As the old-school strippers tell a young Rose Louise Hovick in GYPSY, “You gotta have a gimmick.” A catchy name helps, too. Salvatore Lucania? Nope. Charles Luciano? Nuh-uh. Lucky Luciano? “Lucky” because he once took a three-layered ass-kicking from the cops and didn’t die. Alliterative and provocative. That’ll work.
In LUCKY LUCIANO: THE REAL AND THE FAKE GANGSTER, you do get a sense from author Tim Newark that Luciano’s posthumous reputation needed some kind of boost. For the first half of his criminal life, he was a smart guy, rising through the mob ranks as a hitman and body guard for Joe Masseria. But by the end of the 1920s and the retirement of Johnny Torrio in Chicago, who handed the Outfit over to Al Capone, Luciano had been wooed from the old way of doing things.
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Unearthing buried treasures from pulp literature’s yesteryear!
There was a time within living memory when James Bond was new. The first Bond novel, CASINO ROYALE, was published in 1953, and by the time the ninth volume in the series, THUNDERBALL, came out in 1961, the books had made author Ian Fleming a rich man. When President John F. Kennedy, in a LIFE magazine article that year, named FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE as one of his favorite novels, and Fleming sold the film rights to 007, everything was in place for Fleming’s enshrinement in the Pop Literature Hall of Fame.
And, of course, a visit from those Merry Pranksters at THE HARVARD LAMPOON.
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As BOOKGASM aficionados may have noticed, I am a fan of pulp fiction — the real pulp fiction, the stuff that first saw print in the pages of the magazines that colored newsstands and magazine kiosks during the first half of the last century.
I’ve never met another person who has the same love of that stuff that I have, which is one of the reasons I took to Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective when I first read about the character, lo, all those long years ago. Nameless loved the pulps and usually had a few of them in the glove compartment of his car so he’d have something to read on long stakeouts.
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THE MAN FROM HELL is a new collection of nine stories by Arthur Leo Zagat writing as Morgan LaFay, one of those pulp writers who is known by every fan of the form, but is completely unknown by everyone else. Which is a shame, because at his best, Zagat wrote well, at times even approaching a Bradbury-esque poeticism. Seven of the stories in this volume were originally published in SPICY MYSTERY between 1936 and 1938, and the final two are from THRILLING MYSTERY in ’36 and ’39.
SPICY MYSTERY was a weird-menace pulp plus sex. In weird-menace stories, the supernatural doings would be explained away at the end as the machinations of a villain out to get the money/girl/property/MacGuffin for himself. Think of it as SCOOBY-DOO with Daphne and Velma flashing their boobs all the time. Mmmm … Daphne and Velma flashing their boobs …
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Ah, there’s nothing quite like being young and attractive and absolutely positive that you can get away with murder. And I don’t mean that poetically and metaphorically — I mean it Smithly and Wessonly.
Everyone, including the potential shooters, knew that no Cook County jury was going to convict a sensitive, white, even marginally attractive young woman of murder. A person who met that description could get into trouble for a lot of things in the Chicago of the early 1920s, but pumping lead into an unwanted husband or lover wasn’t one of them. In 1923, the string of acquittals for “girl-gunners” who had bumped off the unnecessary men in their lives was 29 in a row before a poor immigrant named Sabella Nitti was convicted. An earlier run of acquittals made it to 35.
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