It doesn’t get more action packed than this high drama scene of a gangster mol pin-up girl in a shoot out with an unseen mobster trying to push her out of a moving car in a seedy urban Chinatown. An original oil on board artwork by Wil Hulsey, this appeared as the cover of a 1956 issue of Guilty Detective Story magazine. Loosely illustrating the story “Make Me A Widow“, this has classic pulp style and pin-up attitude. Painting is faintly signed lower left and handsomely framed and matted behind glass.

Guilty Detective Story and Trapped Detective Story  were companion magazines launched by Feature Publications in June/July 1956. Both determined to show that the spirit of the 1940s detective pulp magazines was still alive and well in the 1950s, albeit in a digest format. Guilty Detective Story ran for 35 issues and Trapped Detective Story for 34 issues, initially alternating on a bi-monthly schedule.

 

 

 

 

Wil Hulsey was a regular cover artist for Feature Publications, a publishing company which hired big name writers such as Harlan Ellison, Robert Turner and and Lawrence Block to bridge the gap between the pulps and the later post-war pulp Men’s magazine titles that filled America’s news stands by the late 1950s. The artist worked prolifically for the men’s magazine sweat trade and his True Mens Stories painting “Lizards From Hell” brought an auction high record of $17,500.00 in 2014. The artist also inspired the now-infamous Frank Zappa and The Mother of Inventions album jacket for the 1970 release Weasels Ripped My Flesh.