Vintage Pulp Oct 11 2018
In the naked city there are a million reasons to kill and die.

In Dead End two crooked cops end up with a million dollars in dirty money and decide to ditch their jobs and flee the country. But their law enforcement colleagues are after them, so first they hole up in an old Prohibition hideout to let the heat dissipate. How long will they stay in this little room? As long as it takes. The older cop Doc suggests months. The younger cop Bucky is going crazy in days. You know for a certaintly that this partnership isn't going to end well. Lacy is up and down as a writer but this is him on the upswing. Originally published as Be Careful How You Live in 1959, this Pyramid paperback appeared in 1960 with cover art by Ernest Chiriaka. 


Vintage Pulp Oct 10 2018
I love fire escapes. I don't know if they've saved many lives, but they've helped me ruin quite a few.

Above is another cover for Ed Lacy's breakthrough detective thriller Room To Swing, with the hero lurking on a fire escape. They should change the names of those things, considering how often they're used for things other than escaping fires. The art here is by an unknown, and like the previous cover (though we didn't point it out at the time) shows a white detective. Or one that can be taken for white. But the main character Toussaint Marcus Moore is black. In fact he's so dark even his girlfriend gives him a hard time about it. Clearly both publishing companies knew the book would sell fewer copies with an identifiably black cover star. The whitewash is an ironic side note to a book that directly discusses racism, but mid-century book covers, even those having nothing to do with race, often deceived consumers, so this is not an anomaly. Both covers are high quality art pieces. See the other one here


Vintage Pulp Sep 17 2018
A Harlem detective learns the rules of engagement in pre-civil rights America.

Ed Lacy is credited by many as having created the first African American detective, Harlem gumshoe Toussaint Marcus Moore. Room to Swing is the novel in which this uniquely named character debuted. The set-up for the plot is also unique. The producer of an unsolved crimes television show called You—Detective! has located a fugitive she wants to arrest on air. She hires Toussaint to keep an eye on this ratings goldmine and make sure he's still around when she and her film crew are ready to spring their trap. Sounds simple, but in 1958 a black detective following a white man 24/7 will run into problems, considering he can't safely go to all the same places. Hell, he couldn't comfortably go to all the same places even today.

And if being a cop magnet isn't bad enough for Toussaint, having a white woman as a client is even more problematic, since they can barely be seen in public together. This is true even in New York and Ohio, where the action takes place. Although the northern U.S. was not part of the Jim Crow system, outside of large cities apartheid generally reigned. Small town Ohio is no different from Alabama for Toussaint. Even getting lunch or using a pay phone is often difficult. Speaking to a white man without calling him “Sir” generally leads to trouble, and being referred to as “boy” in return is standard practice. All of which raises the question: Why did this deep-pocketed producer hire a black detective at all? She has her reasons.

Room to Swing won Lacy the coveted Edgar Award, though we wouldn't say the book is brilliantly written. But it takes readers into fresh territory for a detective novel, and Toussaint is portrayed humanistically and empathetically. The book exemplifies the idea that it's possible for anybody to write about anybody else, regardless of race. Unfortunately, it wasn't a luxury that was often afforded to any but white writers back then, but it certainly should have been. All sorts of insights might have been possible. Room to Swing has plenty of those, and if you can find this Pyramid paperback edition with Robert Maguire cover art, all the better.


Vintage Pulp Jan 9 2018
Stop playing hard to get! I just want to make sweet love to you!

