Under the Covers with Charlie Chan

There’s nothing new about the fictional character Charlie Chan. That Chinese-American detective on the Honolulu police force, with his extensive family and equally large waistline, was introduced to the reading public shortly after World War I. In 1925, an Ohio-born author and playwright named Earl Derr Biggers welcomed the publication of his first Chan novel, The House Without a Key. He went on to compose five more books in the series, further illuminating the personality and professional credentials of his creation, a respected but modest sleuth whose resolution of crimes often depended less on physical clues than on his understanding of human nature. The books also allowed Biggers to demonstrate Chan’s wisdom and wit in a series of memorable aphorisms (examples: “Owner of face cannot always see nose”; “Time only wasted when sprinkling perfume on goat farm”; and “Man is not incurably drowned--if he still knows he’s all wet”), which presaged the proverbs spouted by television’s Thomas Banacek and others.

Chan’s renown as an investigator in print, however, was eventually overshadowed by his renown as a film icon. Biggers’ character starred in more than 40 movies during the first half of the 20th century (and a couple more in more recent years), as well as radio dramas (listen here and here) and a short-lived, 1950s TV series.

But if Charlie Chan as a fictional player isn’t new, Academy Chicago Publishers’ paperback reissues of the six Chan novels certainly are. While Biggers’ works have gone through numerous editions over the last eight decades, few have been as noirishly handsome as Academy Chicago’s line, the final two of which--Charlie Chan Carries On (1930) and Keeper of the Keys (1932)--were released only last month. Credit for their visual appeal lies primarily with cover artist Chris Rahn (photographed above), a 25-year-old San Francisco-born illustrator whose work decorates electronic games as well as book jackets.

I took the opportunity recently to interview Rahn (via e-mail). We talked at length about his work on the Chan novels, his favorite book illustrators, the recent trend toward noir-influenced cover art, and his fondness for the old Conan the Barbarian yarns.

J. Kingston Pierce: Tell us a bit about your background in design and illustration. How did you come to work in this field? Were there people in your family who fueled your interest?

Chris Rahn: Well, both of my parents are very creative, my dad’s a professional photographer, so I was supported in my interests from an early age. I’ve always enjoyed drawing, especially when it involves telling an interesting story, so I decided somewhere in high school to pursue that interest and become an illustrator. After high school I moved back to San Francisco [from my then home in eastern Washington] to attend the Academy of Art, majoring in Illustration.

JKP: Have you always freelanced as a designer, or are there some more conventional jobs in your background?

CR: Well, aside from a summer driving a wheat truck on the family farm when I was 17, I’ve always worked as an illustrator.

JKP: Much of the work you feature on your Web site is fantasy-like. Are you drawn more to fantasy paintings than to other sorts?

CR: I’ve always had a soft spot for fantasy and science fiction, but I enjoy working in all genres. At this point my portfolio reflects what type of clients like my style of painting as much as it does my interests.

JKP: What media do you use to create your illustrations? And what size were your original paintings for the Chan covers?

CR: I work in oils, which has become kind of rare in illustration anymore. That’s probably half the reason I landed the Charlie Chan job--they really wanted someone who could work in the style and media of the old pulp illustrators. The Charlie Chan covers are all 20 inches high by about 15 inches wide.

JKP: Tell us how your work load breaks down. What percentage of your effort goes toward books, and what goes percentage toward periodicals and other projects?

CR: I’d say at this point it’s about 30 percent books and periodicals, and 70 percent gaming.

JKP: What book covers have you created in the past?

CR: Actually, in my short career, I’ve only designed the cover of one book aside from the Charlie Chan series. It was a fantasy novel called Alara Unbroken [by Doug Beyer, 2009].

JKP: So how did you come to be hired by Academy Chicago Publishers? Had you worked for that company before taking on the Chan series?

CR: They had actually contacted my reps at Lindgren & Smith asking about getting another one of their artists, Chuck Pyle, to do the covers. Chuck wasn’t able to take them, but recommended me instead. I suppose it was a bit of a gamble on the part of Academy Chicago Publishers, but I think they were pleased with the results.

JKP: How much did you know about Charlie Chan before you were asked to create cover art for these reissued Earl Derr Biggers’ novels? Had you the read any of the books prior to this assignment? Or had you watched the old Chan films?

CR: I knew the name Charlie Chan, but not with much understanding of the story. When I got the Charlie Chan series I made it a point to quickly read the entire first two books to be sure the covers [I had in mind] would do them justice. I really wanted them to feel authentic.

JKP: And what was your opinion of author Biggers’ characters and storytelling style?

CR: I really enjoyed the books. I believe it was the first two that I read all the way through: The House Without a Key and The Chinese Parrot. I was amazed at how accessible and modern the stories and characters were, considering that they were written so long ago. It was also great to see an Asian man portrayed so early on in a capable and less stereotypical role, even if some of the writing would be considered insensitive by today’s standards.

JKP: Do you usually read books prior to creating their covers?

CR: I do when I can. Sometimes with new books you don’t get the chance. I feel that artists should at least read enough to get a sense of the world the author is working in and the mood of the story. In a lot of ways that’s what a cover should be, a concentrated reflection of the world contained in the book. If you can’t get ahold of the book at all it’s definitely more difficult, and for me has resulted in some very in-depth question-and-answer sessions with art directors.

JKP: What were the things you most wanted to communicate with these new Charlie Chan covers?

CR: I just wanted them to feel dark and compelling, with a bit of a cinematic, film noir mood to them.



Illustrating how his Charlie Chan covers evolved, Rahn sent along these four “roughs” of his artwork for Academy Chicago’s edition of Behind That Curtain (1928). The three black-and-white treatments offer options of what might be seen behind the titular drapery; the fourth is a color workup of the image the publisher liked best. (Click on the images for enlargements.)

JKP: What sorts of requests did the folks at Academy Chicago make in regard to these jackets? Were there a lot of parameters? And how many versions did you go through of each cover?

CR: With this series I would submit three rough black-and-white sketches, then once we settled on one I would do a color study, then move on to the final. In terms of requests, they really wanted the covers to feel like authentic pulp covers done in that classic pulp style. That’s also the reason they had me hand-paint all the lettering for the covers instead of using digitally inserted text.

JKP: All of the Chan books have gone through various incarnations over the years. Were you at all influenced by earlier Chan covers?

CR: While I did look at a few of them, I tried not look at the older covers too much. It’s easy to lose direction when you see someone else’s vision of the same story.

JKP: Do you have favorites among those older Chan covers?

CR: Yes, I’m not sure if it’s the original cover or not, but there’s a great version of The Chinese Parrot that I found that really got me thinking. [Editor’s note: The paperback edition he’s referring to here was actually published by Avon Books in 1952, and is shown at left.]

JKP: Do you often read crime and mystery fiction? Or do you favor different sorts of books?

CR: The books I read are all over the map, everything is fair game (when I have time, that is).

JKP: Do you have favorite book illustrators, both historic and contemporary? If so, who are they?

CR: There are too many to name. Robert McGinnis comes to mind, David Grove, Jon Foster, N.C. Wyeth, [Gerald] Brom.

JKP: I’ve written a good deal about “copycat covers,” multiple modern books that employ the same jacket photographs. This seems to me to be a growing and pernicious trend that’s indicative of publishers’ unwillingness to spend for original art and their disinterest in giving readers something new for their dough. Do you agree? And do you think readers actually notice when they are given the same sorts of covers over and over again?

CR: I guess I can’t blame publishers for trying to save money when book sales are down, but it really is insulting to the reader when the cover to their book isn’t even really the cover to their book. I’m sure the majority of readers don’t notice every time, but some do and I’m sure they feel a bit cheated.

JKP: On the other hand, thanks to Hard Case Crime’s paperback covers, the work Richie Fahey has done for Megan Abbott’s noirish novels, and some other retro-cover ventures over the last few years, there also seems to be slightly more interest in giving books stylish illustrated jackets, rather than generic photographic ones. Do you think that’s a development with a healthy future?

CR: I sincerely hope the trend of newly commissioned covers continues. I have to believe that an original and compelling cover could boost sales of any book.

JKP: Are there authors whose work you would especially like to illustrate in the future?

CR: I would really get a kick out of illustrating one of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories. That would be a lot of fun.

JKP: What is it about Howard’s tales that you find most appealing?

CR: There’s just something about those classic adventure/fantasy stories that call to me--and to a lot of illustrators, I think. They were written in a time when people were less analytical and critical, so they have a touch of naïve excitement that is pretty rare in modern writing. It’s also worth mentioning that some of the best illustrators in the world, past and present, have done work for Conan. Frank Frazetta, Greg Manchess, and Justin Sweet to name a few. It would be amazing to follow in such titanic footsteps.

JKP: You said earlier that you do a lot of work in the gaming field. How did you get into that business?

CR: Well, as I mentioned before, one of my major interests in illustration is in the genre of sci-fi and fantasy. It became obvious pretty early on in art school that the gaming industry is where most of that work was being done, so I had started approaching companies on my own with some success. But once I signed with my reps at Lindgren & Smith, they showed my work around to art directors that they had existing relationships with, and it went from there.

JKP: Can you tell us specifically what doing gaming illustrations entails? And in the course of playing which games might people have spotted your work?

CR: Most of the gaming work I’ve done so far has been for Wizards of the Coast, doing illustrations for a game called Magic: The Gathering. I’ve also done work for Fantasy Flight Games on a [card] game entitled A Game of Thrones, and for Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft.

JKP: How does your work in gaming differ from what you do for books? Does either offer greater freedom or control over your art?

CR: There’s often a bit more creative freedom working in gaming as opposed to books, because the publisher has less riding on each individual piece. With books, publishers will sometimes want to have a real hand in the creative process, and at it’s worst, you can find yourself just being a hired hand, painting out someone else’s vision. Another thing worth mentioning is that with book illustration you have to design your art around text that will be added later--the title, author’s name, etc. In the case of the Charlie Chan books, I was asked to design and hand-paint all of the cover text to give the cover the feel of the old, totally hand-painted pulp covers. It was challenging to say the least, but I certainly learned a lot about typography in the process.

JKP: Has your work on the Charlie Chan covers brought you nibbles from other publishers who appreciate your illustrating style?

CR: It’s always hard to say which pieces spark the interest of publishers and art directors. I’m not sure if any of the work I have coming came directly from interest in the Charlie Chan covers, but I think they definitely helped to round out my portfolio. It definitely makes a difference when potential clients can see that you can work in a variety of ways.

JKP: Without prying too much, can you tell us what an illustrator is paid to create a single book cover? I don’t think most people have the slightest idea. And are there factors other than which publisher is making the assignment that affect the rate of payment?

CR: Well, without getting too specific, the artist’s fee for a book cover usually ranges from $1,000 to $4,000 depending on the publisher, as you said, but also how well-known the artist is and how widely the book will be distributed. And of course, if the artist has a rep, a percentage of the fee will go to them.

JKP: You currently live in Portland, Oregon. Is there a huge art and design community there? Or do you feel rather isolated.

CR: Portland is a really creative city, but in terms of illustration, if you’re not in New York, you’re isolated.

JKP: Have you considering relocating to the Big Apple?

