| Vintage Pulp | Jan 15 2023 |
Don't worry! I'm going to get the three of you out of there!
Our girlfriends—affectionately PI-1 and PI-2—rolled their eyes at this one, and why wouldn't they? We did too, but we work with what we're given, and we certainly couldn't ignore the fact that this January 1969 Adam magazine features a cover of a woman whose gravity defying breasts are directly in the center of the art. Men's magazines, those concoctions of macho fantasy set to print, are inherently sexist, but we are mere documentarians of mid-century art, literature, and film—and crime, and weirdness, and sex—in the various forms they take. This one is a particularly eye-catching example.
While literary magazines published prestige fiction, men's mags like Adam carried on the pulp tradition, giving authors without highbrow leanings opportunities to expose their work to wide audiences. Without the efforts of such publications, modern literature might look very different. Stephen King, for example, published many of his early stories in Gallery, a middle-tier smut monthly nobody would have mistaken for Playboy. Speaking of which, Playboy published early works from Ian Fleming, Ursula K. Le Guin, and even serialized the entirety of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 in 1954, a year after its initial publication landed with a thud.
As far as we know Adam didn't produce any major writers except James Lee, aka Jim Aitchison, whose Mr. Midnight books were recently made into a series now streaming on Netflix. But failing to graduate lots of future bestselling authors doesn't change what Adam was—a publication that aimed for mass male appeal by merging all the elements of what was once known as pulp. Those elements included mystery, crime, war, exotic adventure, risqué humor, and a dose of relatively tame sexual content. We have all that and more below in thirty-plus scans, and something like seventy-eight issues of Adam embedded in our website.
AustraliaAdam MagazinePlayboyGallery MagazineMr. MysteryJ. Edward BrownJames LeeJim AitchisonStephen KingIan FlemingUrsula K. Le GuinRay BradburyJack Waughmagazine artnudityliterature
| Vintage Pulp | Jul 12 2012 |
Move your ass, Mary Ann! This lunatic has killed the Skipper, Gilligan, Ginger, and the Howells—and we’re next!
So, we have four or five more issues of the Aussie magazine Adam that we're planning to post, and above you see the cover of one of those, from July 1973. We had been searching around for more issues when out of the blue we got an email from Jim/Australia informing us that he had written for the magazine back in 1975. His stories appeared under the name Mike Rader, and we had posted three issues in which his fiction appeared. Those issues, with the stories “See Rome and Die,” “Deadline Portugal,” and “Hellbound Express” can be seen here, here, and here.
And here’s Jim: In the 1950s-1970s, most Australian writers had few opportunities to sell their work locally. They had to send their work to publishers in the UK. So local magazines like Adam, and pulp fiction houses like Horwitz, inspired and encouraged a lot of Aussie writers to take their first steps. At the time, I was working in advertising, I was time poor but dying to start writing stories, so I targeted Adam. I concocted the name Mike Rader (it sounded like a raider!) and they bought virtually everything I sent in. I found it helped to attach an idea for the illustration with each story—that way they could picture the finished product before they started reading. It was a good discipline for me; I started by dreaming up a movie poster-style scene; if I couldn't think of anything exciting, then I scrapped the story idea and moved on. (Besides which, advertising people are trained to think visually.) What also helped my work sell was the fact I respected the craft; I didn't look down on the genre. By the way, I never met the editor, but I had his letter pinned up on the wall—it said, “We like your stories, please send us more!” Since then, I've written 122 books for children, and books on advertising.
We checked out Jim’s Wikipedia entry, which led us to his publisher’s website and, sure enough, he’s put together a quite impressive bibliography. His million-selling Mr. Midnight series, and his newer Mr. Mystery collection, are both written under the pseudonym James Lee, and are described as being for Asian teens (Jim has lived in Singapore for 20 years). But they’re written in English and we suspect they have plenty of pan-cultural aspects. A few days after we first heard from Jim, he really surprised us by sending in some scans from two issues of Adam in which his fiction appeared. Since we already had today’s post ready to go, we’re going to share those a little later, so keep an eye open for them. In the meantime, enjoy the below scans from July 1973.
Update: a sharp-eyed reader informs us that the model featured in the photo series entitled "Cynthia's Poses" is none other than Rene Bond, who appeared in about 300 x-rated loops and films during the 1970s. Thanks to Rai for soptting that.
AustraliaSingaporeAdam MagazineMr. MysteryMr. MidnightJames LeeMike RaderJim AitchisonRene Bondmagazine artnudity
