vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Oh, the inanity! “Eve knew she would be taking more than dictation.” It seems like an obvious direction to go for a cover tagline, but nobody ever said the editorial staff at Midwood Books were always clever. And no wonder. They put together thousands of paperbacks—literally—in eleven short years. The well tends to run dry. Resort Secretary by Arnold English came in 1962 with art by Jack Faragasso, which he signed “Giac.”
It’s been a long while since we’ve visited with Yuki Kazamatsuri. Onna kyôshi: Yogoreta hôkago, known in English as Female Teacher: Dirty Afternoon, the fourth entry in the Female Teacher series, is a pretty basic roman porno movie, with Kazamatsuri playing a teacher with a difficult past called upon to help highly sexed, extremely beautiful, and emotionally problematic student Ayako Ôta get back onto the straight and narrow. All good, but when Kazamatsuri begins to suspect that Ôta’s itinerant father is a rapist from her own past, things get weird. With Kazamatsuri’s kinky problems she probably isn’t the person to offer a stable example to Ôta, but that’s kind of the point here. Let she who does not have degrading sex throw the first stone. We can’t say Onna kyôshi: Yogoreta hôkago is good, but its stars certainly are. It premiered in Japan today in 1981.
We haven’t read Curt Carroll’s 1952 western The Golden Herd and have no plans to, but this scene on the cover is irresistible for comment. It’s obviously a duel, and we’re going to guess that if one of the combatants unclenches his teeth and just stabs the shit out of the other he’ll have lost the fight, and his honor. Guess we aren’t terribly honorable—we’d unclench and start stabbing d-block style, as fast as we could, everywhere we could. But maybe afterward a bunch of outraged cowpokes would break out a noose. Maybe that’s what happened to this guy. Well, then we’d not fight and be shunned. Shunning we can handle. We’re a little shunned now anyway.
This idea may have originated in Max Kruger’s 1930 autobiography Pioneer Life in Texas, in which he says men were tied together by their left wrists. We’re not sure there are any corroborating accounts, but it’s certainly possible, since the realm of stupid shit men did is a virtual bottomless pit. We presume Carroll wanted to make the idea even more macho for his novel, except in the realm of stupid shit men did, this seems impossible. We feel like these guys’ half-rotten frontier teeth would be snatched out mere instants into this ill-considered duel. What we like, though, is the thought that the man more diligent about oral care had an advantage. Brush often. The art here is by George Mayers.
This uncredited art of a woman wearing only a fur fronts Sax Rohmer’s exotic adventure Nude in Mink, also known as The Sins of Sumuru. Rohmer created the character of Sumuru for a BBC radio serial that ran in 1945 and 1946, after having already turned the occult-tinged pulp villain Fu Manchu into an international brand. He redeveloped Sumuru from radio into novel form, and the above result came in 1950, treating readers to the dark tale of a mysterious woman with mystical powers heading a secret organization called the Order of Our Lady. The core goal of this order is to institute matriarchal global rule and do away with war and deprivation, which are the result of men screwing up the world for millennia. And she’s the villain. Can you believe that? We were incredulous.
Anyway, since women are able to easily manipulate men and advance the Order’s aims, Sumuru utilizes great beauties exclusively, including herself—because sometimes you have to send in the first team. Nude in Mink opens with main character Mark Donovan meeting and being smitten with the lovely Claudette Duquesne, who shows up at his London flat one night dressed as in the cover art. She’s being pursued by the Order, who plan to indoctrinate her. When she disappears Donovan investigates and quickly uncovers traces of Sumuru. He teams up with his secret agent pal Steel Maitland and soon they’re trying to thwart a plot to remove, “as by the surgeon’s knife,” specific men of power, or anyone who may pose a threat to the future matriarchy. Sumuru’s main tool, aside from boner-inducing hotties, is rigor Kubus, a sort of infection that induces total and fatal rigidity. The medusan aspect of it is clear.