CR: I have considered it, but pretty quickly after leaving art school it became clear that it wasn’t necessary. It used to be that location mattered a lot in illustration and that you had to have face-to-face relationships with clients; but anymore, almost all communication is done over the Internet and clients rarely even bother with a phone call, let alone a meeting. Even the final art is delivered over the Internet now. While part of me wishes that I could work in a more personal way with clients, at least with the way things are now I have the freedom to live anywhere I like.

Taking It Laterally

A couple of months ago, during my interview for this page with Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai, we talked about his company’s first horizontally oriented paperback cover, for the Russell Atwood novel Losers Live Longer. Ardai remarked that horizontal book jackets are “a quirky aberration, and are unlikely ever to catch on.” Ever since, I’ve been on the lookout for more examples of these aberrations.

So far, I’ve collected nine in addition to Losers Live Longer. Most seem to come from either the crime fiction or soft porn genres, although I did find one example from science fiction (the 1956 Ballantine Books edition of Arthur C. Clarke’s Reach for Tomorrow), plus the sideways cover of Debra Marquart’s non-fiction work, The Horizontal World. If you spot more such book fronts, please let me know in the Comments section below. For the time being, I’ll post all of those I have, and add to their number here as I can.

Start Screaming Murder, by Talmage Powell

I hadn’t intended to return to the subject of artist Harry Bennett so soon, less than a year after I highlighted his fine work on Frank Kane’s Johnny Liddell novels. But his illustration for the 1962 Permabooks edition of Start Screaming Murder, by Talmage Powell, has been beckoning from my cover files for the last couple of weeks. And there is no good reason to ignore it any longer.

I mean, the jacket shown above has everything: a bonny, underdressed danseuse; mobster types enjoying the floor show with their fedoras, pistols, and libidinous desires; a distinctive, hand-drawn title; and if it’s not obvious from those components that Start Screaming Murder is a novel of crime and detection, Bennett has superimposed the haunting outline of a weapon over his central figures. It must have taken superhuman restraint for a fan of Powell’s fiction, happening across this novel on a spinner rack during the Kennedy era, to decide there was anything more important to do with his 35 cents than snap it up. Bennett (who, at age 90, is still with us) knew just what crime-pulp readers wanted: flesh, fear, and firearms--not necessarily in that order. No wonder Permabooks hired him to create at least one more Powell book front, for its 1962 paperback version of With a Madman Behind Me.

Both of those novels, incidentally, feature a Tampa, Florida, private eye named Ed Rivers. In their Edgar Award-nominated, 1985 book, Private Eyes, 101 Knights: A Survey of American Detective Fiction, 1922-1984, Michael T. Nietzel and Robert Baker characterize Rivers this way:

Ed Rivers lives alone in a small apartment in a run-down neighborhood on the edges of Ybor City, as the Latin Quarter in Tampa, Florida, is called. Ed, who is in his early forties, has brown eyes and brown straight hair thinning at the crown. He is six feet tall and weighs approximately one hundred and ninety pounds. His face is heavy, bearish, dark tanned and creased. “Women either get a charge from his face or want to run from it. Men fear it or trust it to the hilt” [writes Powell]. Ed’s office in downtown Tampa has a sign on the doors which reads: Nationwide Detective Agency, Southeastern Office, Agent in Charge: Ed Rivers. Ed carries a .38 plus a knife in a sheath at the nape of his neck and he knows how to use both. Like most competent P.I.s, Ed has a friend at Headquarters--Lieutenant Steve Ivey who helps whenever Ed needs a buddy in blue. Ed’s office is in two parts--an outer office with a cracked leather couch and matching chairs and an inner office that has a desk, a filing cabinet and a beat-up Underwood typewriter. The building is old and gloomy and the stairs creak under Ed’s weight. Ed makes his own air-conditioning for his apartment--he puts a 25-pound block of ice in a dishpan, the pan on the table and an electric fan behind the pan pointed at the bed. Once upon a time, seventeen years ago, Ed was a cop in Jersey. Ed also had a girl but she took off with a hood that Ed was after. They raced a fast freight train to a crossing and lost. After drinking and drifting for several years, Ed wound up in Tampa working as a stevedore. Then Nationwide gave him a chance and he took it. He’s been at the P.I. business ever since.

The Ed Rivers series began in 1959 with The Killer Is Mine and continued through four more novels, ending with 1964’s Corpus Delectable. Kevin Burton Smith of The Thrilling Detective Web Site says these books are “all well-written, emotionally satisfying reads, solid entries in the genre, and don’t cheat the reader. You could do a lot worse than dig these puppies up; a definite cut above most of the P.I. novels of the era.” In his Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994), crime novelist William L. DeAndrea remarks that “The well-realized, unusual setting, and Powell’s depiction of Rivers as a thinking and caring P.I., for all his skill with the gun and knife he carries, sets this series apart.” Conclude Nietzel and Baker: “Ed is a good knight, one who is a real pleasure to know.”

Start Screaming Murder is the fourth entry in this series. In the story, Nietzel and Baker explain, “Ed is sapped in an alley near his apartment. When he staggers into his pad he finds tiny Tina La Flor--a midget singer--hiding in his room after coming in over the transom. She was being chased by the sapper--Bucks Jordan--a heavy who was after her body. Ed comes to her aid for seventy-five bucks a day plus expenses--Ed’s going rate. Ed manages to catch Jordan at Tina’s house, beat him up and warn him about letting Tina alone. Bucks agrees and shortly afterwards Lieutenant Ivey shows up to tell Ed that Bucks is dead--murdered by his own blackjack. Now Ed has to find the real murderer as well as Tina who has mysteriously disappeared. In unraveling the knots, Ed is locked in a car trunk, hit on the head umpteen times and ‘angrified’ something awful! And when Ed is mad he really plays rough.”

The back-jacket copy teases the plot this way, emphasizing the obstacles Rivers must surmount in order to retrieve an important belt packed with cold cash:

I swung the wet, flat money belt, enjoying the slap of it
against my leg.

I had gone through a lot to get that belt. I had consorted with midgets and freaks. I had been lied to, framed, been offered the bribery of a beautiful but depraved normal-sized woman’s body.

I had also been beaten senseless twice, another time left for dead, locked in the trunk of an abandoned car.

And now I was home, free.

“It’s a long story,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. “It began with a beautiful little doll who stands three feet tall. Unhappily she had an ache inside her almost as big as she imagined the rest of us to be.

Author Powell’s own story began in tiny Hendersonville, North Carolina, where he consumed his first tentative breaths in 1920. He went on to attend schools in that state as well as in Tennessee, New York, and California before studying writing at the University of North Carolina. Powell began his fiction-creating career in 1942, selling his work mostly to the pulp magazines.

“I just assumed early-on that I would grow up to be a writer,” Powell told an interviewer in 1997--three years before he died at age 79 in an Asheville, North Carolina, hospital on March 9, 2000. “I can’t identify any specific inspiration, or reason, for that state of mind. I received my first blush with ‘publication’ when I was in the fifth grade. I wrote a little story as an English assignment and the next day the teacher varied the usual daily routine to read the story to the class and invite discussion.

“The pulps were an influence simply because they were there, a voracious market, said to consume a billion words a year.

“Magazine fiction in those days supplied entertainment in proportion comparable to TV today. Editors were under constant pressure to fill their ‘books’ (they never referred to the publications as magazines) with stories that would retain and expand their readership in viciously competitive circumstances.

“The result for writers was largely a sellers’ market. Publishers employed staffs of specialist readers to spot signs of talent in the ‘slush pile,’ unsolicited stories that came in ‘over the transom.’ Writers received reports on submissions usually in two weeks or less, and were paid on acceptance. The writer who could steadily produce quickly moved up to double the base rate of a penny a word.”

Powell certainly knew how to produce quickly, but he was also able to write at a discernible cut above many of his contemporaries. Over the next half century, he peddled dozens and dozens of pulp short stories under his own moniker as well as the pseudonyms “Milton T. Lamb,” “Robert Hart Davis,” “Ann Talmage,” and others. He contributed to such “books” as Black Mask, Hollywood Detective, Ranch Romances, Fifteen Western Tales, and Dime Mystery, turning out yarns in pretty much every genre. (“I thought of genre in broad general terms, ... and enjoyed writing in any terminology,” the author said.) “After the demise of the pulps,” explains an article in the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, “Powell continued to write another 300 plus short stories for fiction magazines such as EQMM [Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine], Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Mike Shayne, Manhunt, and Suspense.” He also penned stories and screenplays for television, ghost-wrote the first two books in Ellery Queen’s Tim Corrigan series in the 1960s, and even composed a couple of novels (1969’s The Priceless Particle and 1970’s The Money Explosion) as tie-ins with the popular TV series Mission: Impossible. What’s more, he concocted non-series crime works such as The Man-Killer (1960), The Girl Who Killed Things (1960), and The Raper (1962, credited to “Jack McCready” and with a cover illustration by Rafael De Soto), as well as western novels such as The Cage (1969).

There’s no question, however, that Talmage Powell is best remembered for his mere handful of Ed Rivers private-eye tales. However, he could certainly be remembered for worse. I was just introduced to the Rivers books this year, but am enjoying them for some of the same reasons that I’ve come to appreciate the mid-20th-century novels of Thomas B. Dewey, Brett Halliday, William Ard, Robert Terrall, and others--strong characters, quirky plots, hard-driving narratives, and an originality of voice that came from these authors trailing fewer predecessors in the genre. As my friend Mr. Smith said, “You could do a lot worse than dig these puppies up.”

Peek-a-Boo, I See You

It’s one of the stories I remember best from my early education. During the spring of my seventh-grade year (or maybe it was eighth grade), a group of boys from my class decided to take advantage of a maintenance truck that had been parked idly beneath the high windows of the girl’s gymnasium locker. While others were busy in class, they scampered to the top of that vehicle and slowly lifted their wide eyes above the windowsill. I don’t know how long they remained unseen, but once discovered, their presence set off shrieks that threatened to shatter glass throughout that level of the school. Even before the young ladies caught bare-assed and red-faced could formally complain (along with their mothers) about such indignities, our very proper female principal had identified the guilty parties and called them on the carpet. I don’t remember what disciplinary actions followed, but I do recall thanking my lucky stars that I had not been invited to take part in this pubescent prank. At the least, it saved me from having to endure the ugly looks--and I do mean cut-off-your-balls ugly--that those embarrassed misses shot at the offenders each time they passed in the echoing hallways.

It was from that incident that I learned the meaning of “Peeping Tom.” However, the term goes much farther back in history, to the legend of Lady Godiva. According to the tale, Godiva was the wife of an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon nobleman who had recently imposed onerous taxes on the residents of Coventry, in England’s West Midlands region. Sympathizing with the locals, she asked her hubby to roll back the levies. Finally wearying of her repeated entreaties, he agreed to do so--but only if she would ride a horse naked through the town streets. Godiva took him up on the dare, but first ordered that townspeople remain inside and shutter their windows. Everyone obeyed, it’s said, except for a tailor who couldn’t resist a glimpse of the noblewoman’s beauty as she rode by concealed only by her cascading hair. The story has it that Godiva’s husband made good on his promise, while the reckless voyeur--thereafter known as Peeping Tom--was struck blind for his transgression.

