Slice of P.I.: “Blood and Honey”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Blood and Honey, by G.G. Fickling (Pyramid, 1961). Here we find the eighth novel starring Honey West, often touted as “the nerviest, curviest P.I. in Los Angeles—or anywhere else for that matter.” The character was created in the late 1950s by the husband-and-wife writing team of Gloria and Forrest E. Fickling under their “G.G. Fickling” pseudonym. Cover art by Robert Maguire.

READ MORE: “Gloria Fickling, Who Helped Create Honey West, TV’s First Female Detective, Still a Force 60 Years Later,” by Erika I. Ritchie (Orange County Register); “You Can’t Keep a Good Gal Down: An Interview with Gloria Fickling, the Real Honey West,” by Kevin Burton Smith (The Thrilling Detective Web Site).

“Danger for Breakfast,” by John McPartland

Danger for Breakfast, by John McPartland (Gold Medal, 1956).

According to Wikipedia, John Donald McPartland was born in Chicago, Illinois, back in 1911, and later went on to train as an engineer. However, after serving with the U.S. Army in World War II, McPartland transformed himself into a journalist and author. His controversial but fairly successful non-fiction work, Sex in Our Changing World (1947), was described by The New York Times as “essentially a sermon” about how, since the war ended, “America has changed drastically from a sex-shy, inhibited people to a hedonistic, cynical people, openly in search of pleasure.” He followed up that debut in 1952 with Love Me Now, his first work of hard-boiled fiction.

McPartland subsequently composed Tokyo Doll (1953) and Affair in Tokyo (1954)—both influenced by the time he spent in the South Pacific as an Army reservist during the Korean War—as well as The Face of Evil (1954) and The Kingdom of Johnny Cool (1959), the latter of which was adapted into the 1963 film Johnny Cool starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Henry Silva. The novel that gained him the greatest attention, though, was No Down Payment, a tale of suburban sex, alcohol, and marriage troubles that reached print in 1957 and was soon transformed into a movie of that same title starring Joanne Woodward, Sheree North, and Tony Randall.

Danger for Breakfast, featuring paperback cover art by Barye Phillips, has been all but forgotten over the decades. Yet its back-cover plot précis shows the author’s taste for international intrigue:

She was half naked and sobbing when MacBride saw her first, in the fourth-floor corridor of a Tokyo hotel.

Pooled out around her were four men—one dying, one dead, and one ferociously hurt. MacBride had broken the throat of one and blinded another.

Her name was Dorrie Eden. She had copper-red hair and a wonderful body, and the secret she knew made her a living time bomb—the most dangerous woman alive in the East.

They assigned MacBride to Dorrie Eden. They told him to kill her and make it look like an accident.

It was a hell of a way to protect his country—because by then MacBride had fallen in love with her.

In all, McPartland published 11 novels, several of which remain in print (including a Stark House Press combo of Big Red’s Daughter and Tokyo Doll, and Centipede Press’ reprint of 1956’s I'll See You in Hell), and saw half a dozen of his screenplays produced. Unfortunately, his career was cut short by a heart attack in 1958, when he was 47 years old and living in Monterey, California.

Not until the settlement of his estate was it learned that the author had—as Time magazine put it—“lived as harum-scarum a life as any of his characters, had a legal wife and son at Mill Valley, Calif., [plus] a mistress at Monterey who bore him five children and who, as Mrs. Eleanor McPartland, was named the city’s 1956 ‘Mother of the Year.’ Later, McPartland’s legal widow submitted the daughter of an unnamed third woman as one of the novelist’s rightful heirs.”

We’re 14 Today. Wanna Make Something of It?

(Above) Rebels in the Streets, by Kitty Hanson (Midwood Tower, 1965); art by Mitchell Hooks. As one commenter on Flickr wrote of this cover, “Nothing says ‘evil’ like capri pants and ballet flats.”

Every January, in anticipation of yet another birthday for Killer Covers, I try to come up with some appropriate way to celebrate. Last year, for instance, when the blog turned 13—a number with a very bad reputation—I decided the most fun thing to do was showcase vintage crime novels with the words “luck” or “lucky” in their titles.

