When “Dolls” Come Out to Play

South Florida resident Robert Deis, with whom I worked on last year’s The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens, alerts me to this month’s release of its sequel, The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 2: Dangerous Dames and Cover Dolls, co-edited by Deis, Bill Cunningham, and Daniel Zimmer. I haven’t yet laid my hands on a copy, but here’s Amazon’s skinny on its intents and contents:

In the late 1950s, while studying with the legendary art teacher Frank J. Reilly at the Art Students League in New York City, Ron Lesser embarked on a long career as one of America’s top illustration artists. Over the next four decades, his artwork was used for thousands of paperback book covers, movie posters, magazines, and advertisements. Many great artists once made a good living doing such illustration artwork and Ron Lesser is among the greatest. He’s also one of the few who are still alive and still painting.

Like a number of other top 20th-century illustrators, Lesser went on to do paintings for galleries as the market for illustration art faded away in the 1990s. His gallery artwork includes Civil War and Western scenes, sports, celebrity portraits, and new versions of the types of subjects he once did for paperback covers. The Art of Ron Lesser Vol. 1 is the first in the series covering Ron's paperback, movie and advertising art. The Art of Ron Lesser Vol. 2 covers Ron's transition out of paperback illustration and into advertising, movie, and gallery illustration which he continues to this day.

In his Men’s Pulp Mags blog, Deis explains that Dangerous Dames and Cover Dolls “showcases scores of the paintings of sexy women Lesser has done in recent decades for galleries. Some are modern versions of the ‘dangerous dame’-style cover art he did for paperbacks in the 1960s and 1970s. Others are paintings of sexy celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page, Brigitte Bardot, and Pam Anderson, and pop-culture characters like Vampirella, Red Sonja, and Harley Quinn.”

Like its predecessor, this book is said to include “commentary by Ron about his artwork and career.”

It sounds like a beautiful, fun follow-up to our previous work!

“The Tritonian Ring,” by L. Sprague de Camp

And what a lovely book front this is! It comes from the 1971 Paperback Library edition of The Tritonian Ring, by American science-fiction and fantasy writer Lyon Sprague de Camp (1907-2000), part of his Pusadian “sword and sorcery” series. Sadly, I don’t own this novel, so cannot judge it on any basis other than its cover. But a plot summary from Wikipedia reads:

When the gods resolve to destroy Lorsk, principal kingdom of the sinking continent of Pusad, because Prince Vakar, heir to its throne, is thought to be a threat to them, the king sends the prince on a quest to save the realm from destruction. Vakar is tasked with traveling the known world in search of what the gods most fear, accompanied only by his servant, Fual. He finds himself hampered by ignorance of just what that might be and continual attempts to murder him by parties unknown; meanwhile, his treasonous brother Kuros is plotting with the pirates of the Gorgon Isles, Lorsk's enemies, to overthrow their father. On his quest Vakar encounters Amazons, a seductive queen who is under a spell, an amorous centauress, sorcerers who command legions of headless warriors, and the dangerous Gorgonians themselves, masters of the medusas with their paralyzing glares.

I thought the willowy young woman shown above might be the “amorous centauress” in question; she’s clearly an essential character in de Camp’s yarn, being also represented on other versions of this book (such as this one). However, while said filly sports a tail, she lacks the horse’s aft end that I normally associate with such a mythical creature. Perhaps Midwestern artist David McCall Johnston decided that feature might not be universally appealing.

Johnston, born in South Bend, Indiana, back in 1940, painted a small number of SF covers. During the years he spent as a book-cover artist, he came to be known much better for his contributions to the fantasy-fiction field. You can enjoy more of his work here.

Another Look: “The Mad Hatter Mystery”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Mad Hatter Mystery, by John Dickson Carr (Dell, 1953). This cover illustration is by Denver Gillen, perhaps best remembered for helping to create the image of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Right: The Mad Hatter Mystery, by John Dickson Carr (Berkley, 1958); cover art by Lu Kimmel. This was the second installment in Carr’s series starring Dr. Gideon Fell.

