Pulp Fiction for January

Once upon a time on this blog, I used to upload every month an inspiring cover of pulp magazine Detective Tales and comment on it. It is a tradition which I have not followed, but I have decided to do it again today, as January is about to end. So here is the Detective Tales cover for January 1948. And what a great cover it is. A bloody one too, with a murdered man stabbed by a pair of scissors (!) about to have his clothes and gun stolen by his murdered, a thuggish looking escaped convict. This is what we can safely assume from the stripy clothes the villain is wearing. I don't know what the story of this image is, but it looks like a great one. And on a side note, how strong, desperate, committed and downright ruthless you must be to be capable of stabbing someone to death with a pair of scissors?

Pulp cover for #Noirvember

Once upon a time, I used to display a cover from the old pulp magazine Detective Tales and comment on it, as a sort of monthly tradition. I thought this would be something perfect to do for #Noirvember. I decided to go for a stereotypical pulp fiction cover, from the November 1938 edition: a damsel in distress, a hero and a few villains in a dramatic action scene. The setting is what appears to be an exotic temple or palace. The damsel in distress is a blonde, gagged but curiously not tied up. There is a henchman holding her and towering over them what appears to be the leader, all clad in white and sporting a devilish looking goatee. The villains seem to be of Middle Eastern or Asian extraction, and they use old fashioned knives. There are three of them. The hero (private eye?) is already wounded and is fighting the biggest one, a thuggish looking guy with a bloody curved knife. Things are grim for the good guys. I wish I could find the story linked to that image, if there is one.

Pulp violence

I haven't put on this blog a cover of Detective Tales for ages, so decided to do one today.This is the cover for the February 1941 issue. Very similar to the one I uploaded in February 2014, which was the February 1940 cover. It has a slightly sinister streak: a secret door made of bookshelves shows starving prisoners. It was accidentally opened by the hero (a private eye?) who is trying to free the damsel in distress, who is a fiesty brunette. Behind them, the villain is holding a revolver menacingly. With his balding head and his goatee, he is a classical looking villain, a bit like an evil librarian. I just love this picture.

The killer at the window

Remember the time when I used to upload a cover from pulp magazine Detective Tales and comment on it? I used to do it once every month or so. Well, I haven't done it since Fenruary 2014. I thought that I would try to revive the monthly tradition. This cover, from the April 1953 issue, I have actually uploaded before, in April 2008. So it is the first time I reuse an image from Detective Tales, but back then I had not commented on it much (I had written a quick post in the library as the internet had stopped working at home). It is maybe my favourite DT cover ever. It is so simple: one marskman looking at what may be his victim from the darkness of his room. The man in the street  might be a bodyguard of the killer's true victim, a private eye, a man of importance, he might even only be a bystander. The marksman is nothing more than an extension of his weapon which takes center stage. The atmosphere is sinister and ominous. I mentioned before that I always wanted to write a story based on that image. I still do.

With love and bullets! (?)

I did not upload a cover from Detective Tales since November. I was not sure to continue this tradition, but for some reason today I decided to give it a go. It is Valentine's Day, and people might want to read something appropriate for the day. Instead of some soppy romantic stories, how about some crime fiction? Something old with a healthy cocktail of Eros and Thanatos. With love and bullets. So I found this cover, from February 1953 and it has this great title, fitting the day (and hence I used it for my own post title): "With Love and Bullets!" The title is worth the cover. I have no idea if this image is related to the story itself. But it is a neat one: an exotic beauty cornered by two men, one police officer in uniform and another one in civilian clothes. Is she a femme fatale, a damsel in distress? Is she both? Are the policemen corrupted, or doing their duty by cornering her and I guess threatening her (the one in civilian is holding a menacing finger, in a warning gesture). It is deliciously ambiguous.