The Woman Aroused tells the story of a man who allows a confused and mysterious woman to stay with him, then finds he can't get her out of his apartment. He basically can't even get her off his sofa. The woman calls herself Lee, but that isn't her real name. She has no family, no friends, no past. She has a strange accent that hints at origins somewhere in Europe, but conversely she has an American flag tattoo on her forearm.
It emerges that Lee is short for “liebchen,” a nickname from when she was a worker and sex slave in a Polish concentration camp. The tattoo is a cover-up for her Nazi serial number. But even after these discoveries the issue remains how to get rid of her. The narrator is no match for her physically because she's six feet tall and labor hardened, he has limited hope of outsmarting her, and due to complications he can't involve the police. Quite a pickle, and quite an inversion of the usual male-female relationship found in mid-century fiction.
Ed Lacey, aka Ed Lacy, née Leonard Zinberg is not a polished writer, at least not working under this pseudonym, but he certainly dreams up thought provoking tales. This one is just weird enough to sustain interest throughout its short length. The cover on this Avon edition, which gives vivid form to the physical turning of the tables depicted in the narrative, is by famed pin-up artist William Randall, aka Bill Randall, and the copyright is 1951.


Vintage Pulp Nov 24 2017
So much for French chivalry.

This cover for Quatre pas dans la nuit fits right into our collection from earlier this year featuring ruthless men using women as human shields. In fact, it's the same painting by Barye Phillips used on Ben Benson's Broken Shield, which we included in that previous group. Quatre pas dans la nuit appeared in 1958 and is the French edition of the Ed Lacy novel Be Careful How You Live, which is in turn an expansion of his story "Time Wounds All Heels." We talked about Lacy a bit earlier this year, so if you want to know more check here.


Vintage Pulp Oct 18 2017
He fell for her—hook, line, and sinker.

Above is a nice cover for Ed Lacy's Blonde Bait. We talked about Lacy recently—he was a white writer who lived much of his life in Harlem and wrote many black characters. Blonde Bait isn't one of those books. It's about a guy named Mickey who's sailing the Florida Keys on his yacht and comes across a woman stranded on a sand bar. Strangely, she has a suitcase. Her name is Rose, and how she got there, as well as what's in the bag, is what the book is all about. That and whether she's telling the truth about highly connected and dangerous men trying to kill her. Lacy wasn't a master stylist—at least not this time around—but for those who like books with boats, islands, and mysterious femmes fatales, this one will fit the bill. The art on this beautiful 1959 Zenith Books edition is by Rudy Nappi. 


Vintage Pulp Oct 12 2017
Okay, who am I now? I'm you—when you got shitfaced last Friday, couldn't get it up, then barfed and passed out.

The woman on the cover of Ed Lacy's, aka Leonard Zinberg's 1952 novel Sin in Their Blood is supposed to be dead, but we kind of like our alternate interpretation that she's clowning around. Whether dead or joking, though, based on the art you'd never guess the book is about a rightwing organization extorting a black man who's passing as white—thus the sin in his blood—but that's exactly what's at the crux of this tale. Lacy, who was white, dealt with African American issues quite a lot. He's actually credited by some with inventing the first black private eye—Toussaint Marcus Moore. The first Moore novel, 1957's Room To Swing, won an Edgar Award—crime fiction's top honor.

African American subject matter was important to Lacy. From the earliest years of his career he explored racial issues, for instance in 1940's Walk Hard—Talk Loud, which is about a black prizefighter. During the 1950s he was married to a black woman and lived in Harlem, so he was always writing what he observed personally. Harlem is where he blossomed as a writer, where he lived much of his life, and where he died in 1968. Today Lacy is remembered as an important contributor to crime fiction, and we recommend his work. As a side note, the above cover would have fit perfectly into this collection, one of the most interesting groups we've shared over years, we think. And for good measure you can see another in the same style here.


Vintage Pulp Jan 13 2017
If someone knocks, don't answer.



Vintage Pulp Aug 20 2012
Die young and leave a good-looking corpse.

Above, seven excellent if morbid paperback covers showing a favorite pose of pulp artists—the beautiful supine dead woman with (just to make it extra creepy) nice cleavage. It's amazing how similar these covers are. Art is by Maurice Thomas, Rudolph Belarski, Willard Downes, George Geygan, Harry Schaare, and unknowns. 

Update: We were also sent another example in this style by a reader. Check here.


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