Soul Pulp: Shaft Among The Jews by Ernest Tidyman (Corgi, 1972)

Adding to my small collection of blaxploitation paperbacks, we have what I believe is the second of seven Shaft novels written by the character’s creator Ernest Tidyman, and… yes, the title here’s a little on the nose, to say the least.

As anyone who has read much about mid-century New York will appreciate, the city’s working class Jewish community was still just as much of a marginalised, ghetto-bound culture as NY’s African-American milieu at this point, and underworld interactions between the two were generally characterised by a spirit of resentment and distrust, so… I don’t think the title and plot synopsis here indicate that Tidyman’s novel is inherently racist, but when it comes to a WASP writer addressing this kind of subject matter, the title is at best misguided, and it’s a safe bet that 21st century readers who dare venture between these pages are liable to encounter some pretty, uh, ‘salty’ content.

Believe it or not though, I didn’t just pick up ‘Shaft Among the Jews’ just in order to shock people by leaving it sitting on the coffee table – that symmetrical, proto-disco montage cover painting – attributed online to Fred Pfeiffer - is absolutely swell.

Oh, and I think we get a glimpse of Tidyman’s sense of humour via his dedication:

Psychedelic Sci-Fi round-up: New Writings in SF # 18 edited by John Carnell(Corgi, 1971)

Whilst the sublimely trippy (unaccredited) artwork on this anthology is more than worthy of a place in my Psychedelic Sci-Fi Hall of Fame, I’m afraid I must confess that it initially jumped out at me simply due to the fact that the cover painting (well, the nudie floating-in-space lady and the weird tangle of machinery at least – looks like they nixed the dreaming old geezer head) was appropriated by perpetually charming stoner metal band Monster Magnet for the cover of their 1995 album ‘Dopes To Infinity’ – the second release of the band's increasingly ludicrous major label tenure, and one that I have fond memories of playing incessantly through my late teenage “I want to be psychedelic and take drugs, but I haven’t got any” phase.

Actually, comparing the two more closely, it looks as if Monster Magnet’s cover designers have reworked the weird machinery a bit, and in fact the stars around the lady and the details of her hair are slightly different too, suggesting that the band’s artist (I can’t find a credit online, so s/he will have to remain anonymous for the moment too) has repainted the image in its entirety, using the paperback as a close reference. Curious.

Well, whatever. Dave Wyndorf and A&M Records owe some dough if you’re reading, mysterious SF-18 cover artist dude!

(If you’re thus inclined, I believe this album still kind of rules, by the way.)

The Nature of the Catastrophe: A British Apocalypse Cover Art Gallery.

Watching Hammer’s version of ‘Quatermass & The Pit’ recently, I was struck by a brief exchange between Andrew Keir’s Professor Quatermass and James Donald’s Dr. Roney as they brain-storm the likely origins and the excavated Martian remains.

“The will to survive is an odd phenomenon”, says Quatermass. “If we found out our own world was doomed, say by climatic changes, what would we do about it?”

“Nothing, probably”, replies Roney, “just go on squabbling like usual”.

As the 1967 movie swiftly moves on to other matters, 2016 viewers are left with a momentary chill (and yet more evidence of scriptwriter Nigel Kneale’s uncanny talent for holding a beam on the future, even when he wasn’t trying to).

Spending Christmas and New Years in Wales a few months ago, the temperature was anything up to 8 – 10 degrees higher than normal for the time of year, as rain poured down relentlessly for almost the entire duration of our stay. Watching the evening news, seeing various areas of the UK devastated by floods for the second year in a row, I couldn’t help reflecting that we probably have one of the more placid and non-disaster-prone climates of any nation on Earth, and wondering how many ‘freak’ meteorological upsets were simultaneously going unreported in other parts of the globe.

The second story each evening meanwhile brought grim footage of the proxy forces of assorted Western and Eastern powers scrabbling for control of empty, blood-stained piles of rubble in whatever remains of Syria, the juxtaposition making as clear a realisation of Kneale’s casual, fifty year old predication as could be wished for.

A few months later, watching the public’s largely disengaged response to the sight of the French authorities torching and tear-gassing the makeshift city constructed by refugees from war just across the channel, I was reminded not only of Christopher Priest’s bleak 1972 novel ‘Fugue For a Darkening Island’ (a book that trumps the “this might happen” scenarios of Priest’s fellow doom-mongering SF writers by depicting a series of events so grimly inevitable it’s a miracle it hasn’t taken place already), but of the obligatory shrugging-off-the-warning-signs / “it’ll never happen here” segment that tends open most stories in the good ol’ British End of the World tradition.

(This is most bluntly and grotesquely realised by the scene early in Cornel Wilde’s film adaptation of John Christopher’s ‘The Death of Grass’ [‘No Blade of Grass’, 1970], which sees attendees at a buffet lunch stuffing their plates with food as the TV in the corner of the room carries news of the Chinese government’s desperate decision to begin dropping atom bombs on their largest cities in a last ditch effort to curb the effects of mass starvation.)

