Two-Fisted Tales: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (Pocket Books, third printing 1961)

I have mixed feelings about the cover to this late ‘50s/early ‘60s U.S. paperback edition of ‘Red Harvest’. On the one hand, Harry Bennett’s illustration is clearly a great piece of pulp cover artwork, no question. The manner in which it is presented however clearly leaves a lot to be desired. With the painting apparently sliced out by hand and stuck against a decidedly unflattering white and red background, the whole thing is in fact a bit of a disaster area from the design point of view, and doesn’t look terribly appealing.

Furthermore, if you compare the front cover to the tinted detail from the illustration blown up on the back, you’ll get an idea of how brutally Bennett’s art has been squashed down here, and how much detail has been lost in the process of printing it at reduced scale. That great “huh?!” expression on the male figure’s face for instance is totally gone, along with who knows how much else.

(I would also complain that that expression seems entirely out of keeping with the stoic manner in which Hammett’s Continental Op greets the novel’s ever-increasing pile of corpses, but then the scene and characters depicted here by Bennett don’t actually seem to match anything in the book very well at all, so what the hey, right?)

It’s also interesting I think to observe how little Pocket Books chose to play up the fame and importance of this book and its author in their cover copy here. We’re over three decades away from ‘Red Harvest’s initial publication in 1929 at this point, and this edition was in fact printed in the very month of Hammett’s death (January ’61), but there’s still no “..the classic first novel from the celebrated author of ‘The Maltese Falcon’..” type blurb here, and no pull quotes from critics or noteworthy admirers.

Instead, they’ve just stuck a summary of the book’s most lurid and violent moment on the back, bluntly re-worded by an anonymous copy editor - basically treating the storied originator of the hard-boiled idiom in much the same manner as they would some random mug who just sent in an unsolicited manuscript hoping for the best. Which is fine, don’t get me wrong - in fact it’s entirely in keeping with the no nonsense / straight-down-to-business tone of the novel. It’s just… interesting, that’s all.

Could it be, that in the hey-day of more shamelessly populist detective writers like Spillane and Prather, Hammett’s vintage and reputation might have been seen to count against him in the marketplace? As in, perhaps this genre was pointedly NOT being sold to an audience who cared to read an old book that a bunch of fuddy-duddys at the newspapers liked, at this particular point in time?

Be that as it may, it’s fair to say that this hypothetical audience of uncultured brutes would surely not have been disappointed by ‘Red Harvest’, a book which still sparks with barbaric, ill-mannered energy over ninety years after it first hit the streets.

One thing I will say for the presentation of this “perma-book” is that it still remains readable after sixty years and at least one ocean crossing, and having ploughed through it this week, I’m happy to report that ‘Red Harvest’ remains my favourite of Hammett’s novels, half a lifetime since I first gave it a whirl as a teenager.

As violent, action-packed and callously cynical as anything those aforementioned later writers could have come up with, it stands above them not so much through any sense of refinement or literary pretention, but simply because it’s wittier, more stylish, more tightly constructed and more insightful in its unpacking of the ways in which corruption and back-room power games devalue life in America than pretty much any of its author’s subsequent competitors. Essential reading, needless to say.

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For the record, minimal online research reveals that Harry Bennett produced a full set of Hammett covers for Pocket Books in 1961. Most of them fared a lot better than his ‘Red Harvest’ illustration, and the blurb on a few of them at least makes an effort to sell Hammett on his ‘classic’ rep. Other people’s scans can be seen below. 

Unfortunately, I can’t find a decent jpg of his cover for ‘The Glass Key’, but it’s pretty great too. (Apropos of nothing, Bennett also produced an equally nifty set of covers for Chester Himes’ books, which can be enjoyed via Pulp International here.)

Random Paperbacks: The Moonraker Mutiny by Anthony Trew (Fontana, 1973)

Boy, talk about yr ‘tough guy literature’… I found this one at a charity donation stand in the foyer of a branch of Tescos in South West Wales recently, and couldn’t say no. It’s in terrible condition, effectively unreadable – looks as if it’s led a harder life than any paperback deserves (stashed next to the whisky and the chart books on somebody’s yacht, I’d like to think), but… that cover.

I think this one is up there with Three Day Alliance in my Awkwardly Staged Cover Photos Hall of Fame. Just imagine all the trouble they must have had to go to to recruit these two salty sea-dogs (a challenging assignment for the modelling agency), to mock up a background with a convincing porthole, to sort that chap on the right out with his string vest and fake tattoo, to find a prop rifle from somewhere…. at some point I would bet, some harried editorial assistant must have been heard to declare, “..remember the good old days when we’d just hire some nice man to paint a picture and pay him twenty quid?! Jesus wept!”

