Before I fly to the World Fantasy Convention – for the presentation, on Sunday, of the World Fantasy Award, for which Osama is nominated for Best Novel – I leave you with this classic Israeli nazisploitation (‘Stalag’) cover: The Monster’s Stalag, by “Kim Rockman.” No need to thank me!
Thanks to Simon Drax for this classic cover!
Devilish Plots in Laos (actual title!)
Patrick Kim: The Screen of Hypnotism! (Kim, the two meter tall half-Korean assassin, starred in a long running series of pulp paperbacks)
The Bridge on the Kakadon(?) River (front cover)
The Bridge on the Kakadon River (back cover)
I took Nir on Monday to one of my favourite shops in Soho – a vintage place – where we came across reproductions of the classic pulp cover for Satan Was a Lesbian (by Fred Haley, 1966).
I talked about my love of pulp fiction before – admittedly, most of it is because of the covers! So having googled the above title, I came across the wonderful Strange Sisters site, an online gallery of similar covers. I highly recommend checking it out. And though some of the covers are better, the one below is one of the funniest…
I did, incidentally, once write a Women-in-Prison story (or rather, an Alien Abduction/Lovecraft/ WIP story) called “The Love-Craft”. It was published in a Postscripts anthology a while back. Great fun. I should try and get it reprinted somewhere! Anyway, I relied on the equally wonderful Women in Prison Encyclopedia, and here are some more book covers courtesy of the WIP Encyclopedia.
I’m working on what I hope will be my final Osama story – following My Travels with Al-Qaeda, Wrong Number and, of course, the forthcoming Osama.
It’s a story collaboration with “Mike Longshott”, the pulp paperback writer Joe is hired to find in Osama, as well as featuring him as the hero of a pulp story about a special sort of bounty-hunter. At the same time, like in Osama, it has its metafictional element, a second layer of narrative written by “Lavie Tidhar”. I have no idea yet where it will be published, but here is a short extract from the “me” sections, explaining where “Mike Longshott” originally came from.
I plucked “Mike Longshott” out of the moulding Hebrew pulp novels of the sixties and seventies. He was a composite being, a man who did not really exist. Longshott wrote soft core pornography, tales of Nazi concentration camps where prisoners were abused, physically and sexually, by Aryan goddesses, sadistic nymphomaniacs of the Third Reich.
He was a pen-name broke young writers hid behind for cash. He was a collective, burrowing into the sexual and social taboos of his era. He wrote crap, was paid crap, and his books, sold under the counter, went from hand to hand and bathroom to bathroom, their covers featuring naked flesh and whips, guard posts and POW slaves and a plethora of large improbable breasts. He never lived, he never breathed, his prose was eminently forgettable. He was a hack, a pulpster, a paperback writer. His name was Mike Longshott and he was going to be my hero.
Two Hebrew pulp novels, the one on the left by Mike Longshott (The Murder in the Stalag), the one on the right by “Mike Baden” (the notorious Stalag 13).
Lavie Tidhar 