 We're having a baseball season after all, baby. But before I go, you sure you don't want to learn the backdoor slider? 
We were really worried for a while. Baseball had been postponed, and while some blamed the owners and others blamed the players, we blamed the entire universe. Well, except for Bernard Malamud, a favorite writer of ours, who we were forced to read in high school and expected to hate, but loved. The Natural wasn't the book we read. We read selections from The Stories of Bernard Malamud. If you're going to read serious literature, bite-sized chunks can ease the digestion process. We digress—baseball, delayed, now back on track. The best part? Living overseas as we do, it means we get to have our yearly conversations with baffled friends who just can't wrap their heads around the sport's rules—or really, its entire concept. We enjoy that.
 When an unknown neighbor commits murder peace of mind is the next casualty. 
It's always nice to come across a book with a fresh approach. This book for example, The Woman on the Roof by Helen Nielsen, deals with a disturbed woman who has the key clues to a murder mystery due to being able to see directly into a neighbor's apartment. But she's considered a kook by family, friends, and the police, who've interacted with her before on the occasion of her being committed to a mental institution. Upon her release she wanted nothing more than peace and tranquility, but now she's a murder witness. Socially awkward, afraid of people, obsessive compulsive, and psychically tethered to the garage-top apartment that is her sole safe zone, this killing thing really turns her life upside down.
There's a great sequence where the character gets lost on the streets of L.A., and seeing the city from her point of view, experiencing all its nocturnal strangeness and indecipherable cacophony and perceived danger through her eyes, is tremendously affecting. We can't remember feeling that level of sympathy for a character in a jam in a long time. Not sure many male authors could have pulled it off quite as deftly. Nielsen's good ideas, written well with a unique angle on murder—figuratively and literally—made for a very worthwhile read. It was originally published in 1954, and the Dell paperback you see above appeared in 1956 with excellent cover art by William George.
 I think I've finally got his strategy figured out. Every time he throws a punch he hits me. 
William Campbell Gault was a fan of sports—or at least of using sports as a backdrop for his fiction. In The Canvas Coffin the boxer hero Luke Pilgrim wakes up the morning after a tough title fight and fears he may have killed Brenda Vane, the woman he escorted to his victory party. He can't quite remember, though, what with all those blows to the head, but she's definitely dead, and he needs to unpuzzle the mystery before he ends up in prison. As set-ups go, this is a nice one. Guys who think they may have committed murder are staples of crime fiction and film noir, but the idea of making the character a concussed boxer is clever. Gault wrote about twenty sports thrillers, so he knew his stuff. Illustrator William George knew his stuff too, and produced a nice cover for this Dell paperback, dated 1954.
 Oh darling, I’m so proud of you. It’s tough to get any kind of work right now. 
In a down job market you take what you can get, especially if it makes your woman this happy. This cool cover for Brett Halliday’s Murder Is My Business was painted by William George for Dell Publishing in 1949. Halliday was reprinted a bunch, so there are multiple covers for this book. The one just below is the original hardback from 1945, and after that, in order, are the 1945 paperback by Gerald Gregg, a photorealistic 1958 cover, a 1963 Robert McGinnis cover, and lastly, the recent Hard Case Crime version with Robert McGinnis cover art once again. There are others, as well, but we couldn’t track them all down.
    
 He’s always hanging around. 
William Wister Haines wrote six screenplays, saw several books adapted to film, and was considered by some to be a literary talent on the level of John Steinbeck. But you’d never know any of that from looking at the William George cover art for his Depression-era novel Slim, with its shirtless hunk of burnin’ love casually doing a little pole smoking. The novel was mainly a drama about the dangerous working conditions for electrical linemen, but Bantam opted to sex it up a bit for the 1957 re-issue with a cover that looks like a Marlboro ad. We hope Slim remembered his sunblock.
|
 |
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1952—Chaplin Returns to England
Silent movie star Charlie Chaplin returns to his native England for the first time in twenty-one years. At the time it is said to be for a Royal Society benefit, but in reality Chaplin knows he is about to be banned from the States because of his political views. He would not return to the U.S. for twenty years. 1910—Duke of York's Cinema Opens
The Duke of York's Cinema opens in Brighton, England, on the site of an old brewery. It is still operating today, mainly as a venue for art films, and is the oldest continually operating cinema in Britain. 1975—Gerald Ford Assassination Attempt
Sara Jane Moore, an FBI informant who had been evaluated and deemed harmless by the U.S. Secret Service, tries to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford. Moore fires one shot at Ford that misses, then is wrestled to the ground by a bystander named Oliver Sipple. 1937—The Hobbit is Published
J. R. R. Tolkien publishes his seminal fantasy novel The Hobbit, aka The Hobbit: There and Back Again. Marketed as a children's book, it is a hit with adults as well, and sells millions of copies, is translated into multiple languages, and spawns the sequel trilogy The Lord of Rings.
|
|
|
It's easy. We have an uploader that makes it a snap. Use it to submit your art, text, header, and subhead. Your post can be funny, serious, or anything in between, as long as it's vintage pulp. You'll get a byline and experience the fleeting pride of free authorship. We'll edit your post for typos, but the rest is up to you. Click here to give us your best shot.
|
|
