Finding Honey West Online

This is a supplement to the column Pulp Magnet: Honey West at the New Pulp blog.

The first two Honey West paperbacks have been reprinted by Overlook Press.

This Girl for Hire (originally published in 1957) is Honey's debut and it is a fun, light-hearted romp that remains entertaining even after all these years. The main event is where Honey is caught playing a potentially lethal game of strip poker with four suspects. Mike Hammer never got himself into quite the same situation...

Kiss for a Killer (originally published in 1958) is the follow-up to This Girl for Hire, and it features a mystery involving a dead quarterback (Honey's own all american boy-toy Rip spenser) and a movie starlet's suspicious suicide at a peculiar nudist colony. Things are stacked against Honey this time out, and someone appears to be framing her. But who? And why? Read the book and all will be revealed...including a lot of Honey West...

So far Overlook Press has only brought out the first two paperbacks as reprints of this vintage series. Granted it's not Great Literature, but the sexual situations and innuendoes that were borderline scandalous back in the day are still more fun than a lot of what has come along since.

The complete Honey West TV series featuring Anne Francis is available on DVD.

If you remember the TV series, or if you want to learn more about it, literally everything you need to know about the Honey West TV Series is covered in the book by John C. Friedrikson – Honey West, (Paperback, 2009) Bear Manor Media (ISBN-10: 1593933460 / ISBN-13: 978-1593933463). You can find this book over at Amazon usually.

If you're interested in the 1966 one-shot comic book produced by Gold Key as a tie-in to the TV series, good luck. Heritage Auctions had a copy up for bid back in 2006, Comicvine has a mostly blank page (just a scan of the cover), and like comic book collector Mike Hammersky has said--this is a tough item to keep in stock, though it does pop up on amazon.com and other book vendors, collector blogs or auction-sites from time to time. Bes tof Luck!

http://moonstonebooks.com/shop/category.aspx?catid=31

Moonstone Books has brought out a Honey West Comic Book series that nicely blends the classic paperback version of the character with the later TV series featuring Anne Francis.

You can see out article at New Pulp for more details on the Moonstone Honey West comic book series.

If you're looking for the rest of the classic Honey West paperbacks, here's a checklist for the original 11 books by the Ficklings:

This Girl for Hire (1957)

Girl on the Loose (1958)

A Gun for Honey (1958)

Honey in the Flesh (1959)

Girl on the Prowl (1959)

Kiss for a Killer (1960)

Dig a Dead Doll (1960)

Blood and Honey (1961)

Bombshell (1964)

Honey on her Tail (1971)

Stiff as a Board (1972)

You can find examples of the vintage paperback covers for Honey West at the following blogs & sites:

http://bishsbeat.blogspot.com/2011/01/vintage-covers-honey-west.html

http://www.revelinnewyork.com/blog/01/14/2010/honey-west-girl-with-a-gun

http://hwestandcompany.com/hwac/hx2.htm


And as always there is the Wikipedia entry on Honey West or my own recent contribution to all things Honey West via my recent Pulp Magnet column featured at the New Pulp blog.

Introducing Pulp Magnet

Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, John Carter, Ki-Gor, Tarzan, Conan, The Green Lama, The Shadow, The Spider, Lee Falk's the Phantom, Elak, The Avenger, Domino Lady, Black Mask, Black Bat, The Phantom Detective – the roll call of classic Pulp characters is extensive and, to quote Mike Bullock: “Readers can find a million articles about Edgar Rice Burroughs or Lester Dent or Norman Daniels. Also, there's no end of articles examining the stories they wrote.”

True enough.

The Pulps have a rich and varied history and in an era when so many of those old characters are re-emerging in pop culture, revived and revised to better suit the times, it's not enough to look backwards.

We're seeing an incredible rebirth of the classic characters from the old Pulps. Like Frankenstein's grisly monster or Lovecraft's catatonic cephalopod, the old characters are not dead, they aren't even stunned—they're alive—very much alive; well and thriving. The forgotten heroes of yesterday are coming back with a two-fisted or two-gunned vengeance. And they're not alone. A whole new generation of characters have begun to make their own mark on the world. Heroes like Derrick Ferguson's Dillon , Barry Reese's The Rook , Tommy Hancock's The Freelancer, Mike Bullock's Death Angel, and more—much, much more. And that's what Pulp Magnet is all about: The New Pulp.

Mike and the folks at the New Pulp Fiction blog wanted someone to go out there, find the fresh stuff, discover the New Pulp characters, profile the New Pulp publishers, and examine the new versions and re-imaginings of the classic Pulp characters as well. This column is devoted to delving deep into the dark heart of the unknown depths of the New Pulp and revealing all the lurid details and dangerous secrets I can uncover in the course of my investigations and interviews. Armed only with some weird little mystic magnet I found in the pocket of a second-hand trenchcoat and a secret decoder ring that might not have belonged to John Dee, I'm setting off into the shadowy alleys and by-ways of the New Pulp looking for the new stuff, the cool stuff, the Good Stuff. So pull up a chair, pour yourself a drink, and let's see what the Pulp Magnet can attract.