Collección F.B.I. No. 153 (1953)

Title : El Profesor
Author : Frank McFair
Cover art : uncredited
   [Madrid : Editorial Rollan, 1953. Collección F.B.I. No. 153.]

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The Collección F.B.I. was a series of crime novels in the Fifties and Sixties released by the Spanish publisher Editorial Rollan. No. 153 was written by an author with the very Anglo sounding name of Frank McFair, about whom I can’t find much online, though he gets a nice representation of covers via a search in Google Images. Searching ABEBooks also reveals that he wrote quite a few mysteries in the 1950s. Apparently he contributed several of the FBI series. These novels are presumably about the exploits of the famous bureau with the same name. Given the era, could it mean anything else? Nonetheless, it's curious subject matter coming from a Spanish publisher.

Originally I thought the title of the book was just FBI; the conspicuous placement of the lettering on the cover implies as much. But no, FBI is the series. The book’s title is El Profesor. The man on the  front cover might be a good guy but the sunglasses and [pasted on?] mustache give him a sinister aura. A nice Hitchcockesque touch, the reflections of the figures in the sunglasses.

Colección Orquídea (1950?)

Title : La Equivocación de Colette
Author : Eveline Le Maire
Cover art : uncredited
   [México, D.F.: Editorial Albatros, 195?. “Colección Orquídea.” Originally published as La Méprise de Colette, Paris, Plon-Nourrit, 1914.]

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   Contrary to my original assumption, Equivocación de Colette has nothing to do with the famous writer of the same name. It seems that Eveline Le Maire was a between-the-wars author of women’s novels, and this one happens to have a fictional heroine named Colette. Regrettably, the front cover art is not particularly memorable; it’s dominated by a flat, mannequin-like rendering of the title character. By the way, what is that hobby horse/chess piece figure over her left shoulder? There’s no credit for the cover art, though the soft gray blob just beneath her right elbow may be a barely discernible outline of a signature. Pluses include the Deco lettering and quasi-Deco chair.
   The Colección Orquídea was a series of romance novels that Mexican publisher Albatros issued around mid-Twentieth Century, thus I place the date of La Equivocación at circa 1950. The cover's heavy doses of pink tips us off that the primary audience is female.

Collección Crimen No. 40 (1959?)

Title : Exiliado Político
Author : K. T. McCall
Cover art : uncredited
   Mexico City : Editora Latino Americana, S. A., [1959?]. Texto completo. Titulo del original en inglés : M-MM-Minx. Versión el español de : José Villalba Pinyana. Collección Crimen No. 40. [Pseud. Audrey Armitage and Muriel Watkins. A Johnny Buchanan mystery.]

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   “When you buy a book in one of the Donceles bookstores, no matter how much you pay for it, no matter what language the book is in or where it was printed, you feel good about taking with you a little piece of Mexico City history.” Kurt Hollander, “Mexico City's Literary Circle,” L. A. Times, 8 Nov 2009

   A recent visit to Mexico City resulted in a mini-haul of Mexican vintage pbs, thus the next few postings will have a Latino flavor. K. T.  McCall’s Exiliado Político is the first entry and gives us a good idea of the slightly different Mexican take on the tough style : a pistol-brandishing femme fatale dominates the lively cover, which is also noteworthy for its phantasmagoric combination of gaudy, slightly kitschy colors. The woman and the other characters - two tough guys scuffling - are rendered in a wooden, cartoonish style. Moreover, there’s a quasi-surrealistic collage effect as the giant woman’s body morphs into the two men and what appears to be a waterfront or boat setting. I’m not sure about the off-white blob beneath her hand -- rolodex? rumpled newspaper?

  My impression of this cover is that it’s an earnest, well intended attempt to imitate the 1950s hardboiled style. However, it falls a little short due to its clumsiness and overall lack of polish. One can’t argue about those colors making an impression, though.

Portland Confidential

Title : Portland Confidential : Sex, Crime & Corruption in the Rose City

Author : Phil Stanford

Cover : Photographic collage

   [Portland, Or.: WestWinds Press, 2004. Paperback. Second printing. ISBN 1558687939. The subtitle pretty much says it all. Hollywood Babylon with feeling, if you will.]

