Paperback 737: Duke / Hal Ellson (Popular Library 219)

Paperback 737: Popular Library 219 (5th ptg, 1950)

Title: Duke
Author: Hal Ellson
Cover artist: Rudolph Belarski

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

• Her "whatever" face is the best.
• Black Joan Crawford could take you or leave you.
• Shoes! Why does everyone on old paperbacks look so damn cool. Even goofy people look cool. Even Flat-butt No Face here has a certain simple, shabby style I admire. 
• Juvenile delinquency! Dope! Smoking (literally) hot girls who could give a damn! This book has it all.
• The one word I think of when I see Belarski's artwork: creamy. 

Best things about this back cover:

• Love the advisory at the end there! "If you barf easy, or don't, like, care about important stuff, then fuck off already." This book has the same attitude as the lady on the cover.
• Marijuana. I like when books name their drugs. Even though this is a 5th printing, the great condition, the JD (juvenile delinquency) theme, and the drug references make it super-sweet / collectible. 
• "Cash before pleasure"? Come on, you gotta up your slang game if you're gonna run the streets. "Money before honeys"? "Dough before ho"? "Cheddar before girls in tight sweaters"? Something.

Page 123~

"You got any sticks on you?" Chink said.
"Yeah, I got some. You want one."
"I could use it."
I gave Chink one. I passed some around to the others. I lit one for myself. I needed that. We all got to be feeling gay then. 

Aw, yeah … [cue sexy music] …

~RP

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Paperback 300: The Winds of Fear / Hodding Carter (Popular Library 300)

Paperback 300: Popular Library 300 (1st ptg, 1950)

Title: The Winds of Fear
Author: Hodding Carter
Cover artist: Rudolph "Creamy Skin" Belarski

Yours for: $23


Best things about this cover:

• "The Winds of Fear hurt my ears."
• That is the rackiest rack I've seen in a while. Those boobs look oddly fake for 50s boobs. Braless boobs of that magnitude should not do what those are doing, i.e. remaining perfectly taut and nearly perfectly spherical, defying gravity, etc.
• Not enough people are named "Hodding" these days. Damn shame.
• I can't tell if the sheriff is assaulting the poor black man with his heat vision, or if the black man shoots fire out his ears when he gets real angry.
• I usually avoid things that are both angry and probing...
• Complete and utter (and eerie) coincidence that "Paperback 300" is actually numbered 300.

Best things about this back cover:

• "KICKED OPEN," I say.
• "Cancy!" The absurd name train just won't stop runnin'.
• "A scheming honkytonk girl" — now we're talking.
• "Decent people protested ..." Why do I have a feeling I won't find them "decent"?

Page 123~

Colored boys from Carvell City and from near Carvell City were complaining of mistreatment and humiliation, or boasting from overseas of another world where white girls and sort of white girls in England and North Africa looked favorably on soldiers with dark skin.

"Sort of white girls" is a new category to me.

~RP

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Paperback 299: Ward 20 / James Warner Bellah (Popular Library 195)

Paperback 299: Popular Library 195 (1st ptg, 1950)

Title: Ward 20
Author: James Warner Bellah
Cover artist: Rudolph Belarski

Yours for: $16


Best things about this cover:

• "I know my breasts are soft and ripe and possibly delicious but let's just keep your hand right here, mkay?"
• Most pristine Army Hospital ever. Look at that bandage! Those sheets! Her uniform! His pajamas! Immaculate.
• Everyone in a Rudolph Belarski painting always has the smoothest, most luscious, buttery skin. These folks are angelic, bordering on cherubic.

Best things about this back cover:

• Love the way "LOVELY LEGS" springs up tall.
• "Meneilly" joins the growing roster of "Absurd Names from the world of Vintage Paperbacks" — I don't even know if that's a first or last name. I'm praying last.
• Awesome line break near the bottom: "... their need for women — so hard / To fill"; you had me at "hard."

Page 123~

"Let me go now," she whispered.
"You don't want me to."
"You've got to, Joe!"
"Who says so? You don't. You want me to hold onto you until you can't breathe — until you can't think or —"

This was later turned into the very unpopular movie, "What Women Don't Want"

~RP

Bonus material: opening blurb from one A.Q. Maisel of The Saturday Review of Books suggests that "there are many who will gag" when they read this book. Best come-on since, well, "The Macabre Wife Swapping Escapades Will Make You Vomit!.

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Paperback 296: The Dreadful Night / Ben Ames Williams (Popular Library 155)

Paperback 296: Popular Library 155 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: The Dreadful Night
Author: Ben Ames Williams
Cover artist: Rudolph Belarski

Yours for: $16


Best things about this cover:

• "Hello, police, I'm being pursued by ... hello? ... damn, this isn't my phone!"
• Rudolph Belarski: Master of DramaticHands (TM)
• That look is not fear. It is sadistic glee. And the man with the hands is not coming after her. He's about to keel over backwards. See, she has just plucked his heart from his chest with one vicious, kungfu strike. "Ha, take that, you bastard! Hey, I can hear the ocean in this thing..."
• "A Novel of Love, Hate and Death" — yep, that pretty much covers it.
• That's some structured swimwear, that is.
• Why is she at the seashore during a thunderstorm?