Of course, you shouldn’t necessarily pay too much attention to my doom-mongering. I’m particularly prone to such alarmist trains of thought, having been unhealthily fixated by this peculiarly British strain of '60s & '70s apocalyptic sci-fi ever since I was in primary school. John Christopher’s ‘Tripods’ series were amongst the last “children’s” books I read, and, following my Dad’s sound recommendations from there, John Wyndham’s classics were amongst the first “grown up” tales I subsequently made a start on.

After that, I spent the rest of my formative years consuming any story I could find that concerning “the end of the world” and, whether by means of wind, floods, drought, plague, famine, alien invasion, over-population, under-population, nuclear fallout, air pollution or god knows what else, my nation’s authors and paperback publishers were with me every step of the way.

With this in mind then, I’ll leave you to peruse the collection of scans below and decide for yourself the extent to which these storied literary gents of the mid-twentieth century might have been on to something.

Meanwhile, I could claim I was busy this weekend scoping out that easily defendable farmhouse with it’s own water supply and potato field, wondering who I should invite to share the landrover with me as we flee the city before the roadblocks go up. But, for better or for worse, such survivalist fantasies must remain just that in my case. As a Type 1 diabetic, I know I’d be dead within six weeks if the NHS stopped dishing out regular prescriptions of injectible human insulin. So, um..

Happy Easter everyone!

(Please note that a few of these scans have previously appeared on this blog in the past, but it’s always nice to see them again I hope. Also, the ‘Fugue For a Darkening Island’ scan above is not mine – I seem to have lost my copy, so I found this one online.)

(Penguin, 1963 / cover illustration by John Griffiths)

CATASTROPHE: famine.

(Corgi, 1961 / cover artist unknown)

CATASTROPHE: heat / alien terraforming.

(Penguin, 1963 / cover illustration by Denis Piper)

CATASTROPHE: Kraken.

(Signet, 1965 / cover artist unknown)

CATASTROPHE: infertility.

(Arrow, 1971 / cover designer unknown)

CATASTROPHE: overpopulation.

(Penguin, 1974 / Cover illustration by David Pelham)

CATASTROPHE: wind.

(Orbit/Quartet, 1977 / cover artist unknown)

CATASTROPHE: pollution.

(Penguin, 1977 / Cover art by Harry Willock)

CATASTROPHE: blindness / Triffids.

(Arrow, 1979 / “Cover photograph of John Mills as Professor Quatermass by courtesy of Thames Television.”)

CATASTROPHE: general societal breakdown / alien matter harvesting.

Recent Paperback Acquisitions # 3: Crime.

(Dell, 1961)

Robert McGinnis cover, first printing, good condition = £2. Eat my dust! (Or fail to give a damn and live a healthy & rewarding life… your choice.)



(Penguin Crime, 1958)



(Corgi, 1960)

Bertha Cool = best detective name ever.



(Gold Medal, 1960)

Why did I not know there was an early ‘60s TV show in which John Cassavetes played a hep-cat Greenwich Village Private Eye…?




(Lancer, 1973)

And a little bit of smut to finish off with:


(Kozy, 1961)

Recent Paperback Acquisitions # 1: Horror & Gothics

It’s been a while since I did any book cover posts, but in the past six months or so I’ve managed to build up a formidable backlog of material without taking the time to go to any particularly Herculean book-collecting efforts. Y’know how it goes I’m sure: just the odd psychedelic sci-fi paperback picked up here and there around London, a few trips further afield, a few donations from friends, all topped off with a mammoth haul from Baggins Bookshop in Rochester last weekend, and I’ve got pulp fiction coming outta my ears.

I’ve got some of the more interesting volumes earmarked for individual posts in the future, but in the meantime there’s more than enough left over for a few genre-themed gallery posts. First up: horror and suchlike.

As you might imagine, I find it eternally disappointing that the heyday of pulp paperback art (roughly early-‘50s to early-‘70s) never really coincided with the rise of horror as a saleable genre, and, as much as blogs like Too Much Horror Fiction might offer a convincing argument to the contrary, the slick graphic design of the post-Stephen King ‘black background / shiny text’ horror boom has never really appealed to me that much. There WERE plenty of odd horror-ish pulps from before that of course – New American Library big print gothics (see here and here for some great galleries of those), hippy era witchcraft shockers and post-Rosemary’s Baby cash-ins, even completely whacked out psychedelic Lovecraft/Weird Tales stuff (everybody’s favourite). But compared to the sheer volume of crime, sci-fi and romance novels that were hitting the shelves back then, they’re still relatively scarce items – hence finding a good one is always a treat.

(The first one here is borderline genre-wise, but it’s an awesome cover and clearly aligned toward the more overtly supernatural Ace/NAL gothic series, so let’s go with it.)

God, this getting a bit nerdy, isn’t it? Anyone’d think I actually did research on this stuff or something. On with the show!

(Ace Books, 1962)



(Ace Books, 1973)



(Fawcett World Library, 1965)



(New English Library, 1980)


(Corgi, 1963)



(Corgi, 1969)

(Thanks to my friend Kate for donating ‘Death Tour’.)

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;