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The subtitle says much of this delicious quasi-exposé of Portland’s colorful history – there’s plenty of sex, crime and corruption to go around. Focusing on the vintage years of 1935-1955, the eminently readable text presents Portland’s seedy underside through the many personalities of the era. And all without a trace of wholesome environmentalism or double lattés! The Rose City’s noirish little secret indeed has remained elusive, its seamier past being well hidden by the coifurred, cultivated face. However, present book delivers the dirty laundry in admirable fashion.

From its wonderful Weegee-like cover dominated by the imposing figures of Candy Reneé and Big Jim Elkins (different kinds of figures, each, to be sure!), through Stanford’s chatty text with accompanying tabloidy photos, the book is a pure delight. But what really makes the story stick is the coverage - often quite sympathetic - of the many colorful personalities in all their small-time glory. The luminaries include the aforementioned Ms. Reneé, “Diamond Jim” Purcell, Blubber Maloney, Little Rusty, Tempest Storm, and the ever-present Big Jim Elkins. Even Bugsy Siegel makes a fleeting appearance, stopping by to check out Portland as a place to build one of his casinos. Alas, it rained every day he was in town, so he set his sights southward to the sunny climes of Hollywood and Las Vegas, and the rest, as they say, is history.

If there’s a weakness, it’s that the book stops fairly abruptly, ca. 1957, and many questions linger. When exactly did Portland stop being a corrupt and vice-ridden town, and why? How did a place with such a shadowy history transform itself, relatively quickly, into an anti-sleaze mecca of coffee shops, used bookstores, and progressive thought? Who were the principals involved, and when did it take place? Most of all, can we hope for a sequel to sort out all the mysteries? For the moment, however, we’ll have to settle for savoring the current book, and indeed there’s much to savor. 

Site of the Month

Noirboiled Notes "Pulp poems, book reviews, and other tidbits from the noirboiled world"

  Maintained by David Rachels, Noirboiled Notes is a blog on the literary side of noir; pithy commentary along with some good cover scans. A highlight is the ‘pulp poem of the week‘ excerpt. 

Bantam No. 105 (1947)

Title : Our Hearts Were Young and Gay
Author : Cornelia Otis Skinner
Cover art : S. B. (Boomey) Valentine
   [ N. Y. : Bantam, 1947. No. 105. "They invaded Europe" -- back cover.  Co-written with her friend Emily Kimbrough. Cover art by S. B. (Boomey) Valentine. Drawings by 'Alajalov.'  First published in hardcover, New York, Dodd, Mead & company, 1942. An early account of women traveling independently, Our Hearts is the story of two young women’s experiences traveling in France and especially Paris in the early 1920s.]

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  ''There is a noticeable trace of mild humor to Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, but it is very mild indeed, about as tasty as junket or cornstarch pudding. Why it should be a co-selection for December by the Book-of-the-Month Club is a dark mystery.'' -- Orville Prescott, review in the New York Times, 1942

  Cornelia Otis Skinner had an acting and literary background via her East Coast upper-class upbringing which included an Ivy League & Sorbonne education. In addition to acting for the screen and stage, she wrote extensively, with her credits including both fiction and nonfiction books, as well as pieces for the New Yorker. Film buffs remember her as the sinister quack psychiatrist Miss Holloway in the quasinoir ghost story The Uninvited [1].  

  But as for Bantam 105 . . .  that’s some cover! Two nattily dressed women stroll down a Paris boulevard. Love those hats! Cornelia must be the one on the right. Admirers include Adolphe Menjou lookalike and baker (tailor?), and how about sneaking in a dog in the design! Cover artist S. B (Boomey) Valentine is a new name to me, about whom very little information seems available, online or otherwise. The style here is fairly representative of Bantam’s early look which favored flat, cartoonish figures. But this cover simply has a lot more energy and texture than the usual Bantam offerings of the period. In particular the perspective, tone, sensibilities and mostly the colors scream FRANCE! 

