Wednesday 13 November 2013

A femme fatale

This is this time again for my monthly tradition, when I upload a cover from the pulp magazine Detective Tales. This time, it is the cover from November 1949. I usually title the post: The Detective Cover for (insert month here), but this time I simply titled it after the character on the cover. You see a femme fatale delicately pouring explosive in a lighter. She is blonde, her face which takes most of the space on the center of the is angelic, yet she is pouring bleeding nitroglycerin in a lighter. Bombing is a brutal way of killing, her method of assassination is both subdued and nasty. And she has red gloves, which makes it all the more sinister. Once I saw it, the cover was so easy to choose. I find femmes fatales fascinating villains (villainesses?), but they are difficult to do right. I don't know how this story went, obviously, if the character was well written or not, but this is a magnificent portrait of a femme fatale in action.

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