we shared five covers of women standing over men they had just killed and mentioned that there were many examples in vintage cover art of that particular theme. Today we’ve decided to revisit the idea in order to reiterate just how often women in pulp are the movers and shakers—and shooters and stabbers and clubbers and poisoners and scissorers. Now if they do this about a billion more times they’ll really be making a difference that counts.

French publishers, interestingly, were unusually fond of this theme—so egalitarian of them. That’s why many of the covers here are from France, including one—for which we admit we bent the rules of the collection a bit, because the victim isn’t dead quite yet—of a woman actually machine gunning some hapless dude. But what a great cover.

We also have a couple of Spanish killer femmes, and a Dutch example or two. Because we wanted to be comprehensive, the collection is large and some of the fronts are quite famous, but a good portion are also probably new to you. Art is by the usual suspects—Robert Maguire, Barye Phillips, Alex Piñon, Robert Bonfils, Robert McGinnis, Rudolph Belarski, et al. Enjoy.

Aussie writer Shane Douglas may win the all time pseudonym prize. He was really Richard Wilkes-Hunter, but besides writing as Douglas, he wrote as Kerry Mitchell, Michael Owen, Leslie Wilkes, Shauna Marlowe, Sheila Garland, R.W. Hunters, James Dark, Tod Conrad, Tod Crane, Ted Conway, Caroline Farr, Diana Douglas, Adrian Gray, Alison Hart, Lucy Waters, and so forth. Under his Douglas pseudonym, he wrote a lot of doctor and nurse novels, so we thought we’d share some of those amusing covers today. Above and below you see five, all from the early 1960s, with art by unknown. 

As Cool and the Crazy opened, we thought the lesson was that cool was acceptable but crazy was what happened when you crossed the line. It quickly became clear that cool and crazy are synonymous, with both terms meaning that you’re beyond the pale, i.e. basically fucked. Lead actor Scott Marlowe plays Bennie Saul, and he’s both cool and crazy. The crazy part is clear, because he’s an M dealer (“M” being hepcat-speak for marijuana). He deals because he owes a big-time criminal lots of money, and the only way he can repay his debt is to get his buddies hooked on the M.

He decides to approach the task methodically. He starts with one member of his crew. This is where the cool comes in. He seduces the guy into trying it, then stands by and smirks as the poor fella tries to crawl between the grain on a wooden table. Later the same hapless chump dances with a bus stop sign as if it’s a woman, demonstrating his underlyingloneliness. Yes, Fred Astaire danced with a coat stand in Royal Wedding, and it was cute, but this bus stop sign dance is edgy stuff, highly disturbing. We hear that in the unrated version of the scene the character sexually assaults a merge sign because it was really asking for it.

Anyway, in the subplot, brooding delinquent-in-waiting Jackie Barzan meets a girl, which is only possible because he’s cool, but not yet crazy. Like Brando in The Wild One. The girl, Amy, is neither cool nor crazy. She’s warm and totally sane, with big, soulful eyes that drip redemption. Like Mary Murphy in The Wild One. While in Amy’s house one day, Jackie starts handling a ceramic bauble and Amy tells him to putit down, because it’s extremely valuable and irreplaceable. So, she’s sane, but stupid. She should know, via the Moviemaking 101 Handbook, that when an expensive bauble is handled, it will later be stolen or broken.

So, back we go to signdancer, who by now is so hooked on the M that he’s going to lose his mind if he doesn’t partake every day. The problem is he’s already spent his entire net worth. So, being a good friend but a terrible boyfriend, Jackie steals Amy’s priceless trinket to sell for more evil M, but he accidentally breaks it. Conveniently, this happens right in front of Amy, and rather than rat out his buddy, Jackie pretends to be hooked on the M himself. He whines, “You don’t know what it’s like when you’re hooked on the smoke, Amy! It’s the worst! Just the worst! When you’re hooked… you’re hooked!”

Later Jackie… actually, you know what? Let’s just yank the ripcord and end this agonizing freefall. You’ve got better things to do, right? We’ll summarize by saying that in mid-century drug movies all roads lead to either the nuthouse or a fiery wreck. That’s poor Bennie Saul in there, below, no longer cool. But he doesn’t charbroil in vain. His deathserves to reform Jackie, and perhaps even give him a shot to get back with Amy, who may be out one priceless tchotchke, but never runs dry of forgiveness.

As bad as Cool and the Crazy was, it’s an informative example of mid-century drug hysteria. All it needed was an ending voiceover: “And so Bennie Saul, rather than working hard and staying on the straight and narrow like a good American, took a shortcut that led to the graveyard. But while it’s too late for Bennie Saul, it isn’t for the rest of you out there. Play by the rules, obey the law, pay your taxes, and all your money will eventually be given away to a bunch of criminal bankers in something called a bailout.” Well, that last bit probably wouldn’t be in there. Maybe in the remake though. Cool and the Crazy opened in the U.S. this month in 1958. 

Above is an Inside Detective published February 1963, containing a feature on Albert Nussbaum and Bobby Wilcoxson, a pair of armed robbers who were among the most sought after fugitives of their time. Nussbaum was the brains of the operation, and was adept at chess and photography, and was a locksmith, gunsmith, pilot, airplane mechanic, welder, and draftsman. With his spatial and mechanical aptitude, many careers would have been available to him, but he chose instead to become a bank robber. Predictably, he was good at that too.  

But brains are not the same as intuition. Nussbaum was clever enough to arrange a meeting with his estranged wife right under the authorities’ noses, but apparently had no clue his mother-in-law was capable of dropping a dime on him. What followed was a 100 mph chase through the streets of Buffalo that ended only after a civilian rammed Nussbaum’s car.Wilcoxson was arrested soon afterward in Maryland, and both robbers were convicted of murder. But where Wilcoxson got the chair (a sentence which was commuted to life upon appeal), Nussbaum got forty years, which made him eligible for parole.