Two hard-luck juvenile delinquents find each other and fall in love in the slums of New York City, but can they keep it together when their surroundings threaten to destroy them? That's the basic idea of Yield to the Night. Author Jack Karney specialized in this, writing about East Side gangs in many novels, including Work of Darkness, Cry Brother Cry, Cop, and Tough Town. 1960 copyright on the above, with Rafael DeSoto cover art. 

When we started thinking about this post we went straight to candies for tattoo ideas. Apparently there's a candy called Nik-L-Nips that you have to suck the juice out of, but we thought that was too obscure, and of course Milk Duds was an obvious option, but it sounds a bit insulting, so in the end “the twins” seemed like a classic. The Pulp Intl. girlfriends agreed. Brian Agar's Have Love, Will Share is a bit of a classic too, or at least it uses a classic sleaze set-up—the marriage counselor whose patient is a nymphomaniac and soon sets her eyes on the doctor. Agar was a pen name used by author W.T. Ballard, an original contributor to Black Mask who wrote many novels under many names, including Jack Slade, Clay Turner, et al. This effort is from 1961 and it has Rafael DeSoto cover art. 

Above is a nice piece by George Erickson for Eric Allen’s Like Wild. It’s the story of a soldier of fortune who returns from Laos to find that his patch of land in Florida is coveted by a local villain. Complicating matters is the villain’s wife, who is a seductress with no qualms about a little action on the side. You know the drill. You may also notice the rather Freudian aspect of the art—i.e., the female figure wraps herself around the male figure in a sexual style embrace that causes his, er, drink to overflow onto the carpet. Well, the stain will come out with water and soap, hopefully. Top marks on this one. 

Brother and Sister is Donald E. Westlake writing incest sleaze under the pseudonym Edwin West, telling the story of a twenty-one-year-old meathead and his nubile teen sister who, er, come together on a deeper level after the accidental deaths of their parents. They hump like rabbits for a few weeks, deal with a villainous uncle, then morality triumphs and they die in the end. The male character here is in the Air Force, which is appropriate, because Westlake must have written this on autopilot. The Harry Schaare cover art shows a much older guy than the punk-ass troublemaker in the story, but it’s still quite nice. 1961 copyright. 

Above, a nice Tom Miller cover for Suburban Lovers, Jay Carr’s tale of various married suburbanites bedding their neighbors, published 1962, for Monarch. Carr, who was in actuality James P. Duff, must have done okay with this theme, because he also published Crack-Up in Suburbia for Monarch, also in 1962. 

Sleaze fiction is rife with novels about dodgy doctors and here’s another one from Stuart Friedman, succinctly titled The Surgeons, from Monarch Books, 1962, with cover art from Harry Schaare. This is the second Friedman/Schaare pairing we’ve posted. The other is the infamous Fathers and Daughters, which you can see here. Actually, while we’re on the subject, maybe check out a few of our other bad doctor novels here, here, and here. Oh, and here too. 

Above is a cover for 1963’s Fathers and Daughters by Stuart Friedman for Monarch Books. You get the gist from the art. It’s the story of Brad Latham and his daughter Barbara, who were always very close (sharing innocent father-daughter kisses which seemed to banish the worries of the day, we’re informed) but eventually get a little too close. The artist here, Harry Schaare, was born in New York in 1922, and studied architecture and had a stint in the army before establishing himself as a pulp illustrator. He was most active during the 1960s, and eventually moved into fine art, whereupon he diversified into all kinds of subject matter, from sports to western-themed art to portraiture. If you’re interested, there’s a Flickr gallery of some of his paperback covers here.