Usually voyeurism doesn’t result in one losing his or her eyesight. (Thank goodness.) But it can lead to legal action. Only this last summer, for instance, a video circulated on the Internet showing Erin Andrews, a 31-year-old ESPN sideline reporter, curling her long blond hair and putting on makeup while standing nude in front of a hotel mirror. The quality of the image wasn’t great, but that’s partly because it was shot without the subject’s knowledge, through a modified hotel room keyhole. When Andrews learned of this footage, she complained of invasion of privacy, and ESPN made an effort to strike the video from numerous Web sites. Just last week, 48-year-old Michael David Barrett was arrested in Chicago for stalking the ESPN “siren” and shooting eight videos of her through hotel keyholes in Nashville, Tennessee, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The Andrews saga sent me back to my collection of vintage paperback jackets. Believe it or not, the 20th century produced a whole genre of “Peeping Tom covers.” Some decorated cheap books designed for “adult reading,” including a number by the prolific Orrie Hitt (The Peeper, I Prowl by Night, Too Hot to Handle, The Love Season, Peeping Tom, etc.). Others fronted works by Clifton Adams (Whom Gods Destroy), Harold Q. Masur (Bury Me Deep), and Stephen Ransome (Some Must Watch). A couple of specimens were added in more recent years by Hard Case Crime (House Dick, by E. Howard Hunt, and The Last Quarry, by Max Allan Collins)--obvious odes to the genre, conceived by publisher Charles Ardai and his team of talented artists.

Within this genre of book covers, there seem to be three varieties. The first offers glimpses of titillating action through keyholes--the sort of action Ms. Andrews’ stalker was undoubtedly hoping to capture. Jay de Bekker’s Keyhole Peeper (Beacon, 1952)--shown at the top of this post--is a splendid example. “De Beeker” was in fact a pseudonym used by pulp novelist Prentice Winchell (1895-1976), who also published as “Spencer Dean” and, perhaps most memorably, as “Stewart Sterling.” For more than two decades, from the early 1940s through the mid-’60s, Winchell wrote New York City-based series featuring fire marshal Ben Pedley (Five Alarm Funeral), department store troubleshooter Don Cadee (The Scent of Fear), and Manhattan hotel security chief Gil Vine (Dead Right, aka The Hotel Murders). The author evidently had a particular interest in hotel sleuthing; in 1954, he and co-author Dev Collans published I Was a Hotel Detective, a non-fiction work described as “a startling exposé of life in a big-city hotel.” Keyhole Peeper appears not to be a Vine book, but instead a standalone novel. “A house detective spills his guts,” announces its front-cover teaser. “Behind every door lay a temptation!” Another description of the story’s plot reads: “It was not easy for Holcumbe to make the grade as house detective. Day and night he had to cope with party girls, hustlers, con men ... but toughest of all was his battle with himself.”

At least, if we’re to judge from the jacket of Keyhole Peeper, he didn’t lack for entertainment during the course of that battle.

The second sort of Peeping Tom cover involves windows through which males catch furtive, often hungry ganders at women in various stages of undress. There are many of these, though few are quite as distinctive as the front of Bantam’s 1949 edition of Dead Ringer, by Fredric Brown (an entry in his Ed and Am Hunter private-eye series), shown below. One of my personal favorites in this subgenre, though, is the jacket from Frances Loren’s Bachelor Girl (Beacon, 1963), which was painted by Robert Maguire. It’s unusual in that the person treated to a surreptitious sighting of supple feminine flesh through glass is the reader, rather than some character in the book.

Finally come the jackets, such as that on Max Collier’s 1962 novel, Thorn of Evil (illustrated by Paul Rader), in which men avail themselves of salacious perspectives from elsewhere than behind glass. And get away with it--unlike my young classmates in school.

All I can say, before you scroll down any further, is “enjoy the view.” Just click on the covers to bring up enlargements.















(Incidentally, I owe credit to the Web site Vintage Paperbacks: Good Girl Art, where I discovered several of the jackets featured in this post. Thanks, as well, to critic and Rap Sheet contributor Dick Adler, who sent me one or two other of the covers.)

A Gem of a Murder, by Carlton Keith

Harry Schaare isn’t as well-recognized an American paperback artist as, say, Robert McGinnis or Robert Maguire, Mitchell Hooks or Rudolph Belarski. But as evidenced by his outstanding cover illustration for the 1959 Dell edition of A Gem of a Murder, penned by Carlton Keith (aka Keith Robertson), Schaare was no less adept than those other painters at delivering punch, foreboding, violence, and dark seduction within the compact frame of a book front.

Born in Jamaica, New York, in May 1922, Schaare is said to have studied architecture at New York University, but graduated from the Pratt Institute, a prominent art school, in 1947. One Web site says that during World War II, “he served as a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps and has since worked as an artist for the U.S. Air Force.” During the post-war years, as cheap paperback crime-fiction releases flooded onto the market, Schaare took assignments to illustrate the jackets of both hard- and softcover books from publishers such as Avon, Dell, Monarch, Popular Library, Bantam, and Signet. He also did a lot of work for magazines, not only for The Saturday Evening Post, Boy’s Life, Sports Illustrated, and Reader’s Digest, but also for periodicals--Male, as one example, and Action Life--that were geared primarily toward men with a taste for adventure, or at least a taste for reading about other men who led adventurous lives.

“Schaare was comfortable with just about any subject matter, from noir stories to westerns, romance to suspense,” explains the Web site of Scottsdale, Arizona’s Jay and Carole Rosenblatt Artistic Gallery, which represents some of his fine-art pieces. (To view more examples of his non-book work, click here.) In the crime-fiction field, Schaare’s paintings graced paperback novels by such familiar authors as Robert Kyle (Nice Guys Finish Last), Bruno Fischer (Stairway to Death), George Harmon Coxe (Man on a Rope), and John Trinian (né Zekial Marko, The Big Grab). Two of my favorite Schaare jackets--for Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Judge and His Hangman and Thomas Wills’ You’ll Get Yours--are shown on the right. Other of this artist’s covers can be seen here, here, and here.

The jacket illustration Schaare created for A Gem of a Murder--a novel originally published in 1958 as The Diamond-Studded Typewriter--boasts the two most vital components for a mid-20th-century paperback front: a shapely femme fatale, and the suggestion of violence. The woman on the cover, complete with soft cocked hip, burning cigarette, and conspicuous air of indifference, contrasts dramatically against the less well-defined background image of a fin-tailed coupe and two men, one of whom has clearly been hurt. Or perhaps killed. While we don’t know the cause of his injuries, at first glance, we can guess that it has something to do with Schaare’s red-wrapped vamp.

That’s so often the way these things happen.

I don’t own a copy of Carlton Keith’s A Gem of a Murder, and have had difficulty finding out much about this story’s plot. However, the teaser line on the front of Dell’s 1959 paperback edition--“The dead man had a seamy secret life, and a fortune in stolen jewels”--provides some clues. As might a too-abbreviated synopsis of an episode from the 1958-1959 NBC-TV series The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen. It seems that for the December 5, 1958, installment of that Friday night show, Manfred B. Lee and Frederick Dannay--creators of brainier-than-thou amateur sleuth Ellery Queen--adapted Carlton Keith’s tale for the small screen. Unfortunately, the synopsis of their own “The Diamond-Studded Typewriter” reads only: “Alice Anthony asks handwriting expert Jeff Green to help her prove that the late James Gavin is her father, who deserted her and her mother years ago.”

It’s much easier finding out about author Carlton Keith/Keith Robertson himself. According to the Web site of the University of Iowa Libraries, which has archived at least some of his correspondence and typescripts,

Keith Carlton Robertson was born in Dows, Iowa, in 1914. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1937 and served in World War II in both [the] Atlantic and Pacific theatres as the captain of a destroyer. He stayed in the Naval Reserve until his retirement at age 62. He married Elizabeth Woodburn, a rare books dealer, and they had one son and three daughters.

Following World War II, Robertson turned his hand to writing fiction for children. He saw his first novel, Ticktock and Jim, published in 1948, and thereafter composed a series of four books about a pair of trouble-attracting New Jersey boys, Neil and Swede, beginning with The Mystery of Burnt Hill (1952). Yet Robertson is better remembered for penning five novels about Henry Reed, the young son of a U.S. diplomat, who spent his summers with his grandparents in New Jersey trying to think up money-making schemes for himself and his slightly more junior, tomboyish friend, Midge Glass. “In all of the books,” explains Wikipedia, “events spiral out of control, leading to chaotic and humorous misadventures. Henry and Midge are usually the unintentional cause of these adventures, although they’re not deliberately mischievous.” The first Henry Reed novel, Henry Reed, Inc. (1958), won the William Allen White Children’s Award in 1961 (bestowed by a vote of Kansas schoolchildren), and Henry Reed’s Babysitting Service (1966) picked up that same commendation in 1969. The last entry in the series, Henry Reed’s Think Tank, saw print in 1986.

In addition to those children’s adventures, Robertson wrote half a dozen adult murder mysteries as “Carlton Keith.” The Diamond-Studded Typewriter was his first. Another, 1966’s The Crayfish Dinner (aka The Elusive Epicure), was featured in Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime (1971) as one of 90 mystery and suspense novels, published between 1900 and 1975, that the authors deemed “classics of crime.” Periodically, you’ll happen across one of the Keith standalones--the last of which was A Taste of Sangria (1968)--at a used bookstore or flea market; and they’re frequently available through online book retailers. But they’ve been largely forgotten by readers.

Author Robertson himself disappeared in 1991, succumbing to cancer in Hopewell, New Jersey, less than a year after the demise of his wife. But as far as I can tell from doing research on the Web, the artist whose work helped sell A Gem of Murder off bookstore shelves--artist Harry Schaare--is still alive at age 87.

Go, Honeylou, by Thomas B. Dewey

Let’s get one thing straight first: Thomas B. Dewey was not the fairly liberal Republican governor of New York who ran for the U.S. presidency in 1948 and--despite most predictions and one famously incorrect newspaper headline--lost badly to Democratic incumbent Harry S. Truman. No, that was Thomas E. Dewey. The author under consideration here is Thomas B. (for Blanchard) Dewey, whose two-decades-long career, stretching from the 1940s through the ’60s, left us with more than three dozen novels, most of them featuring one of two private detectives: the memorably compassionate Mac, and the happily married Pete Schofield, the latter of whom is responsible for the crime-solving in Go, Honeylou (1962).

Dewey was born in the Indiana town of Elkhart on March 6, 1915, and is said to have traveled widely through the American Midwest as a young man. According to the Edgar Award-nominated book Private Eyes, 101 Knights: A Survey of American Detective Fiction, 1922-1984, by Michael T. Nietzel and Robert Baker (1985), Dewey

received a Bachelor of Science in Education degree from Kansas State Teacher’s College (now Emporia State) in 1936 and did graduate work at [the University of] Iowa in 1937 and 1938 before moving to California, where he received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1973. Dewey held a number of writing and editorial jobs during his career, including a stint with the [U.S.] State Department, a magazine editorship, and several years with a Los Angeles advertising agency. He also taught English at Arizona State University for several years before turning to freelance writing on a full-scale basis.

Another source says this author was married twice, first to Maxine Morley Sorensen in 1951, and then again in 1972, to Doris L. Smith.

