Paperback 247: Terror in the Streets / Howard Whitman (Bantam A964)

Paperback 247: Bantam A964 (1st ptg, 1952)

Title: Terror in the Streets
Author: Howard Whitman
Cover artist: Robert Maguire

Yours for: $10


Best thing about this cover:

• Ah, 1950s paranoia at its finest
• Can't a pretty girl get a haircut at 1 a.m. without being team-stalked by tough guys in olive drab suits anymore? What a world ...
• Guns 'n' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" was based on this book cover
• Maguire would eventually learn his lesson: Put Girl In Foreground!

Best things about this back cover:

• You can tell even from this crowded array of scenes that Maguire is a masterful illustrator. Great faces, action, use of light...
• Love the action in the alley by the garbage cans. Smacked his fedora off with a blackjack. That's about as 50s as 50s violence gets. Fedora still in mid-air. Rich.
• Every quote reads like it's coming out of the mouth of Maude Flanders: "Won't somebody please think of the children!?"

Page 123~

The police are hardly interested in, nor would the average police mentality be capable of understanding, such psycho-dynamics. Police are interested in end-results. When an old homosexual is found dead in his hotel room after picking up a man at a bar, the police just put it down as a "fag murder" and go on from there.

~RP

Paperback 55: The Luciano Story / Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten (Popular Giant G155)

Paperback 55: Popular Giant G155 (1st ptg, 1956)

Title: The Luciano Story
Author: Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten
Cover artist: N/A


Best things about this cover:

• "Ripped from the headlines ... literally! Ripped! Look at the jagged edges!"
• Extra! Extra! Extra!, this cover blows.

Best things about this back cover:

• Now we're talking: "Hi, I'm Lucky. I like booze. And cigarettes. And probably dames."
• "Underworld Overlord" - looks like some copywriter is bucking for a promotion!
• "In breezy journalese..." - I didn't know "journalese" could be "breezy." Does the Buffalo Courier-Express know that "journalese" is characterized by (and I quote) "clichés, sensationalism, and triteness of thought"?
• Speaking of "hack" writing, I dare you to "hack" your way through that first sentence. I mean, just try saying it out loud and see if you have any @#$#-ing idea what the author is trying to say.

RP

Paperback 23: Hillman 18

Paperback 23: Hillman 18 (1st ptg, 1949)

Title: Collusion
Author: Theodore D. Irwin
Cover artist: N/A

Yours for: $12

Best things about this cover:

• Jazz hands!
• "What a scoop!" - that giant flashbulb is hilarious
• That headboard! Where do you get something like that? Versailles? Goes great with the cheap red veloure bedspread and motel-grade bedside table and lamp.
• Her hair! (so tightly coiffed)
• Her eyebrows! (so highly arched / obviously penciled)
• What's the story here? "Woman Found in Bed ... Alone!"

Best things about this back cover:

• "... but divorces are made on earth?" Not where I thought you were going.
• "Night years," cute
• "A sincere plea for more liberal divorce laws" - 'cause nothing says "sincere plea" like a lingerie-laden paperback
• Check out the other authors in the Hillman stable: lots of nobodies with three names ... and Balzac.

RP

Paperback 7 - Pyramid 139

Paperback 7 - Pyramid 139 (1st ptg, 1954)

Title: I Was a House Detective
Author: Dev Collans with Stewart Sterling
Cover artist: photo

Yours for: $9


Best things about this cover:

• "I Was an Armless Psychopath"
• "Why, officer, we were just ... this is my ... he doesn't ... we're not ... say, you're handsome."
• Why is there a giant spotlight - and apparently a smoke machine - in the hotel hallway?
• This looks like a still from a low-budget production of Sartre's "No Exit"

But wait, there's more. The back cover:


Best things about this back cover:

Publisher couldn't afford real art for the back cover, so he cut-and-pasted photos onto a background drawn by a fifth-grader who hadn't yet mastered perspective, or, well, anything else about drawing. I think that lady is trying to open the "door" with some kind of beverage.

The very first page of this book promises that the book will tell you "what happens when":

• ... the "Lizzies" and "Queens" have a ball in the lobby [!?]
• ... a big-business convention brings on the girls - and the girls go wild [whether they show their tits is unclear]

RP