This piece of unusual and excellent cover art was painted for the 1965 Pocket Books edition of Raymond Chandler's four-part anthology Pick-Up on Noon Street, and the scene is personally familiar to us, though it's been years since we got so loaded we ended up insensate. But it happened a few times when we lived in Central America. Ever heard of a liquor called Tic Tack? Steer clear of that stuff. You'll end up a floor tile. The cover specifically illustrates the tale, “Guns at Cyrano's,” in which the hero finds an unconscious blonde in a hotel room. She didn't get that way by doing anything fun, though. The art was painted by Unknown, who's outdone himself here. Seriously, he's put together some masterpieces, but we think this one is top of the heap. You can read more about Pick-Up on Noon Street here. 

Vintage cowboys, as we said above, are usually tough and stoic, so we're going to guess the one on the cover of E.E. Halleran's Double Cross Trail isn't the main character. We've haven't read the book, so it's just a guess. But even when confronted with Cheyenne raiding parties, and even when fighting alongside the doomed George Armstrong Custer—which happens here—we bet the protagonist keeps his cool. We're firmly in the real history camp (as opposed to the patriotic mythology camp), however we've had good luck with westerns. None that we've read have had historical blinders on. A friend sent us an enjoyable one, Warren Kiefer's Outlaw, but as it's a 1989 book without pulpworthy cover art we won't highlight it. We're tempted to try Double Cross Trail but the stack of books is high, and the demands on our time are many. The amusing cover art here is by Stanley Borack, and this Pocket edition followed the novel's 1946 original publication in 1952. 

We already shared a 1952 Pocket Books cover for Ellery Queen's The Dutch Shoe Mystery, but this 1959 Pocket Books art by Jerry Allison goes a different direction, so we have a different, equally silly take on it. The Pulp Intl. girlfriends didn't get the joke last time, we suppose because they aren't old enough to know the same useless things we do, so we'll offer the reminder that a traditional Dutch shoe is made of wood and known as a clog. The Dutch Shoe Mystery features no clog that needs removal, just a ruptured gall bladder. Before the doctor can perform the operation, the patient, a millionairess who founded the hospital, is strangled with a piece of wire. Suspects: a few family members and the immediate medical staff. The “Dutch” in the title comes from the name of the hospital: Dutch Memorial. The “shoe” comes from the standard footwear of surgeons: white canvas moccasins which are the sole (oops) clue. Third in the Ellery Queen series, the authors Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee (aka Daniel Nathan and Manford Lepofsky) basically update the classic locked room mystery by staging it in a medical facility. Good? Well, they published more than thirty subsequent Queen capers, so take that for what it's worth. 

William P. McGivern's 1961 novel Savage Streets was part of a wave of juvenile delinquent fiction characterized by the novels of Hal Elson and Harlan Ellison, and a nice example of a genre that rose in response to middle American fear and fascination with youth gangs. The narrative begins when some junior league thugs who call themselves the Chiefs begin extorting money from the pre-teen kids of a nearby suburb. The kids steal from their parents to satisfy these demands, but the thefts go unnoticed only for so long. The truth comes out, a suburban father intervenes with the gang on behalf of his son, and a fistfight results. Other parents in this conservative enclave are infuriated at the gang, and a group of them go to the police, but when the results aren't satisfactory they decide to deal with the Chiefs in a way the gang will understand—by hitting back twice as hard.

From this point, McGivern takes his tale in an interesting direction. The dads expect the police to function as tools of their anger. Any attempt to give the Chiefs equal treatment or due process is met with outrage. In other words, they expect to be protected by the law without being accountable to it, while they expect the Chiefs to be accountable to the law without being protected by it. This leads not to resolution, but to increasing distrust, violence, and finally disaster upon disaster. Later the dads realize that the genesis of the crisis may not have been the Chiefs' extortion after all, but something the dads were involved with even earlier—a law they helped push through the city council. They might have realized the law was unfair, but none of them cared enough to bother looking closely at it. McGivern really hit pay dirt with this book. It's well written, immersive, and relevant.