We love this cover. It looks very much to us like the man who’s being choked was staring at a woman’s breasts and can’t take his eyes off them—even while being choked. That’s dedication. Y’en a marre… p’tite tête, by the way, means something like “fed up… little head.” Presumably that’s another of those French terms you have to be French to really understand. We'll await illumination via e-mail.

Update: Jo B. comes to the rescue again: "Petite tête" means that you have no brain, that you forget everything you've got to do or that you've been told. It means also that you're absent minded. On the contrary, "forte tête" which means "strong head" is used to design a person with a rough character, who doesn't like rules, who contests everything, doesn't like discipline and is always against the law. In roman noir, he's a bad boy, quite a gangster, the guy who doesn't tell anything to the police even if he's tortured or beaten. As the expression is used on a roman noir cover, I would say that the "petite tête" is used to design a bad guy who ain't got any future in gangster life, who will never be a "forte tête," who will be a loser and say everything to the police if he's arrested. It's pejorative and insulting.

Thank you again, Jo. You've been a great help, and thanks so much for continuing to visit the site.

Above, a cover for Elle ondule du popotin, written by Jack Norton for Éditions Le Trotteur’s Collection Paprika and published in 1953. Norton was of course a pseudonym, in this case for Jean de Backer, who also wrote as Jacques Norton, Henry Ghils, and others. The title of this translates rather provocatively as “she sways her ass,” which is exactly what the artist seems to have been trying to depict with this femme fatale in sheer lingerie. That artist was Alex Pinon, a favorite of ours. We haven’t really begun to share his work the way we’d like, but we will, and in the meantime, if you click over to our keyholes collection from last July, you can see a few more Pinons there. By the way, “popotin”? That’s one of the funnier words for butt we’ve heard. Not great as a song lyric, but maybe we can work it into conversation sometime. 

Well, after yet another failed New Year’s Eve effort to obliterate ourselves before the calendar turned we find ourselves here in the strange and uncharted territory called 2014. Never thought we’d make it this far, but since we did let’s get back to some pulp with yet another excellent Jacques Thibésart, aka Mik, cover, this one for Ça va être ta fête, aka “It’ll Be Your Birthday.” We really like this piece, especially the foreboding monochromatic landscape into which the beleaguered femme fatale is about to pitched unless she comes up with some groin destroying karate or a fingernail rake to the eyes. Not related to the 1960 French movie thriller of the same name (as far as we know), this was published by Éditions le Trotteure for their series Les Grands Romans Noirs in 1953, and written by Peter Viane, who was a pseudonym used by Pierre Cambon and his wife Viviane Pernet. To see more Mik, click.

Is that Humphrey Bogart? It could be if he’d ever received a makeover. You know, spray-on tan, some blonde highlights. A head-to-toe cure de jouvence, as the French would say. Crack waxing, the whole nine. Not that we know anything about it. Anyway, whether this is Bogart 2.0 or not on the cover (which is uncredited, but very possibly was painted by that slippery devil Jacques Thibésart), we really like it. It’s from Éditions Le Globe and Éditions Le Trotteur for the collection Espions et Agents Secrets. Which is to say it’s a spy novel written by Jak Delay in 1953. After a week, it’s time to move on from France. We will have more French pulp later. 

We’re back to the French pulp today, with R. M. Letenre and his 1953 thriller Carte grise pour vienne, number 18 for Editions le Trotteur’s series Espions et Agents Secrets. We also have his 1954 effort for the horror series Frayeurs, Jennifer filleule du diable. The first book is illustrated by Mik, and the second by Aslan. We found zero information on Letenre, even on the many French websites and blogs we frequent. We'll dig, as always. In the meantime, it seems like a good opportunity to mention that our pulp uploader (in the right sidebar) is working again, so how's about somebody research this Letenre for us and shoot us some data?