Paperback 353: Blue City / Kenneth Millar (Ross Macdonald) (Dell 363)

Paperback 353: Dell 363 (1st, 1947)

Title: Blue City
Author: Kenneth Millar
Cover artist: Uncredited (a shame)

Yours for: $23


Best things about this cover:

• I'm not sure there is a cover out there that better expresses the idea of "noir." The grimy fatalism of the urban jungle perfectly expressed by that pollution/hand working all the lowlifes like marionettes. That woman's right boob is freaking me out a little, and the gangster's proportions are all wrong, but all the classic vices are on display, and that hand is going to give me nightmares. The skin on the knuckles, my god ...

Best things about this back cover:

• Mapback!
• Whoever designed that city Really liked right angles.
• Nice detail on the buildings [/sarcasm]
• This book is in a plastic slipcase. I would have taken it out, but I feared I might harm the book in doing so, so parts of the back remain obscured somewhat by the thick plastic strip down the middle. And the ID tag.

Page 123~

"You won't sing," Kerch said, "if what we do to you shuts you up for good. Come along, Floraine. You'll need a coat."

"You'll need a coat" makes me laugh. Cold-blooded hitman worries you might get chilly.

~RP

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Interlude — 2 books I "borrowed" from the BPOE in St. Maries, ID

Come on, how was I *not* supposed to take these?:


Best things about this cover:

• So ... it's about a vengeful virgin? Why not just call it that?
• I'm not sure I'm convinced that Mr. FancyShirt QuaintPinky could make a door explode like that. Seriously, look at his "grip" on that gun. It's like he's drinking tea or something.

Best things about this back cover:

• "Reifel" — from the Dept. of Unimaginative Naming

Best things about this cover:

• When grilling Nick Carter, make sure his massive barrel chest is well basted.
• "Just a second Nick, I'm almost at the next level of 'Missile Command'..."
• That Nick Carter head/logo is the smuggest, douchebaggiest look achievable by a human face.

Best things about this back cover:

• WHEN was it acceptable to break "assassination" between the first and second Ss???

Page 123~

from "Assassination Brigade":

He fired, and the bullet chipped off a piece of pavement about an inch away from me. By then, I had Wilhelmina in my own hand. The man only had the opportunity to snap off one more shot before I had steadied the barrel of my Luger and put a bullet in his belly.

In case you missed that — he named his Luger "Wilhelmina." God save me from ever finding out what that particular relationship is like.

~RP

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57 Books from the University Book Sale: Book 16

Title: The Education of a Poker Player (Cardinal, 1961)
Author: Herbert O. Yardley
Cover artist: N/A

Yours for: SOLD (11/21/09)

• I love this book. Design is impeccable. Vegas/neon-style font = total WIN.
• All poker players should look like this guy. Those douchebags on ESPN2 make me want to stay as far away from the game as possible, but I would sit next to Fred Mertz here.
• "Lusty!?" — not a word I would have associated with this guy, but OK. Good for him.

• OMG it's an interactive quiz cover!
• "One Big Pair" — see "Lusty," front cover.

Page 142 (page 123 is a buncha technical poker stuff) ~

The only kibitzers were Maria, Bing, who spied on foreigners, and a Polish girl who broadcast Chinese propaganda — for what reason I could never understand, but then most foreigners managed to get on the Chinese payroll.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

57 Books from the University Book Sale: Book 7

Title: Death in a White Tie (Fontana Books, 1960)
Author: Ngaio Marsh
Cover artist: John L. Baker (or is that the book owner's signature in the bottom left corner?)

Yours for: make an offer

• New Zealand in the House!
• Uh, that tie is not white.
• Henry was busy entertaining no one with his drunken soft shoe routine when the Rolls Royce came creeping around the corner.
• I contend that there is no way Henry can see that car, despite the fact that he *appears* to be looking at it.
• I would say that Henry looks like he's sliding across a newly waxed floor, but in fact he appears to be levitating.

• Whoa! That is not the author pic I'd use to sell pulp fiction. She looks like she's dreamily recalling the Good Old Days (i.e. the reign of Queen Victoria).
• LOVE the apostrophe-as-abbreviation marker on 'PHONE. Marsh was always so street, always hip to the lingo of kids those days, etc.

Page 123~

"The ball was a great success, I believe."
"Yes. Lady Carrados was born under a star of hospitality. It is always a source of wonderment to me why one ball should be a great success and another offering the same band, caterer and guests an equally great failure."

