_Illustrator_: L. R. Summers
_Here is history's biggest news scoop! Those intrepid
reporters Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer, whose best-selling
exposes of life's seamy side from New York to Medicine Hat
have made them famous, here strip away the veil of millions
of miles to bring you the lowdown on our sister planet. It
is an amazing account of vice and violence, of virtues and
victims, told in vivid, jet-speed style._
_Here you'll learn why Mars is called the Red Planet, the
part the Mafia plays in her undoing, the rape and rapine
that has made this heavenly body the cesspool of the
Universe. In other words, this is Mars--Confidential!_
* * * * *
P-s-s-s-s-t!
HERE WE GO AGAIN--Confidential.
We turned New York inside out. We turned Chicago upside down. In
Washington we turned the insiders out and the outsiders in. The howls
can still be heard since we dissected the U.S.A.
But Mars was our toughest task of spectroscoping. The cab drivers
spoke a different language and the bell-hops couldn't read our
currency. Yet, we think we have X-rayed the dizziest--and this may
amaze you--the dirtiest planet in the solar system. Beside it, the
Earth is as white as the Moon, and Chicago is as peaceful as the Milky
Way.
By the time we went through Mars--its canals, its caves, its
satellites and its catacombs--we knew more about it than anyone who
lives there.
We make no attempt to be comprehensive. We have no hope or aim to make
Mars a better place in which to live; in fact, we don't give a damn
what kind of a place it is to live in.
This will be the story of a planet that could have been another proud
and majestic sun with a solar system of its own; it ended up, instead,
in the comic books and the pulp magazines.
We give you MARS CONFIDENTIAL!
I