The Detective Tales cover for November

I have skipped this tradition in October, but I thought I would respect it before the end of November: as I do (almost) every month, it is now time to upload on this blog a cover from Detective Tales and comment on it. This is the cover from the November 1939 issue. If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one is worth a million. Like the one I uploaded in November 2012, it is overly melodramatic, with three archetypal characters: the hero, the villain and the damsel in distress. The damsel in distress is about to be crushed between the wall bed and the wall, tied down to it, the villain, a somewhat thuggish yet soberly elegant looking man with a receding hairline, is being prevented from shooting (who?) by the hero, who is holding his wrist and about to punch him in the stomach. The elaborate method of execution for the blonde damsel in distress, tied down to the bed (Murphy bed, tells me Wikipedia), mixed with the ripped off red dress and the rather deep cleavage charge the scene with sadoerotic elements. Freud would have had a field day with this. I have to say, I am impressed. This is really edgy, in so many ways. I wonder if there is any plot going with it, or if this is just the artist's imagination responsible for this cover. If there is a story this image is based on, I want to read it.

The Detective Tales cover for September

The month is almost over, and I had not yet uploaded a cover from Detective Tales. It is time to follow the tradition again. So here it is. The cover from September 1937. I am wondering about its story, because there is something ambiguous about it, or one of its character. Most of them are easy to identify: the blonde heroin, the square jawed hero at the center. In periphery, two thugs: one holding a butcher's knife, in butcher's clothes looking every bit the brute he is, guarding the exit the heroes are trying to get through, and one further away, being gunned by the hero. But it is the figure that the blonde is holding that makes me wonder. The tall, thin, ageing man with white hair. He has been hit on the head and is unconscious. But was he kidnapped by the thugs and the heroes are rescuing him, or is he a villain that the heroes are kidnapping? The tuxedo is often the suit of choice for criminal masterminds in pulp fiction, always more elegant than their minions. Yet he could be an innocent victim. So tell me what you think.

The Detective Tales cover for August

Well, August is almost over, and I thought it was time for me to carry on the tradition of downloading a cover from Detective Tales and commenting on it. This one is from August 1939. You see the hero, dashing in his evening suit, very elegant, and his blonde, red wearing partner, trying to save a damsel in distress from being buried in coal. The villain, a massive, thuggish looking bald goon, is about to club the blonde with a wrench. So you have two damsels in distress for one cover, although only one may be aware of her status. But with her haggard gaze, I think she may have been drugged, or is in shock. In a classic pose, the hero is shooting at an unknown party out of the frame. I love this cover because the rough environment and the look of enemy is in sharp contrast with the elegance of both the hero and the heroine. So here it is anyway.

The Detective Tales cover for July

This is again the time when I upload an image from a cover of Detective Tales and comment on it. As I mentioned last year and before, finding a good cover for July is getting increasingly difficult, because I already used many. So I chose the ultimate cliffhanger: the cover for July 1944. The heroine is in a very uneasy position, hanging in the air, held by a single hand (her private eye love interest?) while she is taking hold of a purse, the MacGuffin of the story. And there is a hoodlum who saw everything, on the right side of the window, lurching at it with a gun. How she got there must be quite a story. And from (I am assuming) such height, in such a light dress, she must be quite cold. But I guess it is to her a secondary aspect of her predicament.

The Detective Tales cover for June

This is again this time of the month when I upload a cover from Detective Tales and comment on it. I have chosen an odd one this time, from June 1936. I say odd one because it has a villain literally leashing out of a bookshelf, while the damsel in distress jumps away from him. The hero is gunning away at an unknown adversary, a common trope in pulp magazines, at least in Detective Tales. His shirt is teared apart on his left arm. What strikes me about the this cover is of course the mustachioed villain showing up like a jack-in-the-box from a hidden door/secret passage. Not so much how he looks like, he looks like a a stereotypical elegant villain, or what he is trying to do, grabbing the heroine (does he want to hold her to death?), but where he comes from, or rather what camouflaged the secret door. A bookshelf. Maybe I am reading too much into it, but I find it a nice little mise en abyme, evil jumping off the books.

The Detective Tales cover for May

This is time again in the month when I upload and comment a cover from Detective Tales. I might try to find other pulp magazines to do the same thing at some point, because the choice from some months is starting to run thin. I hesitated to upload this one because, well, it is racist, like unfortunately many pulp stories were back then. It is the cover from May 1939. All prejudice against China aside, it is quite a good cover, ridiculously dramatic. So you have both the squared jaw hero and the heroin, a damsel in distress, in a very tight spot. The hero, maybe a private eye, is shooting at an unseen enemy off frame, holding with his free hand his bloodied upper arm, while the blonde is being held by... the mechanical arm of a metallic Buddha.And she is crying on top of her lungs for his attention, as a Fu Manchu looking Chinese (he is probably Chinese, although I guess he could of any Asian denomination) is about to strike him with a hatchet. The villain is bald and has long thin mustaches. And he is emerging from a secret passage or a tunnel, or some arched alcove. What more can I say? I don't think the story can be nearly as good as the cover.