Best things about this back cover:

• Text me!
• "Adah Capello!" — no offense to all the ADAHs out there, but come on!
• God, these Popular Library back cover write-ups are dreadful. It's like a 9-yr-old kind of sort of recounting what happens in a book he's just read.

Page 123~

Marco the dog was there [I want to stop the quote right there], swimming this way and that, barking incessantly in a frenzied and pitiful fashion; behind his head a wide ripple spread as he quested to and fro..."

Uh ... "quested?" Is he a knight-dog?

~RP

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Paperback 295: The Three Coffins / John Dickson Carr (Popular Library 174)

Paperback 295: Popular Library 174 (1st ptg, 1949)
Title: The Three Coffins
Author: John Dickson Carr
Cover artist: Rudolph Belarski

Yours for: $20


Best things about this cover:

• "Lady in Peril" week continues with another Lady in Peril — and another Rudolph Belarski cover with serious hand action! Can't decide which hand is better, the blood-soaked one or the ... what the hell is that other hand doing? Signing? Is it clutching something? If she were that horrified, would she really have gotten down on her knees and plunged her hand into the red stuff oozing from under the door? I doubt it.
• This makes me not want to see "Behind the Green Door"
• What is with the NYT syntax? Subject at the end ... no verb ...
• CARR is a common crossword answer. If you solve crosswords, it is good to know who created Dr. Gideon Fell.
• Belarski clearly prefers distressed women in solid, bold colors, and with ultra-expressive, super-plastic hands.

Best things about this back cover:

• More text-only dreck.
• Oooh, a locked room mystery. That should be zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
• This back cover sounds like a "Twilight Zone" plot ad-libbed by someone very drunk or very high. (Happy 50th birthday to "The Twilight Zone," by the way — I live in Rod Serling's home town, so there are "Twilight Zone" city buses driving around town and everything)

Page 123~

"Well, sir, there's blood, for one thing," replied Somers. "And also a very queer sort of rope ..."

~RP

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Paperback 294: Lady in Peril / Ben Ames Williams (Popular Library 164)

Paperback 294: Popular Library 164 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Lady in Peril
Author: Ben Ames Williams
Cover artist: Rudolph Belarski

Yours for: $23

It's "LADY IN PERIL" week at "Pop Sensation" — three early Popular Library covers all featuring ... yes, you guessed it, LADIES IN PERIL. First up, "LADY IN PERIL" —


Best things about this cover:

• "I'll be back in five minutes, I swear!"
• You have to be superhot to pull off wearing that much of that color. This lady (in peril) succeeds. Dress alone = OK, but dress + long gloves = wow.
• This cover rules and Rudolph Belarski was a pulp art genius. Such great lurid action. Just the idea of a lady dressed like this trying to escape out of what appears to be at least a second-story window — that's enough to convince me that peril is for real.
• Hand-on-wrist action right in the dead center of the cover, combined with the vividness of her splayed, aqua hand, really creates a sense of immediacy here.
• Her hair is fancy, her horrified expression believable, her rack exquisite.

Best things about this back cover:

• Inspector Tope, HA ha. That character writes itself. Not enough fall-down-drunk detectives in the crime fiction canon for my tastes.
• The sentence that begins "During..." is so convoluted that it makes me want to shoot myself, others.

Page 123~

And it was only when her back was turned that he realized she wore over her nightgown a negligee of metal cloth, bright as silver. This was Lola Cyr!

When are metal negligees going to make their comeback? I like a lady who's not afraid to wear chain mail to bed.

~RP

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Paperback 292: The Four False Weapons / John Dickson Carr (Popular Library 282)

Paperback 292: Popular Library 282 (1st ptg, 1950)

Title: The Four False Weapons
Author: John Dickson Carr
Cover artist: Uncredited (Bergey? Belarski?)

Yours for: $25


Best things about this cover:

• Another deservedly famous cover. Vivid, sensational, boobtastic.
• If it weren't for the evident violence that has been committed here, I would say her posture suggests an accompanying statement of "Go ahead, take them! Take my breasts! They are all yours, cheri!"
• The tendons on the back of his left hand are doing something awfully scary.
• I love the word "wanton" as a noun.

Best things about this back cover:

• OK, OK, I get it, she was a whore, a strumpet, an easy lay, etc. No need to belabor the obvious. Give the poor dead girl a break.
• Look, Sherloque, *I* could have told you that if you find four different weapons near a body, *at least* three of them are "false."
• The last line here takes the story from contrived to ridiculous.

Page 123~

Mrs. Toller had now an air of complete boredom. You would not have thought the broad-nostrilled nose could have gone so high without absurdity, yet there it was ...

Her high bored nose now provided shelter to several small animals and a family of Hobbits. And yet still, no absurdity. Astonishing.

~RP

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