An interior illustration by Amos Sewell (1901-1983) for a story by Garry Grant, “The Embalmers,” in the March 1936 edition of Dime Mystery Magazine, a locus classicus of shudder pulp. Something tells me this young lady might not quite be ready for embalming.
The cover painting of the issue by Tom Lovell (1909-1997) appears to refer to the story.
This issue of Dime Mystery Magazine is available to be read at or downloaded from the Internet Archive.
Another truly strange trope that came up frequently at Dime Mystery appears to be some sort of involuntary mummification, possibly in connection with forced mating with some long-dead Egyptian. A good example would be July 1936 (issue ISFDB entry here).
And there’s an even more thorough one for September 1940.
But perhaps my favorite of the trope is actually an inverse, a cover painting by Tom Lovell for the May 1937 issue (ISFDB entry here). It’s actually a man undergoing the wrapping, under the gaze of a laughing cultist. There’s a girl, and what’s she’s undergoing is rather more mysterious, with wisps of mist or mystic energy or whatever providing another example of just-barely-implied nudity.
This is another example of a page worth visiting at Pulp Covers where the curators provide some interesting interior art (described on the issue title page as having been done by “Monroe Eisenberg and Others”) and also make the whole issue available for download.
Fire is a fearsome thing when you’re in it or might be, and so unsurprisingly there are a lot of Dime Mystery Magazine covers showing pretty women facing the hideous prospect of being burned alive. Indeed, there are so many that I had to break the meme into two separate posts. For want of a better concept, I’ve divided them into stationary and moving examples. Stationary means being fixed in a place and having the fire being brought to one, like being burned at the stake. An example of moving would be being about to be hurled into a volcano as a human sacrifice. So stationary first, beginning with this example from August 1936, painted by Tom Lovell.
It look like our hero is willing to take on some serious hurt in hopes of rescuing this poor girl, and Mr. Nero is amused. A similar risk is posed on the unattributed July 1937 cover.
1937 must have been a big year for setting women on fire at Dime Mystery, because the December cover, which is full of peril, showing a hero not only willing to risk being burned, but also apparently being shot by an assailant behind a picture.
I don’t know who painted that cover, but there’s an interesting art-historical detail if you look at the faces of the women here, you notice that instead of being filled with panic, they seem to be calm and have their eyes cast upward, as if this is a painting of Christian martyrs. As such, this pulp painting participates in an unusually deep artistic tradition!
Finally, there’s some real crazy going on in this meme from time to time. Take, for example, October 1935, painted by Walter M. Baumhofer.
“May you burn. You and the horse you rode in on.”
Turning a living person into a statue is an idea that goes back at least as far as the Greek myth of the Gorgons and certainly in the Internet era has become a sort of kink. More than a few covers of Dime Mystery Magazine strongly suggest the kink goes back at least to the shudder-pulp era. Consider this unattributed March 1937 cover:
Now I suppose it’s possible that our mad sculptor here is only using his victim as a kind of unwilling model. That would be criminal behavior in the real world, but mere kidnapping and assault don’t seem to rise to the level of menace one would expect from a Dime Mystery cover. I would submit that our lady’s fate here is not merely to model art but to become it.
Again, things become more obvious in other covers. There is this cover from March 1938 painted by Tom Lovell:
Helpless women being moved by pulley and dipped into a gilding vat, then hung up (to dry?). And this one from August 1939.
The curators at Pulp Covers remark, whether in innocence or in irony I am not sure “Yes, the evil cult leader is spray-painting the chained girl gold. No, I don’t know why,” A look in the background at one of the victim’s possible predecessors suggests an answer. That’s no ordinary spray-paint.
