There's not been many paperback reprints of Finnish vintage pulp fiction. Some formerly serialized novels of Outsider and Marton Taiga were published as large paperbacks in the late eighties (with cool covers of Jukka Murtosaari, who does illustrations for Isku and articles for Pulp), but formerly there wasn't much. In the mid-seventies, big Finnish publishing house Tammi tried to cash in with paperback reprints of some novels by Marton Taiga. They were originally published by Tammi in the late fourties. Taiga wasn't solely Tammi's author and published with several different outfits, such as Ilmarinen and Mantere that don't exist anymore.
For some reason, the Taiga paperbacks didn't catch on with the readers. I don't know why. The books were nice classic paperbacks, with illustrated covers. Maybe the high-brow Finnish literal culture had made people think that paperbacks are crap, that even these Marton Taigas are some ultraviolent avenger stuff. Even though they are pretty nice and harmless, slightly humorous gangster and adventure stories.
The book above was the first one in the long-running Porkkana/Carrot series that features a young kid called Kid Sparrow as its hero. He has burning red hair, hence his nickname. Carrot works as an errand boy for a big newspaper in New York. The illustrator is not known and the illustration is unsigned.
No comments:
Post a Comment