This Is How Human Kindness Works

Here’s a happy follow-up to a story we brought you in mid-July. A GoFundMe campaign launched to pay the housing and medical bills of renowned 95-year-old artist, art instructor, and author Jack Faragasso has exceeded its goal. His niece, Denise Acerra, was hoping to raise $10,000 for Faragasso’s care. When I went to look for an update yesterday, I discovered that $10,551 has been pledged, and GoFundMe now says, “This fundraiser is no longer accepting donations.”

Faragasso posted a note of appreciation on Facebook last week:

As I reflect today on my life, it is truly overwhelming to see how many beautiful fans and friends, including my students, have shown me so much kindness, generosity and support. I am honored and so humbled. Thank you Thank you Thank you all for purchasing my artwork, books and prints through the years. You all have truly blessed my life.

We wish Faragasso only the best for the future.

Behind an Overlooked McGinnis

(Above) Robert McGinnis’ “forgotten” Florinda front.

When Randal S. Brandt, a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley, went looking for background on Dana Wilson, the author of a peculiarly titled 1946 novel, Make with the Brains, Pierre, that he had acquired for the library’s California Detective Fiction Collection, he discovered there was more mystery in the writer’s identity than there was in Wilson’s “grim tale of psychological suspense.” As he explained recently for The Rap Sheet:

The book itself, including the original dust jacket, was no help at all. There is no author’s biography, photograph, or blurb on this edition. I didn’t even know if Dana was a man or a woman ..., or whether the name was real or a pseudonym. The Library of Congress, usually the authority on matters of book authorship, was no help whatsoever here. In its catalogue, the novel was entered under the simple heading of “Wilson, Dana,” which was linked to a composer and professor of music born in 1946. Nope, definitely not the author of this 1946 novel. The database contained entries for several other similarly named writers, but none were the one I was looking for. Disambiguating authors from one another and identifying them with the works that they produce is called, in library parlance, “authority control” and is a critical component of cataloguing, so I was determined to do something to distinguish Dana Wilson the mystery writer from the other Dana Wilsons.

Eventually, thanks to help from the genealogical database Ancestry, a vague dedication in the novel’s opening pages, and a soupçon of good fortune, Brandt succeeding in finding his answers. Wilson, it turns out, was a New York-born Hollywood actress who, following her divorce from Lewis Wilson—the first man ever to play Batman on film—went on to marry Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, one of two partners (Harry Saltzman being the other) now famous for bringing Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels to life on the silver screen.

Despite her modest success with Make with the Brains, Pierre (republished in paperback during the late 1940s as Scenario for Murder and Uneasy Virtue), Dana Broccoli produced only one more book: the 1977 hardcover release Florinda. Brandt describes it as “a historical novel set in 8th-century Spain, which was apparently inspired while [she and Cubby were] scouting locations for the Bond series.” The story’s protagonist is Florinda la Cava, or simply La Cava, said by Wikipedia to have “played a central role in the downfall of the Visigothic kingdom in Spain in 711. Although she was treated as historical in Spain for centuries, there is no evidence for her existence whatsoever and her name is certainly a later concoction.”

(Right) Dana Broccoli’s author portrait from the historical yarn Florinda.

Mere legend Florinda may be—the lover (or else the rape victim) of the last Visigothic king, Roderic, whose powerful father sought to avenge that dishonor by siding with Muslim conquerors against Roderic—but she appears every inch the callipygous seductress in the cover illustration for Broccoli’s Florinda shown atop this post, painted by renowned paperback and movie poster artist Robert McGinnis. How McGinnis came to be hired by Broccoli’s small publisher, Two Continents, to create that book front is a story now lost to time. The artwork itself has been largely forgotten, as well.

“Wow, Jeff! That’s an impressive piece,” replied Tim Hewitt, a former tech writer and paperback collector in South Carolina, after I asked him to confirm the identity of Florinda’s cover creator. “Yes, it’s McGinnis! After some close examination, I’m confident that’s McGinnis’ signature (what you can see of it) just below Dana Broccoli’s name on the cover. And honestly, if this isn’t McGinnis I’ll eat my hat, as the old saying goes.”