Dewey’s debut novel was Hue and Cry (1944), which concerned “a small-town girl who finds herself pregnant and unmarried.” It introduced readers to Singer Batts, a Shakespearean scholar and bibliophile who owns a small hotel in the fictional town of Preston, Ohio. Like Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe, Batts “is given a full slate of eccentricities,” observed critic Jon L. Breen in his Dewey profile for the Summer 2008 edition of Mystery Scene magazine: “his hobby is studying historical murder cases; he compulsively writes to lonely-hearts clubs; in deliberate reversal of the Wolfe pattern, he is painfully thin owning to a tendency not to eat; he drinks only to face contemporary murder.” The humble Batts is “one of the most reluctant detectives who ever tracked down criminals,” added Ray Broadus Browne in Heroes and Humanities: Detective Fiction and Culture (1986). He “does not like having his reading interrupted and often will not pay attention to anything said or done to him before he has finished a chapter in a book because he ‘can’t stop in the middle of a marginal note.’ Yet when on the trail of criminals Batts is witty, clever, and unrelenting as well as slothful. As is his hard-nosed helper, the manager [of his hotel], Joe Spinder.” Dewey continued interrupting Batts’ peaceful reading through three more novels--As Good as Dead (1946), Mourning After (1950), and Handle with Fear (1951)--before leaving him to the cool company of his bookshelves.

Halfway through the Batts and Spinder series, Dewey gave birth to a different sort of detective, of hard-boiled heritage but with a strong empathetic side that would later arouse favorable comparisons with Ross Macdonald’s Los Angeles private eye-cum-therapist, Lew Archer. The single-monikered “Mac” was “a former Chicago police officer forced out of the department because he was too honest. ... [He] solved a case that the powers-that-be wanted to quash,” recalled Bruce F. Murphy in The Encyclopedia of Murder and Mystery (1999). “Mac,” continued Murphy, “is the fairly sensitive lonely guy of most good hard-boiled fiction, a sort of junior [Philip] Marlowe. He does not indulge in misogyny nor become caught up in saccharine romances, which makes many of the books still readable.” The character also claimed a modest streak a country mile wide. For instance, during his initial appearance, in 1947’s Draw the Curtain Close (aka Dame in Danger), Mac described himself as “just a guy. I go around and get in jams and then try to figure a way out of them. I work hard. I don’t make very much money and most people insult me one way or another. I’m thirty-eight years old, a fairly good shot with small arms, slow-thinking but thorough and very dirty in a clinch.” The fact that Dewey concealed his protagonist’s surname (perhaps revealing it finally in 1969’s The Love-Death Thing, when the sleuth asks a telephone operator to pass along a message from “Mac Robinson”) suggests he wanted his Windy City gumshoe to serve as an Everyman witness to the woes and family dramas of his era. That same intent lay behind Lew Archer, envisaged by Macdonald as a “selfless chameleon” who “likes to move through society both horizontally and vertically, studying people like an anthropologist.”

Over the course of more than two decades, Dewey produced 17 Mac novels. The best of those might be 1954’s The Mean Streets (which critic Breen counts among the 25 best private-eye novels of all time), A Sad Song Singing (1963), How Hard to Kill (1962), and Deadline (1966). But I also enjoyed The Case of the Chased and the Unchaste (1958), which sends Mac off to sunny California to help an obdurate film producer whose daughter appears threatened with abduction.

It’s for his Mac novels that Dewey is best remembered nowadays. But Mac was not this author’s final series protagonist, nor--frankly--was he the most fun. That description better fits Pete Schofield, who starred in nine screwballish adventures, beginning with And Where She Stops (1957). As Breen explained in Mystery Scene:

A light-hearted character with little in common with Mac save his first-person style, Pete is married to a beautiful redhead named Jeannie. Married private eyes are relatively rare. Brett Halliday had tried a similar situation early in the Michael Shayne series, but madcap Phyllis was such an irritating character, he wisely killed her off. Jeannie is much easier to take.

Though Mac is not without humor--he can occasionally get off a risible wisecrack--the Chicago op is a pretty serious fellow. Pete, whose base of operations is [California’s] San Fernando Valley, has a much better time, his cases tending toward the farcical. While Dewey’s attempts at humor in the Singer Batts series had fizzled rather badly, in the Schofield books he handles the comic mystery very well. In every case, Pete finds beautiful, voluptuous women, often in various states of undress, surrounding him, but in a rare hard-boiled tribute to marital bliss, he always stays true to Jeannie. When Pete races off to work on a case, Jeannie goes through the motions of objecting, but on the whole she is amazingly tolerant of his private-eye lifestyle. And not surprisingly, she has the frequent
urge to join in.

That’s precisely what happens in Go, Honeylou. Schofield takes $500 from Pierce Bonwell, an itinerant tent-revival preacher from Texas, in exchange for his driving north to San Francisco with Bonwell’s beautiful, too-trusting, 19-year-old blonde niece, Honeylou, and depositing her there with her “aunt” Cindy. One look at Honeylou (“Six feet of honeysuckle and magnolia; buttermilk, biscuits, and bourbon”), and Jeannie is glad she decided to come along for the ride. It’s pretty slow going at first, what with stops for hearty repasts and Honeylou taking time out for five-mile-long runs down the highway in her skin-hugging shorts and abbreviated sweatshirts (behavior guaranteed to slow traffic to a rubbernecking crawl). However, when Schofield is clobbered by a mountain of malevolence known as Eddie, and the girl and Jeannie are snatched, the pace of Dewey’s storytelling really picks up. The private investigator doesn’t even wait long enough to fill the local cops in on this kidnapping’s specifics, before speeding off toward the Golden Gate, where he thinks--or at least hopes--Eddie has taken them. Predictably, Aunt Cindy turns out to be something other than the generous relative Schofield was led to expect; she also turns out to be no longer breathing. And though our hero finally retrieves his spouse and his “bright-eyed and burstin’” young charge, he can’t keep them safe, but instead winds up imprisoned along with the women in a backwoods cabin, under the watchful gaze and firepower of Eddie and his quick-tempered Mexican partner, Ampara. Whether the captives can escape depends on Schofield’s deviousness--and maybe his seductive skills as well.

While this plot isn’t the newest thing under the sun, the story’s madcap aspects and the playful relationship between Pete and Jeannie Schofield make Go, Honeylou a pleasurable read. Along with the nonsensical but entertaining Too Hot for Hawaii (1960), the wonderfully titled The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees (1963), and Only on Tuesdays (1964), Go, Honeylou probably ranks among the finest of the Schofield novels. Oh, and The Golden Hooligan (1961) isn’t half bad either.

Until only a few years ago, when I stumbled upon a first-edition Dell paperback copy of Go, Honeylou stacked among my late father-in-law’s books, I’d never read anything by Thomas B. Dewey. The fact that my wife’s father had enjoyed his work didn’t guarantee that I would like it; our tastes in crime fiction often diverged. But I was finally won over by this book’s cover, with its eye-catching suggestions of pulchritude and peril.

The jacket illustration is credited to Victor Kalin (1919-1991), known as one of “the mainstays of mystery cover art for [publishers] Dell and Berkley in the 1960s. Like [William] Teason [who did many Agatha Christie book fronts], a Kalin cover was often a still life composed of clues from the story. Other of his works, however, focused rather on the setting of the story--a sinister ruin or a mist-shrouded harbor. He sometimes even managed to combine the two approaches.” At his Mystery Fiction History site, Michael E. Grost provides more information about this artist’s style:

Some of the best mystery novel covers of the [1960s] were painted by Victor Kalin. If Teason’s works could be described as “cheery,” Kalin’s works could be called “dramatic.” He illustrated many Mary Roberts Rinehart books. Sometimes he would follow the Teason approach, and show a still life of clues on the cover--for example, for The Great Mistake. ... But more often Kalin’s approach was architectural, showing buildings and landscape scenes from the story. His illustration for The Window at the White Cat is a visual pun. The White Cat is a somewhat crooked political club; in the novel it is housed in an urban building. Kalin makes it an elaborate white house for his cover, somewhat Gothic and gingerbready. But if you look at the cover at a distance, the house turns into the face of a white cat. The windows of the house become the cat’s eyes, etc. It is a very clever visual illusion.

Kalin’s portfolio extended well beyond these examples, however. He illustrated novels by Kelley Roos (The Blonde Died Dancing), Helen Reilly (The Opening Door), Louis Falstein (Slaughter Street), Frank Kane (A Real Gone Guy), Donald Hamilton (Assignment: Murder), Harold Q. Masur (Murder on Broadway), and so many other crime writers. In addition, Kalin’s illustrations can be seen fronting terror novels such as The Druid Stone, by Simon Majors.

For Go, Honeylou, Kalin created what appears to be a reflected-in-the-mirror image of the titular Texas miss, slipping out of a dress while gripping a horn-handled revolver. That illustration isn’t inspired by any scene in the novel that I recall, but it works splendidly. And it’s accompanied by an inset image of detective Pete Schofield. While the Schofield books carried jackets not only by Kalin, but also by Barye Phillips, Ron Lesser, and others, that little Schofield badge--or a slight variation on it--was consistent on the Dell paperback releases of this series. It assured readers that they were in for a criminally good, if sometimes kooky reading experience.

In addition to the three series mentioned here, Thomas B. Dewey composed short stories for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and other periodicals, and standalone novels that were published both under his own name (such as My Love Is Violent [1956], Hunter at Large [1961], and A Season for Violence [1966]) and under the pseudonym Tom Brandt (Run, Brother, Run, 1954). By the time of his death in 1981, at age 66, Dewey had seen one of his Mac novels, 1953’s Every Bet’s a Sure Thing, turned into an episode (“Death Is a Double Cross”) of the 1971-1976 William Conrad P.I. TV series, Cannon, and he’d been elected a director-at-large of the Mystery Writers of America. Unlike the 1948 GOP presidential candidate, this Dewey was clearly a winner.

Which makes it particularly regrettable that his oeuvre has fallen out of print. Dewey, opine co-authors Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller in 1001 Midnights: The Aficionado’s Guide Mystery and Detective Fiction, is “one of detective fiction’s severely underrated writers.” Adds Jon L. Breen in Mystery Scene: “Of those writers who worked away at the private-eye form for a score or more novels, Dewey ranks in the top handful.” If you get a chance to read these novels, follow my lead: take a chance and dive right in.

A Gun in His Hand, by Victor Rosen

Usually, when I sit down to comment on a book for this blog, I have all sorts of information ready at hand: background about the author, as well as the cover artist and the work’s plot. In this latest case, however, I start with comparatively little. Most of what I know about A Gun in His Hand--a slender, 150-page work by Victor Rosen--comes from a review posted on Amazon.com, contributed by New York reader Michael A. Coluccio. He describes the book as an

Interesting, well-researched biography of Francis [“Two Gun”] Crowley, a small-time car thief and stickup artist who became the object of a statewide manhunt after he cold-bloodedly shot and killed a Nassau County, New York, police officer in 1931. Crowley and his partner-in-crime, Rudolph “Fats” Duringer, who was himself a suspect in the shooting death of a dance-hall hostess whom he murdered after she resisted his advances, were traced to an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side on May 7, 1931. The ensuing gun battle between the fugitives and literally hundreds of policemen drew record crowds of onlookers and lasted for hours before the two were finally overpowered and taken into custody.

Drawing on that headline-grabbing violence, Victor Rosen (who also wrote under the pseudonym “Victor Zorin”) penned what Coluccio says is a non-fiction book “definitely worth reading.” A Gun in His Hand follows Crowley (described as possessing “the face of a choirboy, the mind of an imbecile, and the heart of a diamond-back rattlesnake”) and Duringer as they are “separately tried for murder, convicted, and electrocuted at the death house at Sing Sing Prison.”