Nude in Mink is fine. In order to be better than fine—to be excellent—it would need to have been published twenty years earlier, which is to say Rohmer is behind the times in approach and style. The narrative mainly comprises set-piece conversations that make for broken flow, and truncated bursts of action that aren’t put across visually as well as they should be, considering the kinetic advancements in fiction that had taken place since his first book in 1913. However he’s one of the kings of atmosphere, and he makes London dark, mysterious, and laden with uncertainty. The book was a smash hit, which is why there were several sequels. While we don’t fully endorse it, we think it’s worth reading, and because of the “villain” Sumuru we may graduate to installment two if we can locate it for cheap.
Today we have an issue of the French Canadian tabloid Le Rendez-Vous published today in 1969 with cover star Rosa Dolmai, who’s also known as Rosa Domaille, but is probably most famous as Eve Eden. Under all three names she carved out a career as a glamour model, appearing in scores of publications ranging from Folies de Paris et de Hollywood to Gala. Occasionally she posed explicitly, which positions her well ahead of most of her peers in that regard. She also made at least one nudie loop, and branched out and landed small parts in twenty-seven films from 1961 to 1968. She’s been featured here on Pulp Intl. several times, including in the adventure magazine Adam and the tabloid Minuit, and last spring memorably appeared—branching out again, in a way—as a blonde up a tree. You can see that here.
There’s interesting material beyond the Dolmai cover. If you read French there’s good gossip under the bowler hat logo in “Pour hommes seulment.” Then the editors do it again under the header “Panora-Monde,” because one good round of gossip deserves another. Meanwhile, Frenchwoman Theresa St. John declares that sex is her religion, and to make the point crystal clear Le Rendez-Vous presents her with nuns in the background. It’s not as weird as it seems—vintage cinema has taught us that nuns are the horniest species of penguin. Musician and actress Rina Berti, who released one album and appeared in the 1974 sex comedy C’est jeune et ça sait tout!, puts in an appearance, nude behind a guitar. And the beautiful Christiane Schmidtmer, who we’ve featured in Le Rendez-Vous‘ sister publication Midnight and who appeared in the women-in-prison movie The Big Doll House, gets the centerspread.
Le Rendez-Vous also leans heavily into gore. Who knew Canada could be so violent? Maybe it really should be part of the United States. Then a closer reading reveals that in order to fill its blood quotient, Le Rendez-Vous features mostly crimes from other countries. There’s a two page spread, “de la vie l’americaine”—American life. Elsewhere an Indiana man shotguns his wife, and in Boston a fifteen-year-old boy cuts off his fingers and mails them to his girlfriend. The Brits get a spotlight dance too, as a woman is raped and killed on a London street. So in the end there’s not enough violence in Canada to fill an issue of one of its leading tabloids. It can’t join the U.S. after all.
Above: the lovely Meg Flower enjoys a watery frolic in a photo made for the Japanese culture magazine Heibon Punch in 1971. She starred in many movies and even more promo shots during her career. She’s a photographer’s dream. Click her keywords below to see proof.
This is nice cover work for Nick Quarry’s 1960 crime caper Till It Hurts. It was painted by Barye Phillips, and clues in readers that there’s a show business backdrop to the tale. It’s not Hollywood, though—it’s New York City’s television industry, with a double dip into the jazz music scene. The story follows private eye Jake Barrow as he wanders into an alley where a man is being brutally beaten by three organized crime thugs. It turns out the victim is a private eye too, and he was being warned off a case. He takes the message to heart, and basically leaves his client in Barrow’s lap.
The client is Loretta Smith, who wants to prove that her musician husband was framed for murder, then in turn murdered by cops to cover up the frame. Despite the professional beating he witnessed, Barrow gets talked into the case and immediately focuses his attention on one cop in particular who lives in implausible luxury on a yacht. It’s a dangerous gambit to try to prove a cop is a killer, and those perils quickly mount to untenable levels. Barrow has a little help though—his pal and sometime lover is an undercover cop named Sandy, who’s separately investigatng drug connections in the Manhattan jazz scene. Maybe there’s a link between her case and Barrow’s.
