'Evil Love' in the Pulps

 

There was some seriously kinky stuff going on in the cover paintings of many pulp magazines.  As a rule of thumb, the cheaper the magazine the kinkier it got, with an apex seemingly reached in the mid to late thirties.  I've mentioned Dime Mystery Magazine and its lurid covers before, with their emphasis upon bound and semi naked women being variously menaced and tortured, but this edition from June 1937 is, even by that publication's standards, extraordinary.  Naked women being bound to mouldering skeletons has to be one of the most blatant illustrations of necrophilia ever to grace the cover of a pulp.  The one with the dangerous kink is clearly the weirdo doing the binding, (who is himself seemingly semi-naked).  Weird and pretty disturbing, I can imagine this freaking out and turning on, in equal measure, punters seeing this edition on the newsstands back in 1935.  Nowadays, if sold at all, it would probably merit a plain brown wrapper.  I'm guessing that the cover is illustrating 'The Plague of Evil Love' by Nat Scachner, mainly on the grounds that: a) necrophiliac bondage would seem to fit the description of 'evil love' and that, b) the other lead story is by Cornell Woolrich, who specialised in dark crime thrillers, rather than the more exotic subject matter being illustrated.

Just a few years earlier (March 1935), Dime Mystery Magazine (although the title is ominously cropped to read 'Dime Mystery Maga' - a portent, perhaps, of cheapskate Donald Trump's future reign of terror?), had sported another 'high bondage' cover, this time illustrating (as the cover conveniently tells us) Arthur Leo Zagat's 'Hound of Hell:

The woman tied to an inverted crucifix is pretty much an archetypal bondage image (or so I'm told), still popular on web sites catering for that sort of thing, (again, so I'm told).  Here it is put into the context of what appears to be a Satanic ritual, (the skull on the back of that guy's jacket gives the impression that he is some kind of proto Hell's Angel), doubtless intended to culminate a human sacrifice, (unless the hero crawling into the cave in the background gets there first), in order to 'justify' it and try to deflect moral crusaders who would otherwise have labelled it 'porn'.  Which, of course, is the point of these covers - it is easy to forget in an age when the internet gives us access, in the comfort of our own homes, to just about any form of sexual kink you could imagine, that back in the day, covers like these, (not to mention the even more lurid interior illustrations), were the closest thing to porn the average person could get.  The pulps truly were purveyors of cheap thrills.  That said, the 1937 necrophilia themed cover is, even by the standards of such publications, pretty audacious.