Art Scott, the co-author (with the painter himself) of 2014’s The Art of Robert E. McGinnis, concurs. “[A]s a self-made McGinnis authority,” he wrote me in a recent e-mail note, “I’ll sign off on this one as being genuine McGinnis. I also checked through my file of photos of the paintings held by Bob when we were working on the book, but didn’t expect to find Florinda—and didn't. I imagine it’s in the hand of the Broccoli heirs.”

Available copies of Broccoli’s novel are few and far between, and vary in price. Checking today, for instance, I see two to be had on the AbeBooks Web site—one going for a modest $33.75, the other valued at $150, both described as being in “fine” (or “as new”) condition. For a committed McGinnis fan, though, one to whom this art was previously unknown, cost may be of little significance.

Savage Attractions

With this year’s Pulpfest set to begin on August 1 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Michael Stradford—one of the foremost authorities on the paperback book cover modeling career of Steve Holland—notes that convention organizers have “posted a great video compilation of legendary illustrator Bob Larkin’s many Doc Savage covers for Bantam Books,” all featuring Holland. You can watch that here.

Every Little Bit Helps

As was recently noted on Facebook, a new GoFundMe campaign has been established to help 95-year-old artist, art instructor, and author Jack Faragasso. As you probably know already, Faragasso taught for a long while at the Art Students League of New York and is well-remembered for painting many paperback covers. (He even introduced “pin-up girl” Bettie Page as a paperback cover model!) But now he’s residing in an assisted living facility and confronting both health and financial difficulties.

As his niece, Denise Acerra, explains on GoFundMe:

He lived his entire life in a 4-story walk-up, rent-controlled apartment in NYC, until 4 years ago when he fell on the city street and broke his hip. After surgery, he needed extensive rehab in an attempt to make him able to walk up steps again to go home. Unfortunately, insurance ran out and he had to leave rehab. He needed care to dress and shower, plus more PT so we had no choice but to bring him to Assisted Living. We thought he would get stronger with more PT there, but the day he got there, Covid broke out and they were in lockdown. No PT was allowed in for a very long time and at that point, he had gotten so weak we knew he would never be able to go up or down steps again so we had to give up his rent-controlled NYC apartment. My uncle was very depressed and lonely, missing the only home he knew and in quarantine in a strange place with nothing familiar and no art supplies. We have since then set him up so he can once again paint and draw but financially it’s a great struggle. We have been selling his art in hopes of being able to pay this extraordinary rent but it’s just not enough. It’s so difficult when an elderly person needs care because the care is extremely expensive.

The goal is to raise $10,000 to cover Faragasso’s monthly rent and medical care. So far, only $3,930 has come in, from 55 people. If you can spare a few more dollars, go here to contribute.

Robert Deis, who with Bill Cunningham produces The Men’s Adventure Quarterly (and was my editor on The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens) notes that “Another way to help Jack Faragasso is to buy his books and prints of his artwork. Thanks to Paul Burke at Asylum Publications, you can get copies [of] Jack's classic art instruction books, books showcasing his photos of models like Bettie Page, and prints of his cover paintings and photos. Kudos to Paul and Asylum for helping Jack and for keeping his legacy alive. Jack's books and prints are available on Amazon (https://amzn.to/3S5Tit4) and on the Asylum website (asylumpublications.com/shop).”

Angel on the Lam

Sorry, everyone, for the long silence on this page. My last post went up at the end of March, and the one before that promised the imminent unrolling of a new series. Since then, I’ve experienced computer issues and the death of one of my closest friends. If you’re a reader of my other blog, The Rap Sheet, you will have noticed a drop-off in activity there as well, though not quite as serious.

My absence became persistent enough, that I received an anonymous comment here earlier this week, asking, “Where have you been?”