  Our Hearts clearly overshadows all of Cornelia’s other creative endeavors, even her considerable acting career. How to explain its nearly universal good press today, given the quaint and dated sensibilities? To a large extent it must be the very innocents abroad quality that’s so engaging to our more jaundiced eyes and ears. Indeed Our Hearts was fairly light and frothy even for its time; it appeared only a few years after the Great War and just before the more edgy travel writing of the 1930s and 1940s. It also stands as a lighter contrast to the more somber fiction of the period which had a travel element.   


  Curiously - a bit a trivia that only a librarian could love - spot checks reveal that the book is invariably classified by libraries as fiction though the subject matter is clearly personal recollections of a nonfiction nature . . . such are the mysterious whys and wherefors of library catalogers.

  In any case Cornelia remains a fascinating character and, Orville Prescott's aforequoted dissent notwithstanding, Our Hearts ranks as her literary masterpiece and major creative contribution. 


   [1] This was a role with decidedly lesbian overtones, quite remarkable for the strait-laced Forties. Indeed viewed today from a seven decades distance, Cornelia’s brilliant performance leaves little doubt as to the character’s orientation*, and it’s a bit of a mystery that the film got past the censors. Which, in a roundabout way, brings us back to the present book, and we wonder if the ‘gay’ in the title refers to the term in the more contemporary sense (after all Our Hearts is the story is of two unattached women traveling together in the more open, less homophobic Twenties). But not the case -- the modern usage of the word didn’t take until 1965 or thereabouts, and thus the more prosaic explanation for the book's title is that it simply refers to the contents as being a lighthearted travel frolic**. 

A formidable character in The Uninvited
(with Gail Russell)

  * Her entrance is a master stroke of subtlety and suggestion -- she sits imperiously at her desk in the inner sanctum of the gloomy, dungeon-like ‘retreat center‘ which she presides over. A gigantic, Laura-esque portrait of the deceased Mary Meredith looms over the massive office, while Wagner, Tristan & Isolde no less (Love & Death indeed!), gently wafts nearby (this is a nice ambiguous touch since it’s not made clear whether the music is source or background). Her high priestess chic clothes, stilted manner of speech, and severe hairstyle establish her as an exotic, mysterious character with quasi-supernatural powers, who exerts an unlikely, and uncanny, in any case decidedly malevolent hold over the film’s nominal heroine Stella and - even more so, and even more surprising - Stella’s pathologically protective but otherwise no-nonsense grandfather. This is paralleled by the hold, from beyond the grave, which Mary Meredith has over Miss Holloway, further contributing to the forbidden, diseased eroticism which hovers, hothouse-like (after all, they’re always talking about the strong scent of mimosa!) throughout the film and in particular is associated with Miss Holloway's obsession with Mary, and which seems to spill over to the other characters.

  ** Although at least one source suggests a mildly lesbian subtext. 

Black Dog & Leventhal reissue, 2005

The Mysterious Press 0-445-40709-3 (1986)

Title : Seeds of Treason
Author : Ted Allbeury
Cover art : Rolf Erickson (design); Sonja Lamut, Nenad Jakessivic (illustration)

   [N. Y. : Mysterious Press, 1986. Published in hardcover by The Mysterious Press. First published in U.K. by New English Library.]

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Spy vs. spy

The cover of Mysterious Press’s paperbound reissue of Seeds of Treason is nothing special; it’s a pleasingly eye-catching design which gets right to the Cold War bonafides of the story (I just love all that red!). But what is most of interest in Seeds is the discovery of espionage writer Ted Allbeury. From all accounts he was a relatively major figure in the post Ian Fleming/Graham Greene era of spy fiction but alas largely forgotten today. 

In any case Seeds is a very late in the day Cold War thriller, conventional but supremely competent, with serviceable characters, a tight plot and well-textured settings. But most notable is Allbeury’s lovingly drawn, convincingly detailed accounts of the mechanics of the spy business in all their rather mundane le Carré-esque glory [1]. 

[1] And sometimes not so mundane, as in the intellectually exotic concept of stochastic processes which figures peripherally in the story. Author Allbeury came by his espionage expertise honestly and it shows; think Peter Wright’s Spycatcher as fiction and you get an idea of the general tone and content of Seeds of Treason.

New English Library hardcover edition