Gringo adventurer goes down South American rabbit hole looking for Inca treasure.
Pulp fiction, genre fiction, crime fiction—call it what you want. Basically, none of it will ever win a Pulitzer Prize, but it can be mighty enjoyable when done just right. Plunder of the Sun is faster than fast pulp-style fiction from To Catch a Thief author David Dodge. The rough and tumble protagonist Al Colby tries to unravel the secret of an Inca quipa—an ancient numero-linguistic recording device—which may tell the location of an impossibly huge hoard of gold. The tale speeds from Santiago, Chile to Lima, Peru and into the high Andes by boat, train, and tram to a climax on the highest lake in the world.
This is a confident yarn from an author who traveled widely in the countries portrayed, and his tale avoids the cultural judgments you often find in these types of novels. His descriptions of cities, hotels, and transport are unflattering but accurate, yet his treatment of the Peruvian and Chilean villains has no whiff of condescension. They're just the villains, nothing more—smart, tough, deadly, and motivated. The book's only flaw is its late turn toward romantic matchmaking. Still, it was a very good read. It became a movie of the same name in 1953, placed in a new setting, with Glenn Ford and Diana Lynn. The art on this 1951 Dell paperback is by Robert Stanley, and as a bonus it comes in a collectible mapback edition.
That wasn't you panting? Oh... Does that mean I don't excite you?
A. B. Cunningham wrote more than twenty mysteries starring small town sheriff Jess Roden, with Death Haunts the Dark Lane coming fourteenth. An heiress is murdered and the sheriff has to sniff out the killer—literally making use of tracking dogs, which is why you see a hound in Robert Stanley's cover art. The series was popular at the time, but isn't that fondly remembered today. But this Dell mapback edition from 1948, like all the company's mapbacks, is highly collectible.
Okay, okay, I'll take out the garbage when I get home. Just let me finish this other thing first. Our subhead is a little inside joke with the Pulp Intl. girlfriends. But not really that inside, because inside jokes can't be figured out by outsiders, whereas this is pretty straightforward—we always forget to take out the garbage. The look on the woman's face is perfect. We see it constantly. Cover artist Robert Stanley used this type of guileless expression often. He really had painting it down pat. There's only one explanation for that—he forgot about the garbage all the time too.
Guys, I just saw some incredibly rare— Oh. I was going to say clownfish, but you two have those beat. A shell collecting vacationer in Florida comes across a damsel in distress during a late night beach walk and she of course draws him into intrigue way over his head. Before he knows it he's stumbled across a corpse and gotten involved in a murder investigation, as the damsel seems less and less like she's in distress as opposed to causing it for others. Author Richard Powell was known for the wit he mixed into his mysteries, and Shell Game is heavy on the repartee—if light on actual mystery. This Dell edition appeared in 1951 and the fun cover art is by Robert Stanley.
He lives in a fetid swamp, has terrible grooming habits, and zero career prospects. But at least he listens to me. David V. Reed’s, aka David Vern’s The Thing That Made Love was originally published in Mammoth Detective in 1943 as The Metal Monster Murders. The first paperback version appeared in 1946 as I Thought I’d Die, and the above version from New York City’s Universal Publishing and Distributing Corporation, which marketed digest sized paperbacks under the imprint Uni-Book, hit stores in 1951 with Robert Stanley cover art. What you get here is a man blamed for murder, but who claims the slayings were the work of a metal swamp monster. The women die battered, but with ecstatic facial expressions. Which raises the question—what exactly is happening to them? You can read a review of the book here. Update: We learned that Stanley's cover art also appeared in 1952 on Florenz Branch's Whipping Room, for Intimate Novels. Often these cover reworks are clumsy, but we think this makeover is actually pretty good. Not as good as the original, but close.
As your decorator, I recommend putting the rug over there for a splash of color, and the clock over here to remind you that you’re basically just worm food. Carter Dickson was the pseudonym of John Dickson Carr, one of the most prolific authors of the pulp and post-pulp periods, as well as what is known as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. He published novels from 1930 to 1972, and also wrote radio scripts and worked in television and movies. 1958’s The Skeleton in the Clock is not one of his most appreciated books, but we love the Robert Stanley cover art. By the way, there’s literally a skeleton grandfather clock in this book, which prompted us to wonder if such a thing existed in real life. After much searching, the answer is no, apparently, but we did remember there was a coffin clock with a skeleton inside in the midnight movie classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Time is fleeting indeed.
Um, what exactly did you mean when you said your boyfriend was a big dumb ape? We love this cover for Fredric Brown’s 1949 thriller The Dead Ringer, with art by Robert Stanley. Brown wrote about 250 books, including The Fabulous Clipjoint. This one includes the same protagonists as Clipjoint, Ed Hunter and Uncle Ambrose, sticking close to Am’s circus roots (he was a carny pitchman before he became an amateur sleuth) as they try to solve a series of slayings plaguing a traveling carnival. This one may be worth a read solely for the bizarre fact that a chimp gets murdered. How many mysteries can say that?
We decided our immigration procedures weren't cruel enough, so we've made a few changes.
Robert Stanley does his usual expert job on the cover action and Robert Parker—not Robert B. Parker, but a different author who wrote only three novels—provides the narrative for Passport to Peril. The art here depicts the impending torture of a character named Countess Orlovska, and things get pretty uncomfortable for her. They get even worse for the protagonist John Stoddard. He'd merely intended to travel from A to B for personal reasons. Instead he gets tangled up in espionage when he purchases a false passport he assumes bears a made-up identity, but which actually belonged to a missing-presumed-dead spy. The spy's associates soon come calling. Considering the increased focus on immigration in many western nations, we saw this not only as a spy story but also as a saga about a privileged westerner ironically caught in a migratory wringer. Set in Budapest with all the Cold War intrigue the background suggests, this is pretty entertaining stuff from Parker. It originally appeared in 1951, with this Dell edition coming in 1952.
Hyperintelligent being made to look like maniacal sex fiend thanks to pulp art.
Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John is not a sex romp, but a serious piece of utopian science fiction that was highly regarded in its day. Below you see the original art, on which the title character seems to be gazing into inner space, as opposed to the pulp art above, in which a shocked nudist has just caught him gazing into her inner space. The sexual tone here is reinforced by the girl’s caress of one phallic symbol, and by the genital placement of another. Or are we looking too hard at this? Anyway, Odd John is just another fun example of serious fiction being pulped for the sake of easy sales. Often, the lurid new art—in this case by Robert Stanley—is an improvement on the old. This time, hmm... maybe not. But that’s the wonderful thing about vintage paperback art—even at its worst, it’s the best.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
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. 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. 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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