With any luck, this post marks my return. Yes, it will likely take some while to resume my normal blogging pace, but a start must be made. Therefore, I am bringing you today the latest Hard Case Crime paperback cover from artist Paul Mann, about whom I have written before. The Get Off—shown above—is due out in March 2025, and is the third hard-boiled novel from Christa Faust to feature her ex-porn star protagonist, Angel Dare. (The previous installments in that series were 2008’s Money Shot and 2011’s Choke Hold).

Hard Case Crime’s synopsis of the book’s plot reads:

Tagged as a cop killer when a mission of vengeance goes wrong, Angel Dare finds herself on the run, with an unexpected burden: she’s pregnant. Her desperate flight takes Angel across the rugged American west, where cattle barons lock horns with rodeo bullfighters and life can end suddenly and brutally. A renegade couple living off the grid near the border might offer a chance of escape—but can Angel reach them in time ...?

It’s hard to believe that almost a decade and a half has passed since Choke Hold reached stores. And that, according to Hard Case, The Get Off will conclude Angel Dare’s story.

You can read a sample chapter of Faust’s latest yarn here.

Another Look: “The D.A. Breaks an Egg”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



An egg-cellent pairing for Easter. Left: The D.A. Breaks an Egg, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Cardinal, 1958); photo front. Right: The D.A. Breaks an Egg (Great Pan, 1959), with a cover illustration by Sam “Peff” Peffer. This was the ninth and final entry in Gardner’s series starring Douglas Selby, the scrappy district attorney for fictional Madison County, California.

Getting a Jump on Things

Happy Leap Day, gentle readers. This 1956 Ace Books cover of Leap in the Dark, by former actress and editor Rona Randall (aka Rona Shambrook), isn’t being highlighted today simply because of its title. It also hints at a project I have upcoming on this page, which will begin soon and likely run through most of March.

Meanwhile, a few words about the paperback novel at hand.

My Love-Haunted Heart, Sara Boyle’s terrific (but, sadly, no longer updated) blog about vintage Gothic romance novels, describes Leap in the Dark as “an interesting take on the mistaken identity plot twist.” She then synopsizes its plot thusly:

Jeanne Cleary is on her way to nursing college in London and on a whim hops off the train in a remote village in France. The station’s deserted so she follows a dusty path through the countryside leading her to the local chateau.

By a strange (very strange) coincidence, nurse-to-be Jeanne finds herself mistaken as an actual nurse (due to arrive that very day) who had recently been hired to look after the lady of the manor, Comtesse de Clementeaux.

Just as Jeanne decides to find a convenient time to break the news to her new found granny, another girl turns up—declaring herself to be Jeanne Cleary, the Comtesse’s granddaughter! The real Jeanne knows this new interloper is just a gold-digging impostor, but how can she reveal her true identity without breaking her own cover? So a sticky situation turns into a quagmire of confusion as our heroine battles to assert her rightful position within her newfound family and win the heart of the handsome Dr Paul Antoine.

The handsome painting that fronts Leap in the Dark was created by Italian-born artist Lou Marchetti (1920-1992), whose work has appeared on this page many times over the years. Boyle quips that “extra points [should be] given for this cover, as it’s refreshing to see a heroine dressed in something other than a floaty nightie.”

If you’re thinking this portends a similar demureness in the cover series I have planned for next month, fear not. There will be plenty of diaphanous attire and bared skin to admire. Stay tuned.

Happy Valentine’s Day to You, Too!

A Time to Love, by Noel O’Hara (Chariot, 1960), which seems like an ideal cover to showcase this week, when both Valentine’s Day and Mardi Gras are being celebrated. Cover painting by Basil Gogos. Enjoy Gogos’ original art for the book here.

Another Look: “Miss Pym Disposes”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Miss Pym Disposes, by “Josephine Tey,” aka Elizabeth Mackintosh (Pan, 1957), with a cover by new-to-me vintage artist S.R. Boldero. Right: Miss Pym Investigates (Pan, 1960); cover illustration by Sam “Peff” Peffer. Scottish author Tey (1896-1952) may be most fondly remembered for her half-dozen novels featuring Inspector Alan Grant (The Man in the Queue), but her two standalone mysteries—this one (originally published in 1946), and Brat Farrar (1949)—are no less deserving of attention.