Soul Pulp: Keller # 1: The Smack Man by Nelson De Mille (Manor Books, 1975)

Bloody hell. As if to demonstrate the scarcity of these ‘blaxploitation pulps’ in my collection, not to mention the frighteningly rabid conservatism prevalent in these ‘70s ‘men’s adventure’ series books, we’re already down to this one for our second (and thus far, final) Soul Pulp post.

Born in 1943, Nelson De Mille began writing series detective books from the mid ‘70s onward and is still writing thrillers at a prolific rate to this day.

Trying to determine exactly how many ‘Keller’ novels he turned out is however complicated by the fact that some if not all of these books seem to have first been published as outings for the author’s on-going character Joe Ryker, and were sometimes credited to his Jack Cannon pseudonym, except when they weren't. For reasons unknown, these Ryker books were then retooled as Keller books, with “Joe Keller” taking over as the protagonist.

From the late ‘80s onward, it seems that De Mille revised and republished all of these books as Ryker novels, and removed all mention of “Keller” from his bibliography, with most online sources following suit. Currently, some ‘Ryker’ books being sold on Amazon even have ‘Keller’ cover art attached to them, so… who knows. I have no idea what was going on with all that, to be honest.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, ‘The Smack Man’ usually seems to be listed as the fourth Ryker book, despite appearing here as the first Keller one.

As to the book itself…. well it seems to be yr standard trudging police procedural business, enlivened largely by frequent and bold use of expletives, detailed drug use and other such tough guy shit, with some rampant misogyny, bone-crunching violence and ugly racial stereotyping thrown in for good measure. As such, there's probably some good, cynical fun to be had here, if you're nasty enough to dig it.

For a pure dose of 1975, just check out this central card ad page and the text that surrounds it. Nice.

Teens on the Rampage! A JD Paperback Special

I recently acquired a stash (well, if three can be said to constitute a ‘stash’) of classic Juvenile Delinquent paperbacks, so, uh, here goes…

The first one I had a bash at is “Savage Delinquents” by Alan Bennett (not that Alan Bennett, I’m assuming), copyrighted 1959, although this awesome looking McFadden Books edition dates from 1968.



I love the moody photo-cover and the font used on the title, and that “GANG GIRL” panel on the back is a stone-cold classic, but despite the enthusiastic seller’s blurb scribbled on the inside cover I’m afraid I found “Savage Delinquents” pretty thin gravy – a by-the-numbers tale of a good girl who goes off the rails cos her parents don’t understand her. A tough guy called ‘Bull’ takes her to ‘the club’, an ahead-of-its-time DIY community space (that’s probably not the idea Mr Bennett intended to convey) in which bad teens give in to their untamed desires, dancing to modern jazz records and indulging in some PG-rated flirting… until midnight that is, when a guy turns up with a box of ‘tea sticks’ to distribute (it’s free until they jack up the price!). Then it’s flashing colours and feelings of ‘ecstasy’ all the way.

This being some strictly “Reefer Madness” style jive, naturally it’s about a week before Lissa is stalking the streets, a wreck of her former self, prepared to sell out her best friend for one sniff of the evil weed.


Stodgy, uninspired prose wrapped around a plot consisting entirely of reheated cliché, I stuck it out for a few more chapters than turned my attention elsewhere. I’m no advocate of teen drug abuse (well, not very often anyway), but the complete failure shown by writers like Bennett to even try to investigate or understand the social, economic or practical realities of drug usage always strikes me as kinda depressing.



Much more enjoyable overall was “The Violent Ones”, edited by Brant House, here presented as a 1958 British edition from Digit Books (the classic cover to the American edition from Ace can be seen here).



“The Violent Ones” is a short story anthology, not that you’d know it from the cover blurb or the lack of any contents page, and actually contains some really killer nuggets of hard-boiled prose from writers like Evan Hunter, Hal Ellson and Murray Wolf, leavened out with a few absolute stinkers from Robert Turner and a rather out of place Robert Silverberg.

The subject matter of the stories is generic and repetitive in the extreme, establishing a formula for the JD story almost as archetypal as that of the western, with the protagonists’ life divided between weak/abusive/misunderstanding parents stuck in the cramped inner city apartment, the ‘good’, trusting girlfriend at the soda foundation, the ‘bad’ kids on the corner, the rival gang from the next block, and so forth.

What they lack in originality though, the best of these stories more than make up for in guts, with Hunter’s “See Him Die” and Wolf’s “Knives in the Street” in particular standing out as tight, violent urban tragedies, vaguely reminiscent of Chester Himes, or of one of my favourites pieces of ‘modern pulp’ writing, Jack Womack’s post-apocalyptic JD update “Random Acts of Senseless Violence”. Highly recommended.