It is always a source of wonderment to me that anyone ever found aristocrats inherently interesting.

~RP

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Paperback 276: The Hunger and the Hate / H. Vernor Dixon (Gold Medal 454)

Paperback 276: Gold Medal 454 (PBO, 1955)

Title: The Hunger and the Hate
Author: H. Vernor Dixon
Cover artist: James Meese

Yours for: $11


Best things about this cover:

• "I'm hungry." "Well, I hate you." The End.
• His hat is fabulous but his tie looks like something he ripped off an early-80s New Wave keyboard player.
• "The world was his and conquered" has to be one of the most inelegant and awkward opening gambits in mainstream paperback cover copy history. "The world was his ... and then a woman took it all a way" would work. So would "He conquered the world ... but then a woman took it all away." So would "He was a traveling salesman with a hankering for Mexican restaurant waitresses..."

Best things about this back cover:

• Crop. Zoom. Reverse image. Change to B&W. There. Now you can really feel the Hunger. And the Hate.
• Jeez, it's a whole frickin' short story back here. Concision!
• What's his name again? I forgot ... you only said it four times.
• "Hey, ya know what a good place for a paragraph break would be? The middle of a sentence." (see last two "paragraphs")

Page 123~

He thought of Truly and dissected her in his mind and liked little of what he found and wondered why he had been such a damned fool as to accept her invitation.

Strangely, the part of this sentence I hate most is "as to."

~RP

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Paperback 270: Stretch Dawson / W.R. Burnett (Gold Medal 106)

Paperback 270: Gold Medal 106 (PBO, 1950)

Title: Stretch Dawson
Author: W.R. Burnett
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: $16


Best thing about this cover:

• Every year, Tex made a pilgrimage to worship at the altar of the Sexy Lady of the Gun
• That neckerchief is tied so tight about his neck that I'm a little scared for him.
• Silly lady — shotguns are no use against Cowboy Zombies. You gotta burn 'em.
• I'm not a big fan of her hair, but everything else about her looks fabulous.
• Like the blurb says, W.R. Burnett wrote the 1929 gangster classic "Little Caesar" (which was turned into the even more classic 1931 gangster movie of the same name, starring Edward G. Robinson)

Best things about this back cover:

• "Stretch was all man..." We get it, he's hung. I mean, his name is Stretch and you've got a huge phallic gun pointed at his crotch on the front cover. I think you've made your point. Move along.
• "Squeeze it out of her..." Stretch's preferred method of torture had always been the Bear Hug.
• In case you're confused about where this text came from ... Stretch has signed it himself. How handy / weird.

Page 123~

Shame stabbed at Stretch. He felt his face getting red and lowered his eyes so he wouldn't have to meet the Old Man's shrewd gaze. "Sure does," he said, in a husky unnatural voice.

When "unnatural" and "shame" appear in such close proximity to someone's "face getting red" in a vintage paperback, you know something very, very gay is going on.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

P.S. blogger Michael5000 will send you this trashy paperback for free if you agree to read it and write an entertaining review. Act fast if you're interested.

Paperback 267: The Man Who Said No / Walt Grove (Gold Medal 120)

Paperback 267: Gold Medal 120 (PBO, 1950)

Title: The Man Who Said No
Author: Walt Grove
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

• Despite the fact that the man appeared to be happily enjoying a cigarette, Rachel could not find a heartbeat, and so pronounced him dead at 7:45 a.m. EDT.
• "Oh Steve, let's get out of this squalid basement flat and run away together." Steve did not answer "Yes." [actually, he tried to reply "No," but since he was a character in a mystery that was "faster than sound" (!?) the story was over before Rachel ever heard his response]
• I love that her blouse matches the matchbook. All the detail in the lower left corner of the cover is awesome.

Best things about this back cover:

• "There was a warm liquid feeling in his legs" — that's one letter away from saying he was drenched in his own urine. Nice.
• What did he say 'No' to? He clearly never said 'No' to a drink.

Page 123~

"Stand by for the fireworks," McMahan said. "I'm going to go off like a roman candle."

And then there was a warm liquid feeling [o]n her legs...

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 242: Kid Galahad / Francis Wallace (Bantam 133)

Paperback 242: Bantam 133 (1st ptg, 1947)

Title: Kid Galahad
Author: Francis Wallace
Cover artist: Charles Andres

Yours for: $17


Best things about this cover:

• Unlike most Good and Bad Angels, Kid Galahad's Good and Bad Angels chose to reside in his armpits, not on his shoulders.
• Love how heads are crammed into every crevice of the painting. My favorite is the sweaty, neck-wiping Tintin lookalike (under the Kid's right glove, which appears to have been fashioned from the remains of an old football).
• This Kid has apparently been waxed within an inch of his life. "Behold my glistening torso!"