READ MORE: “Decades After Her Death, Mystery Still Surrounds Crime Novelist Josephine Tey,” by Francis Wheen (Vanity Fair).

A Nonagenarian of Note

New York-born painter and art instructor Jack Faragasso—“one of the cornerstones of paperback illustration art”—celebrated his 95th birthday exactly a week ago, on January 23. To honor that milestone, Michael Stradford showcases several of Faragasso’s pieces featuring once-ubiquitous paperback cover model Steve Holland in his blog.

You’ll find more of Faragasso’s work on the image-hosting Web site Flickr. Or click here to read an interview with the artist.

Going on 15

I love the above illustration, based on artwork by Barye Phillips. It’s appropriate to post in honor of Killer Covers’ 14th anniversary.

When I launched this blog on January 19, 2009, the first illustration I posted was the front from a 1960 Bantam paperback edition of The Three Roads, the fourth novel by author Kenneth Millar, who would soon begin publishing crime fiction under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald. The quote installed over that Phillips painting, however, comes from Macdonald’s The Wycherly Woman (1961), his ninth book starring Los Angeles private detective Lew Archer.

Writing three decades ago in Reason magazine, Wisconin academics Lester and Deborah Hunt observed that “Macdonald's concern with trouble is conscious and pervasive. ...

“Trouble” is his name for the destructive consequences that follow from human irrationality and viciousness (usually the former). The real trouble begins when we can no longer control the destruction we cause. A blackmailer appears in the aftermath of what seemed a perfect crime; or an illegitimate child shows up, bringing home to his lost father the consequences he has never faced. Things get out of hand.

Once a mistake is made, trouble follows with a logic as intricate and ruthless as algebra. It resembles the “justice” (dike) in Greek tragedy, a cosmic force that the ancients believed restores an imbalance in nature created by wrongdoing. But trouble is not justice in our sense of the word, because it harms the innocent and the guilty alike. Trouble therefore must be stopped, and that is Archer’s task. He discovers who is criminally responsible for it, not so that retribution can be exacted for what they have done, but simply in order to have them locked up someplace where they can no longer harm others or themselves. The point is to bring the tragedy to an end before trouble has expended itself.

There are certainly ample troubles—of the individual, familial, and societal sort—in all of Macdonald’s two dozen novels, which is of course one reason they’re so memorable. Fortunately, fewer tribulations have beset Killer Covers and your humble host, which has made it possible to carry on so long and why we will continue to showcase vintage (and occasionally new) book fronts into the future.

Thank you all for joining us over these last 14 years!

Borack Captures Holland

Earlier today, Michael Stradford, the author of several books about ubiquitous American paperback cover model Steve Holland, posted a selection of captivating paintings by Brooklyn-born artist Stanley Borack (1927-1993). “He had a crisp, realistic style that captured emotion and movement convincingly,” Stradford writes of Borack. “As such, it makes sense that Steve Holland was his go-to model for many years of paperback and magazine cover work.” As Stradford concludes, they “made a dynamic team.”

And a Very Merry Christmas to All!

The Corpse in the Snowman, by “Nicholas Blake,” aka Cecil Day-Lewis (Popular Library, 1945). Cover art by H. Lawrence Hoffman.

All the Rage

Literary Hub believes it has finally identified this year’s hottest book-cover design trend. Writes Drew Broussard:

The reign of the color-blob book cover has slowly come to an end over the last several years, and various pretenders to the throne have taken their best shot at being the next trend—sans-serif minimalism (The “Cusk”); brightly-colored paper-cut-out illustrations, usually involving women (The “Bernadette”); and of course, the perennial text-over-full-jacket-evocative-photograph (The “Prestige White Author”).

We’re here to report that a new contestant is entering the field in 2024 (or at least Knopf is really trying to make fetch happen). Folks, allow me to introduce … the Pastel Sky.

