Pulp International

In all the possible plots for mid-century crime novels it was probably inevitable that an author would eventually make the hero a pulp writer. We don’t know if Day Keene was the first, but he’s the first we’ve run across. Some purists say the pulp era ended before 1951’s My Flesh Is Sweet was published, but main character Ad Connors writes pulps and uses that ...

This promo image stars Key Lenz and is from the 1983 sci-fi film Prisoners of the Lost Universe. That makes it a little late for our femme fatale shots, but we like to switch things up occasionally. Lenz has more than one hundred acting credits, mostly on television, but of her big screen efforts many are right up our alley. We’re thinking the trucker action flic...

When we saw this circa 1980 illustration from a catalogue published by the lingerie company Frederick’s of Hollywood we immediately saw it as a successor to vintage pin-up paintings by artists like Art Frahm,

Legendary Hollywood redhead Rhonda Fleming, known as the Queen of Technicolor because of her hair, graces this edition of K.T. McCall’s Tassut ylös, punatukka! from the Finnish publisher Valpas-Mainos. The star of this book and more than twenty others is New York City investigator Johnny Buchanan, of the Silver Star Insurance Company. It came in 1962, by which ti...

Is it still called a nightie when it’s long? Absolutely—they’re called maxi-nighties, according to our half-assed research. Taking her nightie to the max is U.S. actress and model Vera Day. As you might guess, some of her modeling was racy, as in nude. Her movies include 1957’s Quatermass 2, 1959’s Too Many Crooks, and the awesome 1998 crime movie Lo...