The Detective Tales cover for April

I thought I would carry on today the tradition of uploading a cover of a Detective Tales. It is getting more and more difficult for April, because back in April 2008, I uploaded a few of them. This time, I have chosen a far more sober cover than usual. Nevertheless, it is very suspenseful. It it from April 1951. You have the hero, most likely a private eye, at night, rummaging through papers with a flashlight, on what appears to be a dark and stormy night (I don't mind clichés in pulp magazines), while a hand holding a gun. Simple, efficient, dark and, as I said, very suspenseful. On the bottom right side you see the title The Deadliest Game. I don't know if the image is for this story, but it is certainly fitting.

The Detective Tales cover for March

Now the time has come to upload again on Vraie Fiction a cover from Detective Tales. This time from March 1943. The selection is getting more and more difficult, both in 2012 and 2013 I took very melodramatic covers, with the frame completely filled with characters and full of action. This cover could almost belong to the whodunit genre as well as the hardboiled one. You have the investigator/hero, a squared jaw atheltic man, holding a... magnifying glass, the tool of sleuths from detection fiction, holding a piece of cloth that is being clutched by a dead man's hand (a hand turning to green for sinister effects, I might add). The piece of red cloth belong to the sleeve of a woman's dress, who is now, of course, holding a gun by the hero's head. I wonder how the hero will get out of this situation, with a magnifying glass as his apparent sole weapon. I am dying to read this tale, like many other from this pulp magazine.

The Detective Tales cover for February

The month is almost over already (being the shortest month of the year and all) and I have not until now uploaded a cover of Detective Tales. So it is time to carry on this blogging tradition, with the cover from February 1940. Absolutely brilliant cover, full of very strong images, especially from that time. A hero, private eye (?), is trying to untie the damsel in distress du jour... She is wearing the red dress very common for damsels in distress and is tied upside down to a butcher's cooler door. With two badguys/butchers on each side of the door, one peeking through meat carcasses, the other one lying on the door, both pointing guns at the hero. Eros and Thanatos in all their glory. No pun intended, but this is a very raw image, one wonder if those butchers are not a bit serial killers, maybe more than mobsters. In any case, what a cover!

The Detective Tales cover for January

Tonight is the time to follow the tradition to upload on Vraie Fiction a cover from Detective Tales and comment on it. I skipped December because I had plenty of other subjects to blog about. Maybe I should end this tradition, as it generally gathers little interest from my readership (it very rarely gets commented anyway), but I love judging a book, or in this instance a magazine, by its cover and it is always fun to look at pulp art. This one is from January 1936. Quite a nice image, with an economy of details and characters and plenty of action. The setting is the roof of a building. The damsel in distress is in the center of the frame, looking worryingly at the back as a thug holding a sharp knife is climbing a ladder, while the squared jaw hero (private eye?) is holding a gun and looking carefully for potential enemies, oblivious to the clear and present danger behind him. I love the way the blonde is about to grab his arm to warn him. And I wonder how she managed to get up over the roof with such tight dress. So there you have it, a classic pulp magazine cover.

A femme fatale

This is this time again for my monthly tradition, when I upload a cover from the pulp magazine Detective Tales. This time, it is the cover from November 1949. I usually title the post: The Detective Cover for (insert month here), but this time I simply titled it after the character on the cover. You see a femme fatale delicately pouring explosive in a lighter. She is blonde, her face which takes most of the space on the center of the is angelic, yet she is pouring bleeding nitroglycerin in a lighter. Bombing is a brutal way of killing, her method of assassination is both subdued and nasty. And she has red gloves, which makes it all the more sinister. Once I saw it, the cover was so easy to choose. I find femmes fatales fascinating villains (villainesses?), but they are difficult to do right. I don't know how this story went, obviously, if the character was well written or not, but this is a magnificent portrait of a femme fatale in action.

