Pulp Blurbs

I’m a collector of pulp magazines and paperbacks. Because of the condition of most of my collection I can’t actually read much of it. What I can do is admire the outrageous cover art and the cornball blurbs above the title. I think it’s time to honor the faceless assistant editors who came up with lines that often outclassed those inside the book. Here’s a few of my favorites:

From “Confessions of a Psychiatrist” by Henry Lewis Nixon:
Every boudoir was his office; every patient his plaything–

From “Bouncing Betty” by Michael Avallone:
She was a beautiful mattress-tester and she bounced our private eye into a double bed of trouble

From “Recoil” by Jim Thompson:
Her proposition was simple: Be a con with a number - or a corpse with a name

From “Pure Sweet Hell” by Malcolm Douglas:
For a dame like this I’d sell out to Satan - but the devil was ahead of me in line

From “Long Haul” by A.I. Bezzerides:
Pickup women…Wild rides…Crooked deals - The brawling, sleepless nights of a truck driver

From “Marihuana” by William Irish:
A cheap and evil girl sets a hopped-up killer against a city

…and my all-time fav:

From “Office Sinner” by Gene Harvey:
The frank story of EVERY young girl who works in an office…side by side with MEN!

If anybody has any trashy novels from the '40s or '50s at hand, please share the blurbs…

Split Infinity – Piers Anthony

“If he used any magic at all, the werewolf and unicorn who were his only friends were determined to kill him at once!”


“Though I hate 'em, I’ll defend to my death your right to use smilies.”
Forward deployed until 18AUG00

“All right, brain, I don’t like you and you don’t like me, so let’s get this over with and I’ll get back to killing you with beer.”


I sold my soul to Satan for a dollar. I got it in the mail.

This is too good to just let it die. I don’t have any true pulp, but is this close?

"Deep in the redneck heart of East Texas, they’ll drive straight into a town packed with Klan wannabes, a midnight exhumation in a voodoo graveyard, a thunderstorm of biblical proportions, and flat-out murder. They’ll be packing heat, a vow to find the truth, and a lunch.

Oh, and that’s from the blurb on “The Two-Bear Mambo” by Joe Lansdale, which is where my short-lived sig line came from.


Not being specialists on bear’s dicks, none of us responded. We didn’t want to look like fools. Joe Lansdale, The Two-Bear Mambo

You can’t handle the truth!


I sold my soul to Satan for a dollar. I got it in the mail.

GUN IN CHEEK and SON OF GUN IN CHEEK, by Bill Pronzini.

Both these babies are out of print, but worth searching for on ABE or Bookfinder if you’re a blurb buff. They’re books of compilations and analysis of “the worst writing in crime fiction history,” and both screamingly funny. I think the Pronz also did one on Western fiction, called SIX-GUN IN CHEEK.

AuntiePam: Don’t forget one of MY favorite lines from the same Lansdale novel:

“Maybe you ought to watch the educational channel…last night they had a great NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC special on bears. I tell you, it tantalized me to the point I couldn’t sleep afterwards.”


Uke

Doing a little web-search on this topic, I stumbled over this site from Duke University.
http://odyssey.lib.duke.edu/women/pulp.html#collection

It’s a list of lesbian pulp novels w/ blurbs. (Sorry, no pictures.)

Here’s an example:

Campbell, Bea. Orgy of the Dolls. 1967. (E 12mo #4351) “A dynamic study of woman from the viewpoint of the most brutal female lover of all–the most voracious of her species–the lesbian nymphomaniac.”

Someone should get the movie rights.


When someone annoys you it takes 42 muscles to frown. But it takes only 4 muscles to extend your arm and whack them in the head.

From “I Married a Dead Man” by William Irish:
The strage story of a girl who is both bride and widow…and yet not either

I’ve got a whole collection of these – at home. But in what I have at college the closest I could find was:

Telefon by Walter Wager:
A spy novel so compelling we defy you to put it down!

(I haven’t even opened it yet, by the way)

yeah, weak, I know, but I couldn’t let a pulp fiction thread go by without contributing something!


Mayor of Snerdville, the home of Mortimer Snerd

“I’m just too much for human existence – I should be animated.”
–Wayne Knight