Pulp International

The French crime adventure Popsy Pop, aka The 21 Carat Snatch, has vintage posters made for multiple international markets, but this Japanese tatekan version is the best, we think. It shows star Claudia Cardinale to nice effect, and has a pleasing color scheme. Popsy Pop premiered in France in 1971 and reached Japan today in 1972, where...

Above: menacing art by Robert A. Osborne for John C. Cooper’s The Grip of the Strangler, published in 1958. It was a novelization based on a screenplay by Jan Reed, sometimes Jan Read, for a British movie of the same name, but which was later retitled for U.S. release The Haunted Strangler. It starred Boris Karloff, and he looks just as bad in the movie ...

Revolution is a difficult, dirty deal. You have to live in seclusion, often stuck in dirty encampments in the jungle where entertainment is non-existent and pleasures are few. In the sexploitation flick Frauen im Liebeslager, Wal Davis, the somewhat Crocodile Dundee-looking commander of the Independent Revolutionary Front ensconced somewhere in the endless tracts...

Vanishing Ladies should have a different title, in our opinion. When police detective Philip Colby and his fiancée Ann drive through a hickville hamlet called Sullivan’s Point and stop in a dodgy motel late at night, the title tells us Ann will vanish. And because the title is plural we know she’s just the latest victim of a kidnap ring. It would have worked bett...

Here’s an alternate cover for Jonathan Craig’s So Young, So Wicked, a pretty good hitman novel from 1957 we read a while back. The cover tells you the Leda of the tale is fifteen, but don’t worry—crucial statutory lines aren’t crossed in mass market fiction. The publication year alone tells you that. Even so, many pop authors explored this idea of the teen that’s...