The Detective Tales cover for October

This is the time of the traditional upload of a cover from Detective Tales magazine. As it is October and Halloween is coming, I wanted something that would look as much as something from a horror story as crime fiction. Sometimes the genres were mixed and there were elements of adventures. It was going to be difficult to do as well as last year. Have a thorough research, I found the cover from October 1937, which seems to fit. You see the hero and the beautiful heroine going against what appears to be an evil cultist. There are skulls in the background. There are two villains: one henchman holding a bone as a club, the other one in a green robe and green mask, shooting at the hero. Maybe there is no supernatural in the story, yet the villain is more than your usual mobster or megalomaniac.

The Detective Tales cover for September

Today is a good occasion as any to observe this blogging tradition (a tradition of this blog, I mean) of uploading a cover from Detective Tales and comment on it. September is a tricky month, because my mind is all on horror stories and I think very little about crime fiction, so I am less inspired watching these covers. Last year I had chosen a cover with some elements you could find in horror stories, even though there was no supernatural element in it. I did something similar in 2008, uploading a cover with strong sadistic elements. So this year I looked thoroughly, pondered a lot about what would look good on Vraie Fiction, then chose the cover from September 1938. It is a crime fiction adventure cover, but it does have the nod to other genres: the simian hunchback and the secret passage, right by a fireplace.

So let's have a good look at the cover. When I saw it, it reminded me of the Clue/Cluedo mansion, which I wrote a post about this year. In a way, the setting belongs more to a whodunit than hardboiled crime fiction. I say whodunit, I should add a lazy one, because as Ronald Fox said in his ten Commandments of Detective Fiction, shouldn't rely on secret passages, not more than one anyway. It is true that it may be the only one. The old mansion, or the luxurious house is a setting of whodunits, in any case. I don't know what Fox thought of hunchbacks. That said, this is not a whodunit story, for obvious reasons: the hero is not an eccentric detective, but an action man, athletic and probably a private eye, even though he is very well dressed and firing away at an adversary out of the frame. The living room is not a place where the detective will reveal the identity of the murderer in front of all the suspects: it is a place of violent confrontation and danger, the fire still burning very near the escape route, blocked by a nasty antagonist. The two ladies in the back are both damsels in distress, one because she is unconscious, the other because she does not see the beastly henchman holding a knife. He could easily belong to a Gothic horror story. But in any case, it is an exciting piece of work.

The Detective Tales cover for August

So again, this is the time of the month when I upload on Vraie Fiction a cover of Detective Tales, because I love good old pulp fiction imagery. Incidentally, I uploaded the one of August 2012 on the very same day. This cover is from the August 1945 issue. It is deliciously sinister, with an image that could belong just as much to gothic horror than crime fiction. You have no detective or male protagonist, but a heroine. The damsel in distress is discovering blood dripping from the sealing, so we know a murder was committed in the upstairs (attic?) room. If there was any doubt, you see in the background a shadowy figure, a cloaked man holding a bloody knife, going down a scale. An evil, ghostly presence. The murderer has seen her, but she has not seen him. Further in the background, you see that it is a dark and stormy night. What can I say? It is a great cover.

The Detective Tales cover for July

The time has come again when I upload a cover from the pulp magazine  Detective Tales and comment on it. I say the time has come again, but I don't have a specific time or date in the month when I do it, I only do it once a month, when convenient, when I feel inspired to do it or when I am not inspired to blog about anything else. As I mentioned in July 2012, finding a July cover is tricky, because so many of them have racist undertones, especially against Chinese. What's with July and China in pulp magazines?

This cover is from July 1942. Surely enough, there are Buddhas' statues on the picture, so the unknown villain(s) the hero is shooting could be Chinese. Or Japanese, as the issue was published during WWII, after Pearl Harbor. So you have one broken statuette inside which precious stones, probably rubies, were hidden, and the heroine carefully putting them on a cloth, while the hero (private eye? I always think the male protagonists are, unless otherwise stated) is gunning away in a classic stand. I wonder if they are not a recurring couple, as they do look like other couples we have seen before on other covers (here for instance). Anyway, precious stones and works of art are common MacGuffins in pulp literature and hardboiled crime fiction, so I thought it was interesting that it was featured on this cover instead of the villain.