You can see that artist Barye Phillips had plenty of material to work with when paperback publisher Gold Medal Books assigned him to create an appropriate--and appropriately tension-filled--jacket for its 1951 edition of A Gun in His Hand (shown above). Phillips, according to one online biography, “was a prolific cover artist perhaps best known for his work on Fawcett’s Gold Medal Books, including most notably Richard [S.] Prather’s Shell Scott series. He also did covers for Avon, Bantam, Dell, Pocket, and Signet. He began his career in paperback cover illustration in 1943 for Pocket Books after working in Columbia Pictures’ advertising department. Phillips eventually became known as ‘The King of Paperbacks’ due to the speed and the variety of his work--he typically produced four cover paintings per week!” Among Phillips’ other outstanding creations were the jackets of Hill Girl, by Charles Williams; Danger in Paradise, by A.S. Fleischman; The Dangerous American, by A.E. Hotchner; and Man Divided, by Dean Douglas.

There’s no knowing now how long it took Phillips to come up with A Gun in His Hand’s front, but it doesn’t look like a rush job. It looks, well, fantastic! The bullet-riddled windowpane, the broken and falling curtains, the rifle cast aside on the bed, the torn and bloodied shirt on the masculine figure (who I assume was meant to be 5-foot-tall “Two Gun”), the appearance of fear but fortitude on the face of that delightfully underdressed blonde at his back, and all that gunsmoke fingering through the room--these were the ideal artistic components to draw a passing post-war reader out of his post-work doldrums and get him to fork over some change for a copy. The only element marring Phillips’ work is that repulsive white box in the lower right-hand corner, with its ridiculous teaser, “Two Women ... Two Guns ... and Two Deaths to Die.” Of course dying involves deaths; didn’t Gold Medal have somebody with copy-editing skills on hand to prevent such silly lines from appearing on its book covers? And couldn’t the art director have preserved the integrity of Phillips’ powerful illustration by running any such teaser across the white bedspread, rather than installing a clumsy box on the cover?

Phillips had to have been pissed about this mistreatment of his otherwise fine work. Maybe not as pissed as Crowley and his “moll” were about being shot at through a window, but pissed nonetheless.

Crime on His Hands

I couldn’t fail to feature on this page the cover of Russell Atwood’s paperback novel, Losers Live Longer. Not only is Losers the brand-new follow-up to East of A (1999), the “tough little shaggy dog tale” that introduced New York City private eye Payton Sherwood and launched the authorial career of Atwood, a former managing editor of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine; but the book boasts a jacket illustrated by the renowned American artist Robert McGinnis--and a horizontal jacket, to boot.

“Horizontal covers were never really popular,” explains Charles Ardai, the editor of Manhattan-based Hard Case Crime (HCC), which publishes Losers Live Longer. “They’re a quirky aberration, and are unlikely ever to catch on. But I happen to like them.” Asked to name his favorite horizontal book front, Ardai (left) says it “may be the Regency edition of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters.” (A few other examples of the breed can be found here.)

When it comes to crime-fiction covers, Hard Case claims at least a modicum of celebrity. Ever since Ardai, the founder and CEO of Internet service provider Juno, and writer-designer Max Phillips launched the paperback-only imprint in 2004, it has been accumulating acclaim in almost equal measure for its pulpish, sexy, fast-moving plots and its wonderfully lurid jackets, all suggestive of the cheap softcover originals that were churned out by Gold Medal and other publishing houses after World War II, and were peddled in corner stores and truck stops. Many of HCC’s titles have been reprints of long-out-of-print work by veteran wordsmiths such as Lawrence Block, Wade Miller, David Dodge, Richard S. Prather, Donald E. Westlake, A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner), and David Goodis. But peppered amongst those classics have been fresh and equally tough tales by Max Allan Collins, Dominic Stansberry (The Confession), Christa Faust (Money Shot), and the writing team of Ken Bruen and Jason Starr. HCC has also issued a few never-before-seen works, such as Honey in His Mouth, by Doc Savage writer Lester Dent, and The Dead Man’s Brother, by fantasy novelist Roger Zelazny.

Ardai wasn’t even a gleam in his parents’ eyes when many of HCC’s books first debuted. (“As my mathematician friends would put it, I’m 39.8 years old,” he concedes. “Keeping 40 at bay through heroic measures.”) Yet this New York native, Columbia University graduate, and Edgar Award-winning author has become something of a, well, savior for crime and mystery fiction of the mid-20th century. More than a few novelists, critics, and bloggers, when lamenting the unavailability of particular volumes by long-forgotten authors, have uttered variations on the lament, “If only Hard Case Crime would bring them back into print ...” Because Ardai works closely with illustrators old and new to create his line’s distinctive covers (some of which are now available for purchase on T-shirts), he has also gained recognition as a historian of paperback jackets.

Recently, I took the opportunity to interview Charles Ardai via e-mail. We discussed the origins of Hard Case Crime, how he works with cover artists old and new, how idiosyncratic modern American tastes affect his line’s book fronts, and the future of both HCC and its newer sister line, The Adventures of Gabriel Hunt.

J. Kingston Pierce: Can I assume that, ever since you started planning Hard Case Crime, you’ve been concerned about the covers of these books? How important do you think the jackets are both to selling your books and establishing the Hard Case “brand”?

Charles Ardai: They’re absolutely essential. Hard Case Crime wouldn’t be Hard Case Crime without the covers, any more than a James Bond picture would be a James Bond picture without Monty Norman’s theme music, or a BLT would be a BLT without the B. In each case, you’re looking at an integral element that adds flavor and color and texture and juice. (Note to self, idea for new product:
bacon juice.)

Cover art was always central to pulp fiction--back when these stories were sold primarily on newsstands in crowded train stations and such, you wouldn’t get your two bits out of a commuter’s pocket if your cover didn’t jump off the rack, grab the sucker by his lapels, and drag him to the cash register. The same was true when it came time to get readers to pick your paperback original out of the wire rack at their local drugstore, and it’s no less true today. Most book covers are tedious, visually unimaginative, tired; they drone nasally instead of singing a siren song. Our covers are designed to tease, to tempt, to infect with curiosity. To make the reader say, “I sure hope the story behind that cover is good, but even if it’s not, I’ve still got to get that book, just to have that cover on my shelf.”

JKP: So what are the most important elements of a Hard Case cover? Beautiful women? Dangerous men? The opportunities for seduction? The certainty of violence? What??

CA: How does the old song go from The Night They Raided Minsky’s? “Take 10 terrific girls/But only nine costumes/And you’re cooking up something grand.” All but one of our first five dozen covers features a beautiful woman, in whole or in part, and the one that didn’t was one of our worst sellers. It’s not an original thought but ... sex sells. Some of our covers show only one person, some two, some three or four; some feature action, while others are very still; some have an atmosphere of menace while others are more seductive. But they all have a gorgeous femme fatale, usually with less clothing on than you might wear to church.

The other element that’s critical isn’t one of content but of style: The painting has to be a classical painting done in the style of the mid-century masters--McGinnis, [Robert] Maguire, [Rudolph] Belarski, [James] Bama, [James] Avati, [Rafael] De Soto, and so on. The fleshiness is critical; the dimensionality; the painterly brushstrokes; the classical rendering of anatomy. No airbrushing and for god’s sake, nothing digital. Just oil paint on canvas, or egg tempera made with real eggs, and the hand of a master on the brush. That’s what gives our covers their look.

JKP: Back in 2006, you told Denise Hamilton of the Los Angeles Times: “It’s ironic. You could show a completely naked woman on a paperback cover in the 1950s, as long as she was facing away from the viewers, but today, covers that risqué wouldn’t fly with at least some retailers.” What has changed over the last 50 years? Why were the covers less puritanical during the Eisenhower and Kennedy decades than they are now?

CA: Since we’ve established that I’m less than 40 years old (even if only by a few months), I don’t know that I’m qualified to say what things were really like 50 years ago--but I get the sense that mild titillation was acceptable in selected semi-public locations then in a way it isn’t today. Even 30 years ago, when I was a kid, I remember going to the local barbershop and poring wide-eyed through the pile of “men’s magazines” available for patrons to peruse while waiting for a chair to open up. I can’t imagine a barbershop getting away with that today, especially one that services both adults and children. But back then, it was accepted--even expected. I suspect the same was true of the paperback racks in drugstores. We’re not talking hardcore pornography here--just the occasional bare bottom or maybe, once in a blue moon, a hint of a nipple through a too-thin top. No one’s ever been hurt by seeing either. But today’s retailers are so terrified of giving offense (and with justification--witness the foofaraw over Janet Jackson’s instant of exposure) that they’d rather play it safe and often won’t carry a book if the cover contains the slightest hint of something that might offend someone. (Over the years we’ve been told “no bare feet,” and “some stores won’t take bellybuttons,” and “you can’t show side cleavage”--honestly, I didn’t even know what “side cleavage” was, or at least that there was a name for it. But there you go. There’s a name for everything, and if it might conceivably give someone an erection, there’s a store that won’t tolerate seeing it on a book cover.) I try to ignore these comments as much as possible and just have our painters paint the best covers they can. Once in a while I’ll tell Bob McGinnis, “Could you close her robe up a little bit?” but that’s as bad as the censorship gets.

JKP: How far have you tried to push the bounds of what you think readers or booksellers will accept? Can you give specific examples of Hard Case covers that test the limits? And in what respects do those covers test public acceptance?

CA: We have a book coming out in 2010 called Quarry’s Ex [written by Max Allan Collins] and its cover features a beautiful woman standing topless in a swimming pool while a man with a gun looms over her. We’re looking down at her and between the angle and the position of her hands, you can’t see any more of her breasts than you would if she were wearing a bikini top--but the fact is, you can tell that she isn’t. (If nothing else, there’s no string around her neck or going across her back.) And there was some discussion about whether it would be too racy--which is silly, really, because you can’t see anything. Believe me, I’ve tried, and you can’t. So I went to the folks at Dorchester Publishing [which handles HCC’s printing and distribution] and asked if they were willing to take a chance on it. And I’m happy to say that they were. It’s probably our most risqué cover to date--and it’s not all that risqué.

Another one I thought might be iffy was the cover for my second Richard Aleas novel, Songs of Innocence [2007], which shows a completely naked woman clutching a large blue teddy bear in front of her--I thought we might take hits for both the nudity and the juxtaposition with an object that suggests childhood. But it was the right image for the story, so we went with it, and we didn’t get any complaints at all.

The one cover we did, bizarrely, get a complaint about once was the cover for Max Phillips’ Fade to Blonde [2004], which someone described as containing a giant penis. I stared at that cover for an hour to try to figure out what this person was talking about, and all I could think of was that maybe thought the woman’s bare, bent left knee somehow looked phallic. It sounds crazy, but then we’re a society that sees Jesus in grilled cheese sandwiches, so anything’s possible.

JKP: You have had success in working with some very famous paperback illustrators, from Robert McGinnis and Glen Orbik, to Ron Lesser and Ken Laager. Given the noteworthiness of your line’s covers, and the concurrent dearth of other publishers wanting equally retro work, have you ever had trouble landing an illustrator you really wanted? Any good stories along those lines?

