 Actually, I'll pay first. I once bought a television on installments and I can tell you easy financing is a scam. 
This cover illustration from Robert McGinnis features one of his more famous elongated femmes fatales. He's also cleverly included iconic detective art objects such as a pistol, a martini glass, a smoldering cigarette, and a tumbler of some amber liquid or other, and with some nifty positioning he's placed all these items clearly in view why keeping the poses of his stylized figures easy and balanced. And for good measure his femme has lost a heel, which invites speculation as to how that happened. That's GGA (good girl art) at its best.
Could Robert Kyle's, aka Robert Terrall's, aka Brett Halliday's 1960 thriller Kill Now, Pay Later possibly be as good as its cover art? That's a big ask. Too big, really, though the book is pretty good. Kyle's franchise detective Ben Gates is hired to guard gifts at a high society wedding, but someone slips a mickey into his coffee and he's in la-la land while two murders and a robbery occur. As a matter of self preservation he has to solve the crimes or his chances of securing more work will be pretty slim. After all, who'd hire a detective that passes out on the job?
So Gates delves into the mystery, unravels a complicated plot, and handles the advances of three beautiful women. We think of these babe-magnet detectives as the male analogue to the dewy maidens of romance novels. As male wish fulfillment goes, Kill Now, Pay Later gets the job done, offering up a tough and competent protagonist and an engaging assortment of secondary personalities. This was third in the Gates series after Blackmail, Inc. and Model for Murder. We'll probably try to locate those. Kyle/Terrall/Halliday knows how to entertain a reader.
 Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. 
Above is the cover of Rufus King's 1945 mystery The Deadly Dove, which isn't a particularly notable book, except that it demonstrates one of the time-honored motifs in pulp cover art—the woman fighting for her life. We've cobbled together a small collection of such covers, with art by Robert Hilbert, Robert Stanley, and others. We're curious, but unfortunately have no way of knowing, how readers reacted to these depictions when they first hit newsstands. There are probably some examinations of that question out there somewhere, but not in a place where we can find them. To our contemporary eyes, though, some of these images seem brutal to the extent that if someone actually saw us holding one in a store, we'd be like, "Oh this? Not mine. No, no, no. Found this uh, on the floor and was just, er, putting it back on the shelf. No, I was actually buying this copy of Genital Warts and U." Okay, maybe that's a bit of an overstatement. You get the point, though. But violent or not, there's no denying the artistry on display on these covers. Thanks to various Flickr groups for some of these, by the way. In other news, that long delayed internet installation is so close we can almost taste it. How much you wanna bet it all fails spectacularly?           
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1921—Sacco & Vanzetti Convicted
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are convicted in Dedham, Massachusetts of killing their shoe company's paymaster. Even at the time there are serious questions about their guilt, and whether they are being railroaded because of their Italian ethnicity and anarchist political beliefs. 1933—Eugenics Becomes Official German Policy
Adolf Hitler signs the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, and Germany begins sterilizing those they believe carry hereditary illnesses, and those they consider impure. By the end of WWII more than 400,000 are sterilized, including criminals, alcoholics, the mentally ill, Jews, and people of mixed German-African heritage. 1955—Ruth Ellis Executed
Former model Ruth Ellis is hanged at Holloway Prison in London for the murder of her lover, British race car driver David Blakely. She is the last woman executed in the United Kingdom. 1966—Richard Speck Rampage
Richard Speck breaks into a Chicago townhouse where he systematically rapes and kills eight student nurses. The only survivor hides under a bed the entire night. 1971—Corona Sent to Prison
Mexican-born serial killer Juan Vallejo Corona is convicted of the murders of 25 itinerant laborers. He had stabbed each of them, chopped a cross in the backs of their heads with a machete, and buried them in shallow graves in fruit orchards in Sutter County, California. At the time the crimes were the worst mass murders in U.S. history.
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