This was a good book. It moves fast and has a nice cast of characters, including a now-grown child actress Barrow was in love with when he was a kid. It becomes clear early that the bad cop angle isn’t a red herring, but that’s fine. The yacht-ensconced villain is so mean and deadly that no subterfuge is needed to keep reader interest, as strategic maneuvering between opposite sides and bursts of action lead up to a kinetic climax. We learned that Till It Hurts is entry four in a Jake Barrow series, so we’ve got the first book winging its way here via international mail. But this one stood alone just fine.
You see here the front and rear covers for House of Evil, a thriller published in 1954 and written by the wife/husband team of Clayre and Michel Lipman (you’ll see them as Clayre and Michael on some sites, but that’s an incorrect spelling of his name). It’s a crime novel, but horror-adjacent as the plot develops. Basically, it deals with an everyman named Roman Laird who gets tangled up in a macabre mystery when he walks into a murder scene in his girlfriend’s San Francisco apartment. His girlfriend is out of town, so the initial elements of the puzzle are: why kill in her apartment, and did the killer get who he was really after?
When the body seems to vanish, only to reappear, the puzzle deepens. As Laird begins to feel observed and the killer goes after another woman, answers continue to be in short supply. The few uncertain eyewitnesses are unhelpful with identification. Later Laird and the police uncover a set of oil paintings depicting terrors such as women hung upside down on hooks and strange beasts assaulting terrified victims. The Lipmans don’t make direct comparisons to existing artists, so the choice of what the art looks like is up to the reader’s imagination. People often go to Bosch or Goya when it comes to dark art, but we decided the paintings probably looked like those of Francis Bacon. In any case, the riddle in the story is what they might mean.
House of Evil is bold, and it’s well written and interesting, however because iterations of the book’s central gimmick have appeared quite a bit since 1954 (click only if you want to find out about a book—and movie—with an identical twist), you may guess what’s happening a few chapters in. That’s no fault of the Lipmans, but it means for modern readers that the mystery may not scintillate, the ending may feel too drawn out, and the final shocker may not hold sufficient impact. But even so, it’s a deft, dark, deeply psychological, outside-the-box thriller. We had to appreciate it.
Above: a classic in the lesbian sleaze genre, 1964’s Tutor from Lesbos, by A. P. Williams. If you want a copy of this it’ll run you upwards of two-hundred dollars, which we can tell you is a lot for a book that’s almost guaranteed to be bad. We’ve never paid more than thirty dollars for a paperback, and then only a rare few times. At that maximum price, we might never be able to buy Tutor from Lesbos, but we can certainly buy something almost identical. That’s the real lesson learned.
Jean Moorhead makes a fourth appearance as a femme fatale on our website in this image from 1956, which, like the previous one we shared, was made for The Violent Years. We really must watch that movie. Click Moorhead’s keywords to see everything we’ve done on her.
The International Opium Convention is signed at The Hague, Netherlands, and is the first international drug control treaty. The agreement was signed by Germany, the U.S., China, France, the UK, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Persia, Portugal, Russia, and Siam.
U.S. president Harry S. Truman establishes the Central Intelligence Group or CIG, an interim authority that lasts until the Central Intelligence Agency is established in September of 1947.
The New York City “Mad Bomber,” a man named George P. Metesky, is arrested in Waterbury, Connecticut and charged with planting more than 30 bombs. Metesky was angry about events surrounding a workplace injury suffered years earlier. Of the thirty-three known bombs he planted, twenty-two exploded, injuring fifteen people. He was apprehended based on an early use of offender profiling and because of clues given in letters he wrote to a newspaper. At trial he was found legally insane and committed to a state mental hospital.
American lawyer Alger Hiss is convicted of perjury in connection with an investigation by the House unAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), at which he was questioned about being a Soviet spy. Hiss served forty-four months in prison. Hiss maintained his innocence and fought his perjury conviction until his death in 1996 at age 92.
U.S. President Jimmy Carter pardons nearly all of the country’s Vietnam War draft evaders, many of whom had emigrated to Canada. He had made the pardon pledge during his election campaign, and he fulfilled his promise the day after he took office.