CA: There are some painters who started their career in the pulps and who are still working today, but who don’t have an interest in going back to their roots. The great James Bama, who’s a sweet, generous, kind man, retired from commercial illustration in 1971 and moved west to Wyoming to become a fine art painter, mostly of Western images. We showed him what we were doing and he was very enthusiastic about it, but he stuck to his guns (literally). He wrote, “Have turned down Malcolm Forbes, Clint Eastwood, and George Lucas, and it gets easier all the time.”

Ray Kinstler similarly felt he’d moved on from the pulp work he’d done half a century ago and didn’t have either the time or desire to dip into that well again.

But the one I’m saddest about is Robert Maguire. I had a good conversation with him shortly before his death [in 2005], and I got the sense that he would really have loved to give it a try, but he felt he couldn’t do it anymore--that any painting he produced wouldn’t have been up to his old standards. I begged him to give it a shot anyway--even a lesser Maguire painting would still have been a marvelous thing to see. But he wouldn’t do it; and then a few months later he was gone.

JKP: I’m particularly interested in McGinnis, as he’s the grand-daddy of the mid-20th-century paperback illustrators. How did you land him for your stable; how much convincing did he really need to work for HCC? And what’s your working relationship with him now, after he’s done several Hard Case covers?

CA: Bob is a joy to work with. He’s working on his 10th cover for us right now, and it’s a very special one, since it’s for one of Brett Halliday’s Mike Shayne novels, and that’s probably the series for which Bob is best known. (That, or the Carter Brown books.)

I first found out that Bob was still painting from Glen Orbik, who suggested I give him a call. I was tongue-tied and uncertain, but I girded myself and picked up the phone--and as soon as we started talking I knew it would be a great relationship. For one thing, he’s a gentleman and a pro and ridiculously modest (even though he has nothing to be modest about); beyond that, he has a real passion for the sort of books we’re publishing and clearly has an enormous amount of fun getting to do this sort of painting again. He doesn’t have a lot of time available--he’s still very heavily in demand--but he’s always made time for us and I’m very grateful for it.

The working relationship is simple: I send him a description of the book and a few weeks later he sends me a batch of sketches the description has inspired. I pick one, say “Put some more clothes on her, please,” and we’re off to the races.

JKP: That Halliday book for which McGinnis is now creating a cover--which Mike Shayne novel is it?

CA: It’s called Murder Is My Business [1945] and it’s my favorite of the series. It’s set during World War II, on the home front, when the mother of an army private killed in a hit-and-run accident down in El Paso [Texas] hires P.I. Mike Shayne to investigate. It’s got a twisty plot like you wouldn’t believe, and everything comes together just right in the end.

JKP: With the attention and applause won by HCC’s covers, do you think other publishers have become more receptive to commissioning retro-style book jackets? Both Megan Abbott’s novels and those by Linda L. Richards (Death Was the Other Woman, Death Was in the Picture) have sported fronts that might have worked on HCC releases (all of them by Richie Fahey). And the new Charlie Chan line from Academy Chicago Publishers offers equally throwback-style art (by Chris Rahn). I’m not sure those jackets would have been green-lighted without HCC’s lead. What do you think?

CA: I do think we’re seeing more retro-style covers now than there were five years ago when we started publishing; I don’t know that we deserve the credit for it, but the wide exposure we have received certainly couldn’t have hurt. Suddenly people were seeing our covers on TV and in newspapers and magazines, and of course in bookstores, and art directors at other publishing houses are apt to be influenced by such things. I know of several cases where one of our painters has been approached for a retro, pulp-style illustration job because an art director has seen his work for us, and I’m thrilled when that happens. I like the idea that we can be a showcase for our artists’ talent.

JKP: Surely you have favorites among the Hard Case paperbacks so far. Which have you liked the best? And which have been most successful in actually selling books?

CA: I couldn’t pick favorites among our artists’ work; I’d offend whoever I didn’t name. But I can tell you some of the covers that have attracted the most comments from the public: Greg Manchess’ covers for The Vengeful Virgin and Fade to Blonde; Glen Orbik’s for The Max and Blackmailer; Robert McGinnis’ for The Girl with the Long Green Heart and The Last Quarry; Sharif Tarabay’s for Killing Castro; Ricky Mujica’s for The Corpse Wore Pasties. There are plenty of others, too. We’ve really only had a handful that have drawn any sort of negative comments, and over the course of five years, that’s pretty remarkable.

JKP: OK, now let me ask you a broader question, since you’re obviously interested in book-cover design: Can you name your five favorite classic crime-fiction book jackets?

CA: Confining myself to paperbacks:

• Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely--the famous
  bedspring cover (Pocket)
• Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon--the infamous bra-removal cover (Pocket)
• Cornell Woolrich (as “William Irish”), Marihuana--green and purple and delicious (Dell)
• Stanley Ellin, The Eighth Circle--a classic McGinnis back (Dell)
• William Campbell Gault, Sweet Wild Wench--great
  composition and color (Crest)

JKP: Every once in a while, I’ve noticed, a Hard Case cover will deliberately suggest some other, classic paperback jacket. Orbik’s cover for David Goodis’ The Wounded and the Slain, for instance, echoed McGinnis’ 1960 Avon Books cover for He and She, written by Edward Le Comte. Lesser’s illustration for Honey in His Mouth, by Lester Dent, is remarkably akin to the cover he himself created for the 1972 paperback edition of Edward S. Aarons’ The Decoy. Undoubtedly, I’m neglecting a few other examples of this trend. How is the decision made to create such echoes of paperback covers past? And does anyone notice except for other illustrators and people like me, who are on the lookout for copycat covers?

CA: I don’t think too many people notice, unless they have your encyclopedic knowledge of the field; but we do like to tuck little Easter eggs into our books when we can, just for the fun of it. The best-known example is the copy of our first John Lange book, Grave Descend, that the woman on the cover of our second John Lange book, Zero Cool, is reading. In the case of the Lesser cover, Ron decided to go back to the original reference photographs he’d shot decades earlier of the model who posed for The Decoy and bring her back for a new appearance some 40 years later. I liked the idea--it seemed fun to me that this woman who is now probably in her 60s would get a second chance to see herself on a book cover.

For the most part, though, we try to give people something they haven’t seen before. It’s hard--there are only so many ways to pose a woman in a way that suggests mystery, suspense, or crime and still fits on a paperback cover while leaving room for type, and since there were hundreds of paperbacks published between 1940 and 1970, almost all those poses have been used somewhere, most of them multiple times.

And of course sometimes you want to remind people of a certain classic image--like when I told Glen Orbik I wanted to do a keyhole cover for E. Howard Hunt’s House Dick, or when we asked Rick Farrell for the giant dice on the cover of [Steve Fisher’s] No House Limit.

JKP: Let’s talk about the cover of Losers Live Longer, Russell Atwood’s P.I. Payton Sherwood mystery, which is due out this week. It’s HCC’s first horizontal cover. It only reads properly when placed on its side, rather than straight up as normal. Why was the decision made for artist McGinnis to create such a cover?

CA: Doing a horizontal cover is something I’d had in mind almost from the start of the line. I was just waiting for the right book to come along, one with a title like Turnabout or On My Side or The Long Way. When Russell Atwood agreed to change the title of his sequel to East of A from Between C and D to Losers Live Longer, I knew we had our sideways cover at last. (It’s “longer,” get it? Ah, never mind.)

And once we decided we were going to do a sideways cover, what better artist than McGinnis to paint it? After all he’d painted one of the few horizontal covers of the golden age--Carter Brown’s The Sad-Eyed Seductress--and he’s famous for the length of his women’s legs. The cover basically designed itself.

JKP: What are the downsides of releasing horizontal covers? How do you think bookstores will react to this deviation from the norm?

CA: So far, everyone who’s seen it has been very enthusiastic. The truth is that most books in bookstores are shelved spine-out anyway, and it’s got a completely ordinary spine. Those few stores that like to shelve our books with the covers facing out can either spend the extra two-and-a-half inches of shelf space necessary to show it horizontally, or they can show it vertically and leave it to the reader to pull it off the shelf and rotate it 90 degrees. Not a big deal either way. And I think the fact that it looks different from other books is a plus. Anything that makes people take a second look at
your books is a plus.

JKP: I notice that the back cover of Losers Live Longer features a slightly different image of the same woman who’s featured on the front. Did you commission that back-jacket art specifically, or was it simply an alternative version of the cover art that you were considering, and couldn’t not use somewhere?

CA: For Losers, we did a photoshoot for Bob and sent him a stack of images of a gorgeous, busty model brandishing a gun on a sofa. There were several poses we both liked and it was very hard to choose among them. Finally we did choose one--but when, a month later, I opened the box from Bob containing the finished painting, I found two paintings and a note explaining that he’d found himself tempted by a second pose and gone ahead and painted both.

Now, when you find yourself with two McGinnis paintings in your hands, you don’t just send one back--you find a way to use them both. And that’s what we did.

JKP: Late last year, you celebrated the issuing of your line’s 50th book, which you’d written: Fifty-to-One. That screwball-noir novel used all of the preceding HCC book titles as chapter headings, and its plot concerned crimes associated with a small book-publishing company in mid-20th-century Manhattan, coincidentally called Hard Case Crime. How did that project come into being?

CA: I wasn’t sure what to do to commemorate the 50th book, but I wanted to do something special, and one of my notions was to get all of our living writers to write a short story, and the twist would be that each writer would tell a new story based on the title of another writer’s book. So, for instance, I sent Stephen King a note suggesting some plots that might go with the title Lemons Never Lie (it could be about a used-car salesman!), and I wrote to Don Westlake with some ideas about what he could do with the title The Colorado Kid (it could be about a boxer!). And basically no one liked this idea ... except me. I had such a blast coming up with new meanings for all our titles that I decided I’d just write the whole book myself and use all 50 titles, and use them in order, too. I love ridiculous challenges like that.

JKP: You wrote Fifty-to-One under your own name. But your two earlier books--Little Girl Lost (2004) and Songs of Innocence--both carried the byline “Richard Aleas.” Why did you adopt that pseudonym, and are you still glad you did?

CA: I did it originally for two reasons: a desire to separate my persona as editor of the line from my persona as author of one of the books in the line, and a desire to participate in the great pulp tradition of writing under fake names. Lawrence Block was Chip Harrison and Paul Kavanagh and Sheldon Lord; Donald Westlake was Tucker Coe and Alan Marshall and (famously) Richard Stark; Evan Hunter was Ed McBain, and even “Evan Hunter” wasn't the name he was born with. I wanted to play, too.

So far, it hasn’t caused any confusion. (It also hasn't been much of a disguise, since I freely acknowledge it. But it's still fun.)

JKP: I read recently in one of your e-mail notes to readers that you plan to reduce the frequency of HCC releases next year. You’ve been putting out one book a month, but you’ll start releasing them on a bimonthly schedule in 2010. Why the change?

CA: A bunch of reasons. I’ve basically been publishing a book a month for five years, and it’s exhausting--we have a total full-time staff of zero, meaning it’s just me doing all the reading, buying all the books, negotiating all the contracts, commissioning all the cover art, getting the art shot and scanned, copy-editing and proofreading every line of every book, doing all the publicity, standing in line at the post office to mail out the author copies, and so on. And I love it--but five years of it will wear anyone out. And when I added the new Gabriel Hunt adventure series on top of it, it was just too much.

