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Pulp International - Mickey+Spillane
Vintage Pulp Jun 1 2014
FAST SPILLANE
The books are lovely, dark, and deep.


Below, four evocative covers from the French imprint Editions Les Presses de la Cité for, top to bottom, Mickey Spillane’s En quatrième vitesse (Kiss Me Deadly), Dans un fauteuil (The Big Kill), Charmante soirée (One Lonely Night), and Nettoyage par le vide (The Long Wait). Does that last one sound familiar? Look here. Artist or photographer unknown on these. You can see more excellent Presses de la Cité Spillane covers on Müller-Fokker’s blog.

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Vintage Pulp Jun 8 2013
BEAST IN HUMAN SKIN
Mike Hammer lets his inner predator come out.


Mickey Spillane's iconic private dick Mike Hammer is a lethal weapon and he wants everyone to know it. He constantly tells others and the reader how tough he is, how willing he is to kill, how afraid others are of him, and why they're right to be afraid. At some point that changed in crime novels and these days the toughest characters almost never boast about their abilities, or it's done in a leftfield way, such as in Lee Child's novels, in which Jack Reacher sometimes explains clinically how he's going to get the better of somebody. But Hammer just comes out with it: “I'm mean, I'm tough, I'm better than you, I have a code you can't possibly understand, and I'm going to kill you and everyone who tries to help you.”

This is never more true than in 1952's Kiss Me, Deadly, which revolves around Hammer accidentally becoming the patsy in a murder plot and seeking revenge, not only for the murdered woman (who's Swedish and has the awesome name Berga Torn), but also because anyone who would dare try to put him on the spot, and anyone who would wreck his custom built car, simply deserves to die. Spillane is great. This is still genre fiction, so it's never perfect, but the writing is visceral and the tightness of the plotting is unbeatable. When Hammer gets violent it's serious business. He rips a guys eyes out. He rips another guy's jaw loose. The man is a hammer alright, only his first name should be Jack.

Film buffs should note that Kiss Me, Deadly diverges significantly from the 1955 film version. There's no suitcase of— Well, if you haven't seen the movie we won't tell you what there's no suitcase of, but those who've seen it will know what we were going to say. Here the MacGuffin is drugs with a street value of two million dollars. Kiss Me, Deadly is fast, clever, unexpected, and quite a pleasure to read. It's basically preposterous, of course, the male antipode to the romance novel, with Hammer fulfilling male desires to be tough, unbeatable, irresistible, but still basically a good guy. We don't care if it's male wish fulfillment. It's a ton of fun.

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Vintage Pulp Mar 29 2012
STARING DOWN THE BARREL
Stop whining. You deserve this bullet and you know it.

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.

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Vintage Pulp Aug 9 2010
FRAGMENTS OF FEAR
Be afraid... be very afraid.


Below, fifteen pieces of pulp art with terror as their central theme. The cover in panel three from Erle Stanley Gardner is the German version of 1948's Perry Mason and the Case of the Vagabond Virgin, retitled Perry Mason und die Unschuld vom Lande, or Perry Mason and the Innocence of the Country.

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Vintage Pulp Aug 26 2009
RUBY BABY
When the original artist finds out his work has been reused he'll see red.

This Dutch edition of Mickey Spillane’s Everybody’s Watching Me has one of the cooler covers we’ve seen. From the supersaturated red shade, to the handlettered text, to the brunette in a bikini and Roman sandals, this one is picture perfect. Definitely a new favorite, and we’re not just saying that because we’re in Amsterdam this week. It's repurposed from somewhere, originally from a U.S. paperback, we suppose, and the art would be by an American artist. We just aren't sure which one. Interestingly, there is not a lot of Dutch-language pulp. At least, we haven't spotted much thusfar. But we'll keep digging and see what turns up.

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Musiquarium Aug 14 2009
DIRTY LOWDOWN
Tabloid pretended concern for singer’s career, but it was all a ruse.

On the cover of this August 1955 issue of the tabloid Lowdown the editors get confrontational with the then-governor of Michigan, G. Mennen Williams. The story involves chart-topping singer Johnnie Ray, who in June 1951 was convicted of propositioning a man in the restroom of a Detroit burlesque house called the Stone Theatre. Lowdown’s insistence upon a pardon for the singer is simply a backdoor way of airing out the scandal while pretending to crusade on his behalf.

How do we know that was Lowdown's intent? Simple—because any tabloid worthy of labeling itself such would have known Ray was bisexual. He pled guilty on that solicitation charge without even bothering to bring a lawyer to court, and his sexual involvement with both halves of the husband-wife comedy team of Bob Mitchell and Jay Grayton was not exactly a state secret.

On stage Ray was an emotional singer whose antics earned him the nicknames the Prince of Wails (for his unrestrained style) and the Nabob of Sob (for his tendency to burst into tears), so even if his fans didn’t realize he was bi, they certainly understood that macho was not his stock-in-trade. Which meant, in the end, he had a nice career even with the tabs dogging his heels. He scored numerous big hits, including “Cry” in 1951, and “You Don’t Owe Me a Thing” in 1957. But even if Ray was impervious to slander, some of Lowdown’s other victims were less fortunate. We'll discuss some of them in the future.

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Vintage Pulp May 4 2009
HOLLANDAISE BOSS
Spillane adds flavor to the Dutch literary scene.


Mickey Spillane pulp covers from Holland, circa 1950s, 1960s, with art from Robert McGinnis, except possibly book four. These are, top to bottom, Survival...Zero, Me Hood (aka The Affair with the Dragon Lady), I the Jury, My Gun Is Quick, Kiss Me Deadly, The Body Lovers, Vengeance Is Mine, and The Snake.

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History Rewind
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
March 28
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.
March 27
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.
March 26
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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