Gold Medal 994 (1960)

Title : Shanghai Incident
Author : Stephen Becker
Cover art : Robert McGinnis
 
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“You need more than luck in Shanghai” – Elsa Bannister (played by Rita Hayworth), The Lady from Shanghai (film, 1948)

   Maybe I’m a sucker for all things Shanghai – Paris of the East; hotbead of intrigue, and so on. I’m especially fond of those old movies with the city‘s name in their title – Lady from Shanghai, Shanghai Express, Shanghai Gesture. The (Eurasian?) woman depicted on the front cover of Shanghai Incident is obviously the story’s femme fatale, and I just love the yellow dress, orange umbrella and high heels. By the way, I’m curious to know what those Chinese characters say at the top. And the Chinese woman in the background – is her gaze directed at the woman in yellow or beyond her, out towards the viewer?

   I’ve always thought that the Gold Medal line of paperback books in the 1950s were among the best produced and had some of the coolest covers. This stunning design by cover art legend Robert McGinnis typifies the company’s bright, splashy style. I’m most familiar with his work for Dell, especially the series for the Mike Shayne novels, and is it my imagination, or did he change his style a bit for the GM covers? In any case, McGinnis, with Barye Phillips and Robert Maguire, probably did the best portraits of dangerous, seductive women which adorned the covers of so many paperbacks in the vintage era.

Shanghai Incident was first published by Gold Medal Books in 1955 (#456) with serviceable but less atmospheric cover art by Lou Kimmel. The author was listed as ‘Steve Dodge,’ a pseudonym for Stephen Becker. - BCS

Review by Gary Lovisi.

Popular Library SP 246 (1962)

Title : Tiara Tahiti
Author : Geoffrey Cotterell
Cover art : Photograph of Rosenda Monteros
  [New York, Popular Library, 1962. SP 246. Movie tie-in : cheesecake photo on front cover; film poster on back cover].

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The cover photo for Tiara Tahiti is of Mexican beauty Rosenda Monteros, who was popular in 1950s and 1960s. This was en era in which Hispanics, especially Mexicans, were often cast as Polynesians in South Seas movies, probably the best known example being Dolores Del Rio in Bird of Paradise (1932). Anyway, Rosenda certainly looks the part of a French/Tahitian maiden and the cover of the Popular Library reprint presents her in most beguiling fashion.

BTW the film now seems to be available in its entirety via YouTube

Popular Library Giant G-121, 1953

Title : Look Down in Mercy

Author : Walter Baxter

Cover art : uncredited
  [N. Y. : Popular Library Giant, 1953. G-121. Popular Library edition published, March 1953. Cover in James Avati style, but cover artist is uncredited. "A savage novel of forbidden love." First published in hardcover, London : Heinemann, 1953]

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The author's first book, Mercy is a WWII novel about a British soldier in the Pacific Theater who has an affair with a Eurasian nurse. Includes graphic descriptions of jungle warfare and Japanese atrocities. The [anon.] cover art for the Popular Library reprint depicts two somnambulist-looking guys who frame a shapely, forlorn brunette who wears tropical clothes. Nice texture is provided by bright lighting of the individuals from the undefined source in background. One criticism : lettering for the title is a little too large, and tends to mar an otherwise beautifully balanced design. The cover blurb (“a savage novel ….”) may refer to hero’s affair with the nurse. Some sources refer to a gay theme in the novel -- this may also explain the use of the word ‘forbidden.’

Site of the month

Steamy East. “The Orient was never like this.” The Mysterious East has long been one of the most enduring of vintage genres, and here’s a terrific site devoted to books with an ‘Oriental’ setting or theme. Two of the more interesting sections are : Resources and Image Studies.

The “Steamy East” site is by the same folks who who created the News Nishikie site, which catalogs, with many translations, woodblock prints used by Japanese newspapers in the 1870s to illustrate and tell many colorful and interesting stories.


“Do not, therefore, expect to find on this website the sort of consistency that is likely to be seen a monograph written and edited by a single mind in a single state of delusion. The states of confusion on this site are rivaled only by the dimensions of the Steamy East universe itself -- vast, warped, full of black holes -- and otherwise the sort of space no manner of matrix math magic could map into the flat, uniform world one will often encounter in writing that dwells on faulting Steamy East fiction for its tendency to portray Asia and Asians as strange, exotic, mysterious, inscrutable, sexist, cruel, or not quite human, if not mystical, otherworldly, superhuman. . . . What you see here will be what is out there in the natural world of Steamy East fiction -- with no apologies for the blunt and tasteless titles, cover art, and stories one sometimes encounters in the literary jungle.” – description of the Steamy East site, from : About Yosha Bunko and Affiliated Websites.