It's a good thing the real world isn't like the worlds of pulp and mid-century crime fiction. In those realms, when a woman receives an unexpected visitor the result is often disastrous. Bad cops, evil crooks, ruthless blackmailers, lecherous uncles, and all sorts of nasty characters usually await on the other side of the door. Above and below you see a collection of mid-century paperback fronts showing those fraught moments just after a woman opens her door to trouble, or trouble takes matters into its own hands and busts its way in. Our recommendation: in the event of an unexpected knock just go out the window.

Bill Edwards' profile as a paperback illustrator has risen considerably in recent years. Like others who painted for sleaze imprints, it is not so much his technical ability that has garnered the attention, but rather the subject matter and a strong style. Edwards is a guy whose work you can identify in a millisecond. His women almost always have sharp cheekbones, ski jump noses, and a prominent beauty mark. The cover above for Rick Rand's New Girl in Town shows you all three elements up close. Edwards was also prolific like few other painters, which makes finding his work easy. Below are many more illustrations, some for novels with subject matter well beyond the pale, and we have other Edwards pieces populating Pulp Intl., for example here, here, and here.

The first step is a doozy, as they say, but in vintage fiction so is the last one and all those in between. Above and below are assorted paperback covers featuring characters who've had a bad time navigating stairs, a few due to accidents but most via ill intent from third parties. We also have one hardback dust sleeve we added at the bottom because it was so interesting. Just scroll down, but do it carefully.

The Rode Vampen Serie, or Red Femmes Fatales Series, was launched in 1963 by the Dutch publishing company De Vrije Pers, with a new entry unveiled every two weeks. Above are ten nice examples. We would love to read Strip Tease Bar, but Dutch is not one of our tongues. See more from De Vrije Pers here and here. 

Above, seven covers from Editions Société d'Éditions Générales' series Le Maître de l'invisible, aka The Master of the Invisible, which was written by Edward Brooker from 1945 to 1947, relaunched in 1953, taken over by Sam Norwood, and finally shelved in 1956. Both Booker and Norwood were pseudonyms, neither conclusively identified at this point, although Booker may have been Austrian born Edward Ostermann. The title character of these books, Pao Tcheou, or Chao Pao, is a creation right out of the psycho-cultural Yellow Peril fever dreams of the era, a Chinese villain who can turn himself invisible, and in order to fulfill his dreams of global domination employs methods as diverse as giant monsters, killer robots, nuclear weapons, and general oriental cunning. He's of course opposed by a group of upstanding Westerners.

Above, a small collection of Mickey Spillane covers illustrated by Barye Phillips in similar style for Signet Books published throughout the 1950s. Spillane had many cover treatments over the decades but these, which were made for the Mike Hammer series, are among the best. There's one more, for Vengeance Is Mine, but we plan to read that and report back, so we've left it out. Phillips did other art for Signet, including illustrating the fronts of James Bond and Al Wheeler novels. We're also big fans of this piece, and this one too. And you can also see another Spillane collection we put together here.