In its story in May on the popularity of paperbacks, The New York Times left out Popular Library which had been publishing paperbacks since 1942. Like Avon and Dell, the imprint had roots in the pulp magazine business, but it had carved out a niche for itself by focusing on cozy mysteries, the kind of stories more likely to have been serialized in a woman’s magazine than to have appeared in a pulp. In this subgenre, a crime, usually a murder, disrupts the orderly life of a community or family. Crime is an aberration. The solving of the crime restores order. Sex and violence is minimal on the pages. The detectives were gentlemen, eccentrics or amateurs. The crime solvers often were women or husband and wife teams. The books played up local color and sometimes had humorous or romantic subplots. In contrast, in the hardboiled novels made popular through the pulps and increasingly on the screen, a corrupt world where violence was the norm lay just beneath the surface of ordinary life. No one could be trusted. The detectives often were a gruff, jaded lot with their own deep character flaws.
In 1946, Popular Library broadened its offerings, adding westerns and adventure stories to its lists. It scored its biggest success later this year with Niven Busch’s western Duel in the Sun, released just before David O. Selznick’s heavily publicized, big-budget film adaptation starring Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck hit the screen. While paperback publishers frequently had published books that had been made into movies, direct tie ins with movie releases was more often left to hardcover reprints. With the success of Duel in the Sun, movie tie-ins became an increasingly common paperback marketing strategy.
At this time, Popular Library books had bright, simple covers. Later, the company would adapt the pulp magazine look.
Here are the first titles released by Popular Library in 1946:
•The Listening House (1938) by Mabel Seeley. In this Gothic thriller, a young woman down on her luck rents a room in a rundown rooming house on top of a steep cliff. When she finds a corpse in the trash dump at the foot of the cliff, she uncovers a horrifying mystery going back 20 years to a time when vice ran rampant in the city. This was Seeley’s first book and it tells a more disturbing tale than most of the Popular Library offerings of the time.
•Mr. Polton Explains (1940) by R. Austin Freeman, who died in 1943. He wrote this book in part in a London bomb shelter when he was 77. The novel features Dr. Thorndyke, the British forensic investigator who was the hero of many of Freeman’s novels. In this book, Thorndyke investigates a death in a suspicious fire in a Soho townhouse supposedly filled with inflammable objects.
•Hell Let Loose (1937) by Francis Beeding, a pen name used by the writing team of John Palmer and Hilary St. George Saunders. It was one in a series involving Alistair Granby of British Intelligence. In this novel a Spanish physicist disappears during the Spanish Civil War after offering to sell an invention that uses television for military purposes to the English, Germans and Italians, setting off a race between the opposing sides to find the plans for the device.
•Who Killed Aunt Maggie? (1939) by Medora Field, an Atlanta newspaper columnist. A matriarch is killed on a Georgia estate during a family get together. Republic Pictures filmed it as a comic mystery in 1940.
•Hasty Wedding (1938) by Mignon G. Eberhart, a leading American writer of romantic mysteries that were often serialized in women’s magazines. People called her the American Agatha Christie. In this novel, a Chicago socialite's wedding day is ruined when the police find her former fiance murdered and she becomes the prime suspect. Several of Eberhart’s novels were made into films in the 1930s. In 1945 Republic Pictures adapted Hasty Wedding for the screen as “Three’s a Crowd.”
•Murder in Season (published in 1940 as Romance in Crimson) by Octavus Roy Cohen, a Southern writer whose novels were known for their “local color” including stereotypical African-American characters who spoke in comic dialect a la “Amos ‘n Andy.” In this novel, a Yankee girl visiting an exclusive Southern hunt club is accused of murdering a local belle. It had been serialized in Collier’s and in newspapers.
•She Faded into Thin Air (1941) by Ethel Lina White, a British mystery writer who died in 1944. In this novel, a terrified woman attempts to solve the mysterious disappearance of a young woman in front of her eyes. Three of White’s novels had been made into hit suspense films: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes in 1938, The Unseen in 1945 and The Spiral Staircase, which was playing this week at movie theaters in the city.
•Fog (1933) by Valentine Williams, a veteran British mystery writer who died in 1946 and Dorothy Rice Sims, who was an aviator and artist as well as writer. In this novel, a millionaire, a medium and a ship’s doctor are murdered on a transatlantic steamship. Fog was originally published as a short story in The Saturday Evening Post and made into a film in 1933.
•Buckaroo (1932) by Eugene Cunningham was what Kirkus called a “blood and thunder western” about Texas Rangers in lawless territory. Cunningham usually straddled the middle ground between the pulps and the glossies.
•Timbal Gulch Trail (1934) by Max Brand, one of several pen names used by Frederick Schiller, a prolific writer of western stories and novels as well as screenplays. In this western, the protagonist inherits a ranch, which makes him the target of a murder plot. Schiller died in 1944 while serving as a war correspondent.
•Rolling Stone (1940) by Patricia Wentworth, a British writer of mysteries in the classic style best known for her novels featuring Miss Silver, a retired governess turned private eye. The protagonist in Rolling Stone, however, is Peter Talbot, a sleuth who adopts the identity of a dying con man to penetrate a gang of thieves led by England’s most deadly villainess.
•The Golden Box (1942) by Frances Crane was one in a series featuring the Abbotts, a husband-and-wife sleuthing team, who also were the main characters in a radio series at this time. In this novel, the future Mrs. Abbott goes to a small town to be with an ailing relative. When her boyfriend, San Francisco private investigator Pat Abbott, comes to town, they attempt to solve the murder of the tyrannical battleaxe who had ruled the town.
•Three Thirds of a Ghost (1941) by Timothy Fuller is one in a series featuring a Harvard professor turned amateur sleuth, who, in this novel, investigates the death in a bookstore of a famous mystery author.
•The 24th Horse (1940) by Hugh Pentecost, a pen name used by prolific writer Judson Philips. This was one in a series featuring Lt. Luke Bradley of the New York homicide squad, who in this outing, enlists the aid of an elderly, deaf amateur sleuth to solve the murder of the disreputable daughter of an Old New York family on the skids.
•The Black-Headed Pins (1938) by Constance & Gwenyth Little, Australian-born sisters from New Jersey who wrote “cozy” mysteries with women protagonists. In this one, a young woman takes a position as companion to an elderly dowager in an old country house deep in the New Jersey woods. When Christmas comes, she meets the rest of the family and soon learns first hand of “the family curse” of strange sounds foretelling deaths and corpses that walk.
•Challenge for Three (1938) by David Garth. An adventurous heiress, a burlesque dancer and a history professor get caught up with a gang of gem smugglers. The story had appeared in Redbook in 1937 and Ida Lupino had starred in a radio adaptation in 1938.