Then, too, I’ve had a feeling for a while that we might be glutting the market. Yes, there are some diehards who have read every book we’ve put out--but for every one of those that I hear from, I hear from 10 others who tell me how much they love our books but say they’ve got a dozen or more stacked up waiting to be read. Similarly, it’s hard to get reviewers excited about each new title when just four weeks later there’s going to be another one coming down the pike. Somewhere along the way, the release of a new Hard Case Crime title stopped being a noteworthy or newsworthy event, and just became something that happened like clockwork. My hope is that by publishing less frequently, we’ll manage to command a bit more attention for each title.

And that of course gets us to the subject of sales. The economy is lousy and everyone is suffering; I’m not saying we’re suffering more than anyone else. But our sales have declined, and I’m hopeful that a less frequent schedule, where each title is a bit more of an “event,” might perk our sales up a bit. We do, after all, need to make money; this is a labor of love, but it’s also a business, and if sales drop below a certain level, we won’t be able to keep it going.

So: the bimonthly schedule. Who knows if it will help or hurt in terms of sales--but at least it will give me a chance to breathe a little.

JKP: Can you tell me a bit more about how Hard Case is doing, business-wise? Is it healthy enough?

CA: We work with Dorchester Publishing for production, sales and distribution, and they’ve done a terrific job consistently over the past five years. They handle most of the business issues for us, so we’re insulated from the worst of it. But I know they’re wrestling with the same tough situation all publishers are, and I do think it’s tougher for small houses than large ones. There’s just less of a cushion to fall back on. Fortunately, there are still a lot of readers out there and you can sell enough books to stay afloat if you work very hard at it. But it’s definitely harder now than it was even just a few years ago, and I would not be surprised if Hard Case Crime weren’t around forever. Not to sound noirish and fatalistic, but nothing lasts forever.

That said, even if we were to close up shop tomorrow (which we won’t), I’d feel proud of the work we’ve done. Sixty-plus books in five years, including five Edgar nominees (and one winner), two Shamus winners [Fade to Blonde and Songs of Innocence], nominees for numerous other awards, write-ups in every major newspaper and magazine in the country ... it’s nothing to sneeze at. It’s a hell of a lot more than I ever thought would come of it when Max [Phillips] and I first cooked up the idea for the line. We thought maybe we’d publish six books and that would be the end of it.

JKP: I was surprised to learn that you are going to issue Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Valley of Fear as a Hard Case title in December. I don’t think of Sherlock Holmes as being a hard-boiled fictional protagonist. What led to this release plan?

CA: Like doing a horizontal cover, I’d wanted from very early on to repackage a classic in full Hard Case Crime “drag.” This would be a tip of the hat to the work of publishers like Signet and Lion and Pocket Books, which would publish 25-cent editions of works of literature and try to get people to buy them by slapping the most lurid covers imaginable on them. So, for instance, Signet’s cover for [George] Orwell’s 1984 featured a sultry-eyed dame in an unzipped jumpsuit with a lapel button prominently displaying the word “SEX,” while Lion’s cover for Frankenstein featured a bosomy, lipstick-wearing redhead falling out of an off-the-shoulder dress. And I thought, what classic could we reprint that could amuse people with a comparably inappropriate cover image, but that would also legitimately belong in our line? And that led me to The Valley of Fear [1915], since it is, when you get right down to it, a hard-boiled detective story. Not because Holmes is a hard-boiled character himself, but because half the book isn’t about Holmes at all--it takes place in the U.S. and tells the story of a Pinkerton agent who goes undercover to infiltrate a corrupt fraternal organization that rules a dirty mining town in Pennsylvania. It’s violent and cruel and dark, and it leads to an ending that’s as despairing and doom-laden as any Cornell Woolrich novel. Leslie Klinger, who won the Edgar for his New Annotated Sherlock Holmes [2004], called the book “the first real ‘hard-boiled’ detective story,” and there’s a lot of truth to that. So half the fun of reprinting it is startling people with a cover painting they’ll immediately think is inappropriate for this staid classic, and then the other half of the fun is watching them discover that this staid classic is actually a tough, mean, hard-boiled crime story after all. The old double-switcheroo.

JKP: Tell me the process whereby a vintage novel becomes a Hard Case title. There are lots of older books, yet most never appear in your line. How do you discriminate? What are you looking for in an HCC reprint? And do you mostly search out the rights to reissue older books, or do heirs of the authors come to you with offers?

CA: I’ve been reading crime novels for the better part of 30 years; I started young. And I remember the ones I really loved. When the time comes to do a reprint, I just go to my shelves, pull some books I remember liking, reread them to make sure I’m not misremembering, and then look into how recently they’ve been reprinted and whether the rights might be available. Sometimes I have to drop a book because someone else has brought out an edition recently; other times, I fail to locate the author or the author’s heirs. But generally if I keep at it long enough I manage to turn them up, and though a few authors (or heirs) have said no to us, that’s pretty rare. It took years to find the granddaughter of Steve Fisher, or the three children (by two different wives) of the original Robert B. Parker--but I found them eventually. And the detective work necessary to track them down can be fun in and of itself.

Once in a while we’re approached by an author or his children--but for the most part that hasn’t worked out. I’m always grateful to get suggestions and I always follow up on them ... but most books just aren’t good enough to reprint, and we have to say no to nearly as large a fraction of reprint suggestions as we do of new submissions.

JKP: Can you give me an example of an author whose descendants you’ve failed so far to turn up?

CA: Sure. Ed Lacy, whose real name was Leonard Zinberg--no luck.

JKP: Not long ago, I had the chance to interview Ben Terrall, the son of vintage paperback detective novelist Robert Terrall (aka Robert Kyle). Two years ago, you added Terrall’s Kill Now, Pay Later (one of his Ben Gates mysteries) to your lineup. Can you tell me specifically how that arrangement came about?

CA: That’s actually one of the rare exceptions to the rule: That was a case where I was approached by one of the author’s children (his daughter Susan, in this case). She suggested that her father’s work might be suitable for our line and asked if I’d ever read it. As it happens, I had--one of his books was on my very first list of reprint candidates when we started pitching Hard Case Crime to publishers. When she contacted me I sat down and read pretty much everything he’d written, and of the lot I enjoyed Kill Now, Pay Later the most. That’s why we did that one. And I’m glad he got to see the new edition before he passed away [in late March of this year]. It gave him a lot of pleasure.

JKP: It must be frustrating to know that there are so many good out-of-print crime novels gathering dust, but so few opportunities to reissue them for Hard Case. How long is your wish list of titles you’d like to see Hard Case bring out in the future?

CA: Believe it or not, we’ve gotten to most of the books I originally set out to do--Branded Woman, A Touch of Death, No House Limit ... these were all on my original wish list, and there they are now, in bookstores. I’m not saying there aren’t more ... there are, and there always will be ... but it’s not a list of 100 titles. Maybe 20 or 25, and some of them we won’t get for one reason or another.

JKP: Can you name a few books you’d like to see as Hard Case titles, but that you haven’t the money or time or rights to bring out? Any “holy grail” books you’d like to score?

CA: When Gore Vidal was a young man he wrote a pseudonymous novel for Gold Medal [Thieves Fall Out, by “Cameron Kay”] that has never been reprinted; I’d love to do that one. We talked with him about it and he considered it, but ... in the end he declined. Similarly, I’d love to bring out a new edition of Alan Furst’s fantastic, Edgar-nominated first novel [Your Day in the Barrel, 1976] ... but he made it clear that’s not going to happen. It’s just too different from the work he’s publishing now, and it’s not something he wants associated with his name (which I think is a shame, but it’s certainly his privilege). Martin Cruz Smith wrote a series of novels as “Simon Quinn” about an operative for the Vatican, and two of them are good enough to reprint--one of them especially. He came close to saying yes; actually he did say yes, but then changed his mind at the last minute. And there are others. But there’s no shortage of people who are glad to see their work reprinted; I won’t lose sleep over the handful who prefer their work to remain in obscurity.

JKP: I realize I haven’t asked any questions yet about your new Gabriel Hunt series. How did that project come about, and how long do you intend to continue it?

CA: Seeing the [1981] movie Raiders of the Lost Ark was a transformative experience for me, back when I was 11 years old--I came out of the theater literally trembling, my heart racing. I’d never seen anything quite like it before; I’d grown up watching old Buster Crabbe serials and reading pulp adventure stories, but the difference between those and my first dose of Indiana Jones was like going from grape juice to rye. And pretty much from that moment I was determined to someday do something that would recapture that feeling, or provide it to someone else.

Then when the fourth Indiana Jones movie [Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull] came out [in 2008] and was so disappointing, I finally had a galvanizing moment. If [George] Lucas and [Steven] Spielberg weren’t giving the world a proper high adventure experience anymore, maybe I could. And Gabriel
Hunt was born.

I pitched it to Dorchester, and they agreed to do a run of six books. If those six do well, we’ll probably do more; if not, not. That’s the same way we started Hard Case Crime, with a six-book trial, and look at us now, with nearly 60 books under our belt. I don’t know that Gabriel will have quite the same legs (there’s more variety in Hard Case Crime, if only because you don’t have the same protagonist in every book), but I’m having a blast with it in the meantime.

JKP: You chose Glen Orbik to do all the Gabriel Hunt covers. Why not follow the tried-and-true HCC formula of using multiple artists?

CA: Well, we’re already not using the tried-and-true HCC formula of multiple (credited) authors, or of multiple leading men, or of a mix of reprints and original novels--using multiple cover artists is no more sacred a cow than any of those. And if you’re having the same character appear in all the books, it’s nice to have him painted by the same artist each time, for consistency. And, of course, Glen had a history of painting precisely the right sort of adventure images, which most of our painters do not.

That said, if Gabriel continues after Book 6, we may let some other painters have a crack at doing a cover.

JKP: What have you learned about publishing a line of books that you wish you’d known before you ever got started?

CA: Oh, there are a million lessons I’ve learned--it would be impossible to do them justice with anything less than a book-length answer. But perhaps the most important thing I learned was that if there’s something you love and are truly passionate about, the odds are good that there are other people out there, maybe thousands or even millions of them, who share your passion. And if you can find enough of those people, you’ve got the foundation for a
long-running series.

JKP: So, Charles, do you do other things than write noirish novels and keep the HCC gears going?

CA: Yep. Roughly half my waking hours are devoted to my role as a managing director at the D.E. Shaw Group, an investment and technology development firm. The other half I spend working on my various writing and publishing projects, including Hard Case Crime and its new sister series, The Adventures of Gabriel Hunt.

JKP: You read crime novels for professional reasons. But what do you read off the clock, for pleasure?

CA: Oh, I read crime novels for pleasure, too--if I didn’t, I can’t imagine why I’d ever have gone down this road. But crime novels are certainly not the only thing I read for pleasure. I’ve read everything Kurt Vonnegut ever wrote; everything Philip Roth ever wrote; everything Graham Greene ever wrote, including the non-crime novels. I like Malamud. Some of Chabon. Salinger. Henry Roth. Some of Paul Auster’s books are excellent. Some of Nabokov. Conrad. Thomas Hardy. Poetry: Keats and Blake and Wordsworth, Browning and Hopkins, Tennyson.

