We close with covers from near the beginning and the end of Dime Mystery‘s existence. From way back in December 1934 we have one with a very Shadow over Innsmouth vibe.

(Woefully thin ISFDB entry for this issue here.) The Pulp Covers scan is of a copy which unfortunately has suffered a fair amount of wear. The index at Galactic Central provides a brighter and cleaner, bur also smaller, version of the same cover.

Nearing the end, in June 1948, Dime Mystery came up with this cover.

We might now be living in brightly smiling, clean-scrubbed, post-war, neo-Puritan America, but we can still manage a cover in which the pretty blonde is at least somewhat scantily clad, and certainly looks to be in a bit of peril. Evidence that the Spirit of Exploitation will never really die out, as long as humans themselves do not die out.

On at least two occasions Dime Mystery featured covers with women being threatened with some sort of corkscrew-like device. There is June 1936 (ISFDB entry here).

By the cover of August 1938, the villains were being significantly more thorough.

As the curators at Pulp Covers remark, “This poor woman is being drilled, snake harassed & branded, which might seem like overkill to some people.” Indeed.

A number of Dime Mystery covers feature one or more women looking on as some other woman is put through some probably fatal ordeal, an ordeal which they to might soon expect to undergo. The cover of the April 1936 presents this as a simple case of crimen interruptum.

By January we have two beauties helplessly waiting their turn while a third puts up what again looks like ineffectual resistance to a fourth being put to the torch, itself a repeat Dime Mystery trope. The editors liked this idea so much that they commissioned the cover as an oil painting, executed in loving detail.

The cover.

And apparently the readership liked the theme so much that the editors again put it on the very next month’s cover.

We again see eyes directed heavenward.

Wartime lewdness shortages meant that Dime Mystery had to recycle even fairly questionable cover-art ideas. In the 1940s, there was something we might call “murder carefully labelled.” In November 1944 they ran this cover:

And a little more than a year later, in February 1946, this:

I am unsure of how to comment exactly, except that I am reminded of a line in the Blackadder the Third episode “Sense and Senility,” which I recall as “Every criminal, no matter how ingenious, makes one subtle yet telling mistake. Theirs was to have written down their entire conspiracy in play-manuscript form.”

What can I say? It’s not like we can have naked women writhing in transparent tube in every post.

Yes, you read that right. The suggestion that a pretty girl is facing imminent transformation into some sort of snake creature. It seems like a somehow overly-specific trope to which to which to devote two different covers over a little over four years, but there it is. Maybe ophidiophilia was in back in the 1940s. A comparatively chaste if suggestive cover from July 1944.

And of course, a considerably more batshit (but loveable) one from October 1940.

Hssss…

With mad science we get into some tropes I really love. There’s a lot of illustration here, so I’m going to divide it across two categories: protagonists and victims. The protagonists are female characters who are someone participants in, or in opposition to, some mad science venture or another. Let’s begin with some protagonists, like this very late-period cover, from May 1945.

Unfortunately I don’t have much information about this cover, but a read suggests that while there’s fear here, our cover girl might be being given a warning that she might be able to do something about, rather than a premonition of unavoidable fate.

More spooky perhaps is from way back at the start of Dime Mystery’s publication history, this cover from March 1934 (issue ISFDB entry here.

Our heroine is getting an injection from a shady character, but at the same time this doesn’t read like a coercive situation. She’s not bound or held at gunpoint; rather, she’s looking in a mirror with what looks to me like a hopeful expression. Does the mystery shot convey beauty? Restore youth? To be sure, if this young woman knew what sort magazine her story was in, she might not be quite hopeful, but still, this illustration is a long way from the norm for the shudder pulps.

In at least one instance in Dime Mystery’s publication history, again fairly late (September 1942), we have a heroine who goes to full-on gun-wielding protagonism.

I don’t know the details of the story, but it sure looks like Dr. Mad here is about to get his ass kicked — or perhaps his brain punted.

As it is the path of nature for us to return to the ashes and dust whence we came, there’s always been something somewhat uncanny about the embalmed and thus non-decaying corpse. There should be no surprise, then, in seeing embalming taken up as a horror theme, creepy in itself and perhaps also something to throw in a bit of a necrophile or A.S.F.R. kink. The March 1936 cover painting by Tom Lovell and the story it illustrates goes to this directly.

Interior art for the same story:

The curators of Pulp Covers have generously made the entire issue available for download.

At least Miss March 1936 has the appearance of being decently dead before being embalmed. I’m not so sure about the girl on November 1935 cover (issue ISFDB entry here).

While featured girl on May 1940 appears to be very much alive and putting up an active, if not exactly effective, resistance. Note that this cover might also be an example of the mummification trope, which I shall be covering a few posts from this one.

But perhaps the best or most shocking example (depending on your point of view) of the trope (as well as also the coffin stuffer trope) might be the November 1933 cover (issue ISFDB entry here), where the artist has managed, aside from some serious implied nudity, to get a look of real terror on the victim’s face.

And two-fisted hero/rescuer in sight, alas. Just the cold full moon looking on.