Yes, it's Diane Webber on the cover of this Horwitz second edition of Carter Brown's No Future Fair Lady, and amazingly, she's fully clothed, a phenomenon we've never seen from the most famous nudist model of her generation. Looking closer, though, the dress could be painted on. Wouldn't surprise us. You don't become a nudist icon in the buttoned down 1950s by letting the Man tell you what to do. At any rate, this is yet another example of Horwitz using unlicensed (we suspect) celeb photos on their Carter Brown paperbacks. Since we feature a lot of tabloids on Pulp Intl., we have to point out that the protagonist in this story works for a tab called Smear. We love that. The copyright here is 1960, and we have several other examples of Horwitz celeb covers you can see by clicking this link.

Every once in a while we come across a pleasant surprise of a film and Road Games is an example of that perfect nexus where no expectations meet good filmmaking to greatly improve our day. Starring Stacy Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, Road Games is about an American hitchhiker making her way across the Australian outback the same time a depraved serial killer is loose on the road. She's picked up by truck driver Keach and the two of them come to believe they're following the same route across the country as the murderer. Keach and Curtis are great in this. Even though Curtis's attraction to a porno mustached forty-something can only be explained as a case of outback fever, the May/December storyline is deftly handled and reasonably believable, and the entire movie is given extra dimensionality by vast Australian vistas and witty dialogue. We highly recommend this one. It seems to have been mismarketed as a horror movie back in its day, but really it's just a thriller. Straightforward, well made, and starring two appealing performers, Road Games premiered in Australia today in 1981. You see the Aussie poster above, while the U.S. promo, along with some production photos, is below.

Above, another theft from Pinterest, Nicholas Spain's Name Your Vice, for Australia's Star Books, 1963. Spain was really Michael Skinner, a British author who also wrote as Alix De Marquand and Cynthia Hyde. The artist behind this cover is unknown, and it may even be in the public domain if the fact that it's being sold online as a postcard is any indication. It's a bang-up job in any case. 

This is the fiftieth issue of Adam we've shared, which is a milestone of sorts for our website, considering how hard the magazine is to obtain. The cover illustration depicts the moment in John P. Gilders' story “Girl Trap” when a body is dumped in Sydney Harbor, theoretically to be carried out to sea on a receding tide. The hero had intervened to stop a woman from being beaten by her violent boyfriend only to stand by in horror as she shot the guy dead. He soon discovers that the woman is actually a prostitute and the boyfriend was her pimp. Cops eventually get involved but the hero skates because the police “just know” he isn't a murderer. The story is as bad as it sounds, but on the plus side it's short.

Tired of the rampant commercialism of Valentine's Day? So is the woman on the cover of Edward Ronns' 1955 thriller Say It with Murder. Too bad she doesn't live where we do, where there's no such holiday. This cover is from Australia's Phantom Books, a company we've been featuring often of late, and as we've mentioned, Phantom had a habit of using reconstituted art. You can see exactly what we mean by looking at the front of the 1954 Graphic Books edition, with its excellent work from Lou Marchetti. We still don't know exactly why Phantom changed its covers. A rights usage issue, we suppose. But if that's the case, why was the company able to get away with making near copies of the originals? We'll keep exploring this question until an answer presents itself.

We're very interested in Australian men's magazines. Today we have a new entry for you—Cavalcade, published by Kenneth G. Murray, the same person that gave the world Adam. This issue from February 1956, has a killer cover—uncredited, which is par for K.G. Murray Publishing. There aren't many art or photo pages inside, but we've posted the ones that were there. You may have noticed the somewhat weird slogan “The Know Yourself Magazine.” We guess the idea being peddled is that Cavalcade helped men become better versions of themselves. It sounds almost zen, almost like the Buddha would say it. But then you open it and see all the raunchy cartoons and bikini beauties and realize—no, it's just a regular men's magazine. And if you bought it, you probably knew yourself quite well already. We may get back to this one a bit later.

A gringo detective with an agency in Mexico City is hired to locate his crooked ex-partner, who has bailed with the agency's money, and now is causing trouble for the client. The PI takes the job, glad to be paid to track down his betrayer, and starts in the Mexican town of Rio Bravo where the partner immediately turns up dead. From there the hero delves into local corruption, crosses the border to Texas, uncovers a human trafficking ring, meets a cantina dancer named Arden Kennett, deals with a dangerous wife, watches murders pile up and the police begin to suspect him, and learns that knives can be thrown just as effectively as they can be brandished.

The book was published in the U.S. as an Ace Double in 1959 with Paul Rader art and bound with Charles Fritch's Negative of a Nude, but the rare edition above is from Aussie imprint Phantom Books and appeared in 1960. We can't identify the artist, which is an affliction we've been dealing with quite a bit of late. But don't blame us—as we've mentioned once or twice before, including just a few days ago, Phantom didn't credit art, possibly because much of it was copied from U.S. editions. Many of the covers do, however, look like the same hand, so hopefully someone will be able to ID the owner of that hand at some point in the future.