I’d mention Shakespeare, but hell, the list’s pretentious enough without him on it.

JKP: Finally, are you working on another novel of your own right now?

CA: Alas, no--not yet. I’ve been on a binge of editing the Gabriel Hunt novels, which is a much more intense editing task than the Hard Case Crime books; I’m revising all of them fairly extensively to ensure book-to-book continuity, consistency of voice, and so forth. There’s just one left--but after that I also have two more Hard Case Crime books to edit before I can properly sit down and start work on a book of my own. I’m guessing it’ll be close to year-end before I can. But that’s OK. I’ve got a half dozen ideas I’ve been toying with, and having an extra few months for them to germinate will make it easier for me to decide which one I should write next.

Death Has a Small Voice, by Frances and Richard Lockridge

I think of Richard and Frances Lockridge as having written intelligent and often intriguing, but generally pretty soft amateur detective tales in the S.S. Van Dine tradition. However, this week’s cover--taken from the 1960 Avon Books edition of Death Has a Small Voice, the Lockridges’ 17th Mr. and Mrs. North novel--suggests something considerably more sinister. The illustration shows a well-endowed young blonde who has either stumbled or been pushed to the ground (that mishap having loosened one spaghetti strap of her dress), and who’s now being menaced by a shadowy male figure clutching a handgun and a flashlight. The image supports the jacket blurb from The New York Times, which describes Death Has a Small Voice as an “unusually suspenseful thriller.”

I don’t own this particular edition of Death Has a Small Voice. But looking to the flap copy of the original, 1953 J.B. Lippincott Company hardcover version, I can see why the Times would make such an assertion. Its description of the story reads:

When Pam North receives a dictating machine record in her mail, she thinks it is a message from her husband, Jerry, who is in San Francisco on business. She goes to his office to play back the record and hears an ear-witness account of a murder actually taking place!

Harry Eaton, a small-time burglar, is found dead and the police discover in his apartment a dictating machine that has been stolen from the home of the missing Hilda Godwin, young poet and novelist. Pam is reported missing and Jerry hurries back to join Captain [Bill] Weigand in an effort to find her and to locate Hilda Godwin as well.

The manuscript of Miss Godwin’s first novel is stolen from her publisher’s office under mysterious circumstances. A number of her friends, all of whom are characterized in the novel under different guises, could be guilty. Captain Weigand and Jerry manage to get on the trail of Pam, and a fast three-way race back to New York ensues.

By the time they penned Death Has a Small Voice, the Lockridges were well practiced at crafting fair-play puzzle mysteries. Fellow newspaper reporters, Richard Lockridge and Frances Louise Davies married in the early 1920s and moved from the American Midwest to Manhattan. Their novel-writing premiere came with The Norths Meet Murder (1940), which grafted characters he had used in a succession of comic vignettes for The New Yorker onto a plot she’d been toying with, mostly to her frustration. That collaboration led the pair to compose 25 more novels featuring New York City book publisher Jerry North and his curious and often clever wife, Pamela.

Crime and crime-solving among upper-middle-class Manhattanites--mostly portrayed as sophisticated folk, often intellectuals--and the witty banter between the Norths (and between them and some of the more doltish members of the Gotham constabulary) were all principal focuses of this series. In addition, Charles L.P. Silet notes in an essay for MysteryNet.com that “the books contain a good deal of political and social commentary, a richly detailed look at the changing life in New York City, as well as glimpses of the outlying suburban counties. Also, the Norths’ stable marriage relationship presents a marked contrast--and a welcome one--to the traditions of the lone detective characteristic of much other American mystery fiction.” Film and crime-fiction enthusiast Mike Grost adds that “The biggest strength of the North novels are the people in them. Pam and Jerry North are appealing human beings, and so are most of the suspects in the story. Unlike some detective authors, who mainly write about nasty characters, the denizens of a North tale tend to be civilized, intelligent, decent people. They are people whom one would love to know in real life.”

The Norths’ relationship bears a resemblance to that of Nick and Nora Charles, the alternately imbibing and investigating couple from Dashiell Hammett’s last, 1934 novel, The Thin Man, and the series of witty William Powell/Myrna Loy films it spawned. (The fact that the cat-loving Norths named at least three of their sly felines in honor of alcohols--Gin, Sherry, and Martini--only strengthens the North-Charles connection.) It may remind you as well of another pair of husband and wife sleuths: Stewart and Sally McMillan from McMillan & Wife. That 1971-1977 NBC Mystery Movie series starred Rock Hudson as a San Francisco police commissioner and Susan Saint James as his much younger spouse, the two of whom often became embroiled in nefarious doings.

However, ABC-TV’s Hart to Hart (1979-1984) might owe a still greater debt to Pam and Jerry North of Greenwich Village. That’s because, like the Norths, neither of the principals in that series--businessman Jonathan Hart (Robert Wagner) and his journalist wife, Jennifer (Stefanie Powers)--had a professional snooping background. As Ivan G. Shreve Jr. wrote in his original Thrilling Days of Yesterday blog,

One might be tempted to compare the Norths with that other famous literary sleuthing couple, Nick and Nora Charles ... But Nick Charles was a retired detective, and knew a little about the science of detection--Jerry North, on the other hand, was strictly an amateur; a run-of-the-mill book publisher aided and abetted in his investigations by his irrepressible wife, Pam. This could explain why their adventures had such a tremendous appeal for audiences--the Norths were an average couple who just happened to have a knack for stumbling onto murders.

Long before McMillan & Wife and Hart to Hart debuted, the Norths were familiar to TV and movie audiences in their own right. In 1942, Gracie Allen (yes, the same Gracie Allen who was married to comedian George Burns) starred alongside William Post Jr. in Mr. and Mrs. North, a big-screen adaptation of a stage play written by Owen Davis. CBS Radio listeners were treated to yet another interpretation of the Norths’ adventures from 1942 to 1954. And in 1952, television’s Mr. & Mrs. North debuted, with Richard Denning playing Gerald North (though he was now an “ex-private eye turned publisher”) and Barbara Britton as his “vivacious, attractive, somewhat addlebrained [wife] whose main occupation was stumbling over corpses,” to quote Richard Meyers from his 1981 book, TV Detectives. That series remained on the air (switching from CBS to NBC) until 1954, appealing to viewers with its combination of suspense, romance, and whimsical crime-solving.

The jacket of Avon’s 1960 paperback edition of Death Has a Small Voice was obviously designed to exploit that novel’s suspense and thriller elements. Its illustration is credited to Mort Engel. It’s said that Engel was still a very green art student in New York City when he beat out all other competitors to win Pocket Books’ fourth annual design contest, held in 1955. He went on to create the fronts for a number of western novels (including Powder Burn, by Bradford Scott, and Mulvane’s War, by William Heuman), as well as for mystery yarns and some racier offerings from Monarch Books, such as The Promiscuous Doll, by Clayton Matthews.

In addition to their Mr. and Mrs. North novels, the Lockridges penned non-fiction books about cats, plus three more mystery-fiction series. The best remembered of those--running to more than 20 installments--starred Inspector Merton Heimrich of the New York State Board of Criminal Identification (or, in later books, the Bureau of Criminal Investigation). Heimrich had appeared as a secondary player in a couple of North novels before being spun off as a separate series lead in Think of Death (1947). The Lockridges’ other series protagonists were both New York City police detectives: Nathan Shapiro (The Faceless Adversary, 1956) and Paul Lane (Night of the Shadows, 1962).

The North stories concluded with Murder by the Book, which was published in the same year--1963--that Frances Lockridge died. But Richard Lockridge continued to write the Heimrich books and others, finishing his career not too long before his own passing in 1982.

It would be nice to think that somewhere, in some phantasmal Manhattan the Lockridges are tipping glasses--and tackling villainy--in company with Mr. and Mrs. North. But I’m not sure even they could keep up with their intuitive creations.

READ MORE: “Mr. & Mrs. North,” by Bill Crider (Bill Crider’s
Pop Culture Magazine).

Señor Saint, by Leslie Charteris

This isn’t the book cover I had planned to feature today. I was going to focus on something darker, more suggestive of danger, something crisp with fright. But the weather has been so incredibly beautiful here in the Pacific Northwest for the last couple of weeks, that I was moved instead to look for something more tropical in nature.

Señor Saint is a collection of four short stories by Leslie Charteris (born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin), the half-Chinese, half-English author who, in 1928, introduced the character of Simon Templar in Meet--The Tiger! Templar, who is also known as The Saint (a cognomen derived from the initials of his name), was a thief, adventurer, amateur sleuth, and “Robin Hood of modern crime.” Charteris wrote and saw published almost three dozen Saint books--novels and short-story collections--and witnessed his protagonist portrayed in both movies and on the radio (with Vincent Price giving his voice to the character for four years, on three networks), before television finally took an interest. In 1962, Roger Moore began starring in The Saint, a British mystery/spy series that made handsome Simon Templar almost as famous on the small screen as James Bond was in movie theaters. That role as Templar is now considered to have been valuable training for Moore’s subsequent portrayal of Agent 007 in seven big-action films.

According to Wikipedia, “Charteris wrote 14 novels between 1928 and 1971 (the last two co-written), 34 novellas, and 95 short stories featuring Simon Templar.” Señor Saint falls approximately in the middle of the author’s production. This collection was first published in hardcover by The Crime Club in 1958; a year later, Hodder and Stoughton finally made it available to UK readers. The book contains four yarns--“The Pearls of Peace,” “The Revolution Racket,” “The Romantic Matron,” and “The Golden Frog”--all of which are set in Latin America (Baja California, Mexico City, Havana, and Panama) and have in one way or another to do with swindles. An online review describes the stories as “typical, charming and amusing little thrillers, if nothing very special.” Nonetheless, all four were eventually adapted as episodes of The Saint. (Synopses of those TV installments, and more, can be found here.) The Saintly Bible, an expansive and authoritative Web site devoted to Charteris and Templar, recalls that the author was on record as saying that “The Pearls of Peace” “was his favorite Saint story.” (Yet, “he chose to include ‘The Arrow of God’ when asked for his ‘best’ work for the 1955 book, My Best Murder Story, edited by David Cooke.”)

The Señor Saint cover featured at the top of this post comes from the 1960 Pocket Books edition. Its artwork suggests leisure, languidness, and lust--all in colors familiar from places where one has to think twice before putting on a jacket to go to work. The illustration is credited to James Hill. A Canadian artist born in 1930, Hill grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, later taught at the Ontario College of Art, and reportedly created covers “for more than 200 paperback novels”; yet he is probably best remembered for artwork he did on assignment for Maclean’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines. Described as “a versatile stylist,” Hill was apparently a two-time recipient of gold medals from the New York Society of Illustrators, and executed a number of noteworthy portraits, including those of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Pope John Paul II. Hill is often described as “the dean of Canadian illustrators.” (Click here to see a selection of his magazine imagery.)

Beyond Señor Saint, Hill’s other book illustrations included the cover for the 1959 Dell paperback edition of Cop Killer (see above), one of 51 novels written by George Bagby (né Aaron Marc Stein) and featuring Inspector Schmidt, the New York City police department’s “sore-footed” chief of homicide.

James Hill is said to have died on February 3, 2004, “at his Toronto studio of heart problems at age 73.” If so, he outlived Leslie Charteris by 11 years.