The aforementioned Hal Ellson, author of The Knife, could make a pretty good claim to being the king of JD literature, having seemingly specialised in the genre throughout his career. But by far his best known work is 1952’s “Tomboy”, which had been continuously in print in the UK for twenty years when this 19th printing from Corgi hit the shelves with a new cover design in ’72;


From a distance, this cover could be mistaken for a photo, but it’s actually a painting (uncredited, natch). The early ‘70s date is also given away I think by the exaggerated retro ‘50s font used for the title – a motif that seems to turn up on tons of music/youth culture books through the early/mid ‘70s, perhaps prefiguring the mainstream explosion of baby-boomer teen nostalgia that emerged toward the end of that decade with American Graffiti, Happy Days, Grease et al?


Like previous editions I’m assuming, this “Tomboy” comes complete with an introduction by Dr. Fredric Wertham, the insufferable jackass best known for his 1954 book “The Seduction of the Innocent” and the subsequent moralist witch-hunt that almost destroyed the American comic book industry. Wertham thinks that Ellson’s books bring “truth” to the literature of juvenile delinquency, which we can pretty much take as a guarantee that they do anything but, and indeed, “Tomboy” takes place in a phantasmagorical pulp netherworld that bears very little resemblance to life in 1952, 1972 or any time in between.


Like “The Knife” or his stories in “The Violent Ones”, "Tomboy" is a great bit of vivid, sordid, slightly unhinged pulp, with a style that easily leapfrogs the boilerplate storyline. Any deep social relevance is entirely coincidental as Ellson gives us a rousing tale of a chain-smoking, chain-wielding, sailor’s cap clad “dirty blonde” fifteen year old notably NOT depicted on the above cover, although this US Bantam edition gets a little closer to the action;

Honey Bloodby Glenn Low (Novel Books, 1961)

Movie reviews will be returning shortly, as soon as I get a spare five minutes to finish some of ‘em, but in the meantime - I call another paperback week! At least I’ve got some good ammunition at the moment, beginning with this little beauty.


It always creeps me out a bit when the blurb on smut paperbacks addresses the audience as “you guys” or “you men” etc, taking it for granted that their readership are sub-normal brutes, but this one takes things to a whole other level of creepiness - it sounds like a child-molester hassling to a little boy. And then that freakin’ arrow! Jeez! For the record, “Honey Blood” features no, uh, ‘forbidden world’ content, so I don’t know where they were going with that one.


Good grief.

If not quite the Russ Meyer-meets-Herschell Gordon Lewis fever dream the cover might imply, “Honey Blood” is still pretty rough stuff for 1961, telling a blunt tale of hillbilly thuggery with admirable brevity. Our protagonist is Coker, who has the hots for an assemblage of throbbing body parts named Honey. Honey’s sole personality trait is her love for Junza. Junza is a crazy, murderin’ psychopath who has just escaped from the big house, chained to Coker’s innocent brother Jamie. The above extract clues you in nicely re: where that’s all heading.

Not exactly a story for the ages, but what a cover, huh?

The Knife by Hal Ellson (Lancer Books, 1961)

I'm going to do another 'new pulp scan every day' special this week. All of this week's selections were scored recently from the crime section at Bob's Book Exchange near Liverpool St station - well worth a visit for any London-based paperback fiend.

First up...

I absolutely love the use of the Norman Mailer quote, in which he doesn't seem to be making any reference to the book at all.



"She rolls her head, sticks her tongue in my mouth like mad." Man, you can forget yr "the smell of roasted almonds always reminded me of unrequited love" bullshit - THAT'S some fucking writing!

Actually, from what I've read so far, 'The Knife' is genuinely pretty great - a masterclass in clipped, hardboiled prose with a Sam Fuller-esque b-movie approach to social realism. Here's the opening:

FURY, by Henry Kuttner(Mayflower-Dell, 1966)

Yeah, listen up fatso - this ain’t none of your high falutin’ rocket engine shit – this is a novel of VIOLENCE!



Actually, this book is cobbled together from a 1947 Astounding Science Fiction serial, and seems to be a fairly decent bit of interplanetary heroic fantasy, but I thought Mayflower-Dell’s somewhat unconventional attempt to sell it to the SF audience by accusing them of being pussies deserved to be preserved for the ages.

I don’t know how well it worked out for them, but I don’t recall ever seeing another ‘60s SF paperback packaged like this one; “so you think you got the stomach for it, four-eyes?”