Best things about this back cover:

• LOVE the numbers of the ref's count on the ropes. Dramatic.
• Check out how lame the cover of the Little, Brown edition was!
• Jeez, first line of copy makes this novel sound like a slasher film. Or a tale of surgery.

Page 123~

She looked at him coldly. "Don't flatter yourself. I don't care whether you burn or freeze."

~RP

Paperback 182: The Gay Bandit of the Border / Tom Gill (Popular Library 190)

[Even though I didn't do a proper write-up for this book, I've decided to count it as complete - your insightful comments make it scarily apparent that I'm not as essential to the smooth functioning of this blog as I'd once imagined]

Title: The Gay Bandit of the Border
Author: Tom Gill
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $12

Hey folks - I'm on vacation, working from an unfamiliar computer, and I cannot get Blogger to publish correctly. It's All kinds of screwed up. So ... patience. I'll be back with more as soon as I can. Til then, enjoy this random cover, which I may or may not be able to blog in the near future:

Paperback 181: Guns Roaring West / Peter Field (Pocket Books 6212)

Paperback 181: Pocket Books 6212 (1st ptg, 1963)
Title: Guns Roaring West
Author: Peter Field
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• "Guns Roaring West ... I said 'West' ... 'WEST!' ... aw hell, just leave it."
• That is an arrow, right? Not some malformed cactus or a duck footprint?
• "Powder Valley" sounds like the setting for a saga about babysitting cheerleaders
• This main dude is quite elegant and suave in his erect bearing and mysterious, darkened eyes. His lime green neckerchief with white polka dots kinda undercuts the whole evil vibe.

Best things about this back cover:

• From the looks of that boot, I'd have to say this is a story about the Western fashion industry. I expect some kind of fabulous dance-off at the end.
• "His words rustled dryly in the heavy quiet" - I wish I had audio files of you all uttering "What yuh after here?" in such a fashion. I just can't imagine anyone Making Those Words Rustle Dryly in a Heavy Quiet! I'm trying to do it now, at my desk, and I sound like a combination of Clint Eastwood and pervert on the subway.
• This is like a menu of the writer's choicest phrases - "Let's see ... I'll take the Rattlesnake Blur, with a side of Gun Roaring Hollowly"

Page 123~

Sloan's ordinarily vacuous countenance went wooden.

OK, I am beginning to fall in love with the daring, loopy, teenage prose of your average vintage paperback. I want to set up some kind of story project where I challenge people to write Very Short stories (under 500 words) using sentences culled from these books as the first line. I need to know more about Sloan. Any Sloan.

~RP

Paperback 171: Hell on the Pecos / Ed Earl Repp (Western Novel of the Month 4)

Paperback 171: Western Novel of the Month No. 4 (1st ptg, n.d.)

Title: Hell on the Pecos
Author: Ed Earl Repp
Cover artist: [A. Leslie Ross?]

Yours for: $15


Best things about this cover:

• I love how excited the book is that it's "FULL-LENGTH"
• This early western version of polo never caught on, for some reason
• Impossibly positioned horses engaging in some kind of horse ballet while ruddy-cheeked young men with fancy neckwear fire over yonder.
• What is that cloud under the horse's snout? Is that his breath? Given what the cowboys are wearing, I don't think it's cold enough out to see a horse's breath. Maybe Jim's bullets release a little burst of perfume midair to cover the stench of manure / death.
• Seriously, their cheeks are ruddy. Either they're very ashamed of something or they both insulted the same dame. Or their gigantically-lipped grandmother just kissed them both goodbye.

Back cover, shmack cover. It's the same boring word pattern that all Western Novel Classics have.

Page 123~

"Kelton - Burt Kelton!" panted the old man laboriously. "He come t' the house about a half hour ago! Knocked me out, but I come t' pronto an' sneaked away t' find yuh! That jasper's gone plumb loco, Montany! Yuh better go there!"

Behold the majesty of Western Dialogue! Not surprisingly, this guy is addressing someone named "Montana." Apparently old men in the west were required to change terminal "a"s to "y"s. "That jasper's gone plumb loco!" may take over as the subtitle of this blog some day.

~RP