This year was a bit more challenging. While looking around for things synonymous with the numeral 14, I discovered the following on an online information source called The Fact Site: “The number 14 is, unfortunately, associated with white supremacy. This is because one of the more popular white-power slogans, ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,’ has fourteen words. While known as the ‘14 Words,’ it is commonly shortened to just ‘14.’” The very last thing I want to do is validate hateful racist ideas, so spinning a post off from that connection to the number was a non-starter. Instead, I mused on various ways young people were portrayed during the American heyday of paperbacks. And I realized that they were too often shown negatively. During the mid-20th century, authors and book artists were prone to define teenagers as aborning gangsters, arrant delinquents, drug addicts, experimenters with wild sex, trouble-bound runaways, youths neglected by their parents and left—as the cover text on a 1958 book titled Bad Girls reads—to “prowl the fringe of the underworld for kicks.”

(Right) Bad Girls, by Leo Margulies (Crest, 1958).

Amid such alarming propaganda (no doubt circulated in part simply to goose book sales), it’s a wonder that children of the era—especially those who claimed residence in large cities, where lawbreaking was well-recorded—were allowed to stray beyond sight of their homes. Not that adults could prevent them from leaving and making mistakes. As The Fact Site also informs me, “In the U.S., the youngest age at which you can be legally emancipated from your parents or guardians is 14. Known as the emancipation of minors, it essentially frees a child of fourteen or older from control by their legal guardians and freeing the guardians of any responsibility towards the minor.”

For better or worse.

It happens that my computer files contain a wide variety of vintage paperbacks focused on delinquents and other teenagers gone wrong, which I’ve picked up over the years. Since today’s 14th Killer Covers birthday finds me in a feisty mood anyway, I’ve decided to commemorate the occasion with 50-odd examples of that genre, displaying parents’ worst nightmares of what their children (not all of whom are 14) could get up to if left unsupervised for long.

Within this gallery you’ll find multiple novels named Gang Girl(s), several with the ominous word “jailbait” in their titles, and others suggesting that “cool” and “criminal” are altogether synonymous. The most represented author is probably Wenzell Brown, but there are works, too, by Vin Packer (aka the recently deceased Marijane Meaker), Harlan Ellison (who once joined a Brooklyn street gang for research purposes), Harry Whittington and Whit Harrison (one and the same writer), Orrie Hitt, Hal Ellson, Joan Ellis (one of several pen names employed by the prolific Julie Ellis), Evan Hunter, Henry Gregor Felsen, and screenwriter Irving Shulman.

Click on any of the images below for an enlargement.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found credits for all of these paperback fronts. But among the artists whose work is included here are James Meese (Bad Girls, Teen-age Terror, The Young and Violent, Cry Kill), Robert Maguire (Jailbait Jungle, Tomboy), Tom Miller (The Gang Girls), Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka (Digit’s Hate Alley, Cry Tough!), Raymond Johnson (1952’s Juvenile Delinquents, Jailbait Street, I’ll Fix You, and Cry, Brother, Cry), Samson Pollen (D for Delinquent, Ace’s Hate Alley), Paul Rader (1964’s Gang Girl), Barye Phillips (Teen-age Mafia, The Beat Generation, Strike Heaven on the Face), Mitchell Hooks (End of a J.D., Rag Top), Rudolph Belarski (Jailbait, Rapture Alley), George Ziel (The Little Caesars), Rafael DeSoto (Teen-age Gangs, The Lolita Lovers), Clark Hulings (The Blackboard Jungle), Robert Schulz (Hell to Pay), Gilbert A. Fullington (1954’s Gang Girl), Lou Marchetti (The Long Night), Victor Kalin (Young and Wild), Robert Bonfils (The Delinquents), and Raymond Pease (Runaway Girl).

If you’re interested in finding additional juvenile delinquent-related covers, check out a pair of previous Killer Covers posts, the first focused on James Bama’s contributions to this breed, the second showcasing the myriad risks young people might face by going to school. Or go to the blog Pulp Covers, where I found many of the images shown above, and which has still more to admire.