Click here to enjoy a small gallery of examples.

Meanwhile, The Book Designer cites its own 2023 dust-jacket art consistencies, including head shots of authors, “colorful vector illustrations,” water and river symbolism, and “busy backgrounds with bold typography.” That Web site’s editors somehow missed spotting the whole pastel sky thing, though.

Another Look: “Naked Fury”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Naked Fury, by “Day Keene,” aka Gunnar Hjerstedt (Phantom, 1952), with a cover illustration by Jack Rickard. Right: Naked Fury (Berkley, 1959); cover art by Milo.

Manipulating Reality

Stock photography has become so ubiquitous on book fronts in recent years, that few people give it more than passing notice. But recently, while gathering info about forthcoming crime and mystery novels, I happened across a January release titled The Clinic, by Cate Quinn, that caused me to do a double-take. Not because the cover was anything special, but because part of the art used was so recognizable, it distracted me from caring about the story to be found inside.

Publisher Sourcebooks Landmark describes this book as “a thriller set in a remote rehab clinic on the Pacific Northwest coast, in which the death of a woman inside prompts her sister to enter the clinic as a patient in order to find the truth.” Its synopsis goes on to explain:

Meg works for a casino in L.A., catching cheaters and popping a few too many pain pills to cope, following a far different path than her sister Haley, a famous actress. But suddenly reports surface of Haley dying at the ... facility where she had been forced to go to get her addictions under control.

There are whispers of suicide, but Meg can’t believe it. She decides that the best way to find out what happened to her sister is to check in herself—to investigate what really happened from the inside.

Battling her own addictions and figuring out the truth will be much more difficult than she imagined, far away from friends, family—and anyone who could help her.

The Clinic’s dust jacket, with its wave-battered cliffs, recumbent fog layer, and towered Victorian edifice, certainly supports this yarn’s eerie intent. But its cover image combines at least two stock photos. And if you’re like me, it’s impossible to look past the fact that the supposedly threatening coastal institution is actually a Eureka, California, landmark that once seen, is not soon forgotten.


(Above) The Carson Mansion is far from the Pacific Northwest.

Located at the eastern extreme of Eureka’s historic quarter, the Carson Mansion was completed in 1886 for William Coleman Carson. A native of New Brunswick, Canada, Carson had ventured west in the early 1850s, hoping—like so many other young men—to get rich quick in the California Gold Rush. He stayed afterward to become one of Northern California’s first lumber barons. In the early 1880s, he commissioned San Francisco architect-brothers Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom, who Wikipedia says “specialized in designing Queen Anne-style … homes with extravagant details,” to create a showplace residence for his family in the busy coastal town of Eureka. North Coast Journal, an alternative newsweekly serving California’s Humboldt County, says Carson allowed his architects “a free hand with the design. Redwood—the wood that had made Carson wealthy—was the obvious choice for the exterior, due to its ability to resist weathering and decay. But Carson also arranged to have quantities of tropical hardwoods imported from all over for the internal construction and decoration. … Carson arranged for a schooner to bring nearly 100,000 feet of white mahogany (primavera) from Central America. In addition, shiploads of Philippine mahogany and Indian teak complimented the exterior redwood.”

Carson died in February 1912, leaving what was reportedly a substantial legacy to his five children. In 1950, his elegant four-story, 18-room home with its very distinctive tower became the headquarters of the private Ingomar Club, its membership open then—as now—only to men. Although this structure was included in 1964 on the Historic American Buildings Survey, its club owners have chosen not to apply for its placement on the better-recognized National Register of Historic Places.

While it’s located not far from Eureka’s Arcata Bay, the mansion—labeled “a baronial castle in Redwood” by one national architecture critic—doesn’t perch on an ocean-fronting precipice, as The Clinic’s jacket suggests. Nor is it occupied by a facility for patients in desperate need of physical or mental rehabilitation, though I’m sure many Ingomar regulars find succor within its grand walls.