Strange Bargain, by Harry Whittington

I’ve been sitting on this fantastic 1959 cover from Harry Whittington’s Strange Bargain for several months now, trying to figure out who was responsible for the jacket illustration. But I’ve had no luck thus far. If it was necessary to hazard a guess, I’d say it was the dramatically executed work of prolific paperback artist Robert Maguire (some of whose work can be seen here). But it might instead have been executed by artist Barye Phillips, who was much in demand by soft-cover publishers back in the 1950s and ’60s, and who created fronts for several other Whittington works (including Saturday Night Town and Desire in the Dust). Then again, the Strange Bargain jacket could have been created by James Meese, whose front for M.E. Chaber’s A Hearse of Another Color was featured on this page just a few weeks ago. The problem, of course, is that there’s no credit given in the book for this cover art. Paperback publishers of that era didn’t necessarily foresee a day when their products would be collector’s items, so they weren’t conscientious about making sure that credit was given where it was due.

That’s certainly too bad in this instance.

For readers unfamiliar with Harry Whittington’s work, you should know, first, that this is not the same Whittington who Dick Cheney filled full of birdshot during a hunting incident three years ago. No, author Harry Benjamin Whittington was born in the north Florida town of Ocala in 1915, served with the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, married in 1936, and put in stints as a copywriter and editor before “retiring to write full-time in 1975.” According to a biographical note at the Web site of publisher Stark House Press, which has brought several of Whittington’s novels back into print over the last several years, as a boy the author “survived his family’s rural poverty by reading books and sneaking into the local movie theater. Another escape was his writing. Ultimately, the versatile Whittington would become known as ‘King of the Paperbacks,’ publishing over 170 original paperback novels, using nearly 20 different names.” Under those noms de plume, he published hard-boiled crime novels, more formulaic mysteries, westerns, and soft-core porn novels. “Before his death in 1989,” Stark House adds, “Whittington also carved out a second career writing Southern historical novels as Ashley Carter. Today he is best known for the lurid and brisk noir novels he wrote between 1950 and 1960.”

Novelist Ed Gorman wrote in Mystery*File a few years ago that

Back in the 1950s you could run but you couldn’t hide from Harry Whittington. Those were the days when many if not most paperbacks were sold in wire racks found in drug stores, grocery stores and what were then called dime stores.

Harry told me that he’d once seen five books of his displayed on the same rack, all published that month. He worked for everybody, from Gold Medal all the way down to Carnival. He did westerns, nurse romances, tie-ins, war stories and of course crime novels. The last was his true calling. There ... was no sub-genre of suspense/mystery he didn’t like. Or apply
himself to.

Today, Whittington’s work is largely forgotten, and mostly long out of print. But Texas author Bill Crider, who includes Whittington among his favorite paperback novelists (and has assembled a remarkable collection of that author’s book covers at Flickr), cites 1960’s A Night for Screaming as a work well worth discovering. “One thing Whittington can do about as well as anybody ever could,” Crider opined in a blog post about Screaming, “is begin the book with a tense situation and then dial up the tension on every succeeding page. He can put his protagonist into a situation that seems as bad as it can get, and then he can make it worse. And after that, he can make it worse still. In this book he takes a seemingly simple situation and complicates it more with every chapter, throwing in a few reversals and surprises along the way. If you ever run across a copy of A Night for Screaming, don’t pass it up. You’ll be sorry if you do.” (Fortunately, Stark House Press reissued A Night for Screaming--along with another of Whittington’s 1960 works, Any Woman He Wanted--in a combined trade paperback edition three years ago.)

When asked about Strange Bargain, Crider admits he “read the book so long ago that I can’t remember much about it.” However, the Avon Books cover--with its image of a man and a trenchcoated blonde caught in seemingly intimate contact, and not pleased at all by the interruption (that’s my surmise, anyway, judging by the fact that the man is reaching for a gun on the floor)--supplies the tale’s gist: “The suspenseful story of a woman’s terrible choice between the two men who claimed her!” And the back jacket copy offers more:

TWO MEN AND ONE WOMAN--in a stark tale of love and hate:

THE HUSBAND, who faced death, yet thought only of a plan to destroy his rival.

THE WIFE, who could save her husband only by bargaining with a man who had but one desire--a woman.

THE LOVER, who knew love only as a wild, fierce hunger too long denied him.

On a barren, windswept mountain, these three are caught in a timeless drama that must end in shattering violence.

That’s the sort of teaser that would get you to read Strange Bargain, no matter who illustrated its jacket.

THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY: Apparently, British publisher Panther thought enough of the Strange Bargain cover, that in 1962 it “borrowed” its artwork for the front of Peter Rabe’s Anatomy of a Killer, an entry in its Crime Circle paperback line. You will find the front and back of Rabe’s novel here.

READ MORE: “The Paperback Covers of Harry Whittington,” by Bill Crider (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine).

Scandalizing the ’Burbs

The cover of Adultery in Suburbia (1964). See the back here.

Once upon a time, the term suburb referred to those areas on the outskirts of cities where mostly poor people found lodgings and very little work. After World War II, however, as servicemen streamed back to the United States to start families and score their representative chunks of the “American Dream,” and as house-building funds became available through President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s G.I. Bill and the Federal Housing Authority, suburban residential areas began to grow like fat tree rings around the nation’s metropolises. Ideally, those new “bedroom communities” would offer all the peacefulness and privacy of older rural environments, but also easier access to urban services, shopping centers, and business offices than were common to farm lands. The model for the middle-class, 20th-century suburban family was the Cleavers, stars of the 1957-1963 TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver.

But as suburbs were firmly established, it became clear they could suffer from the very same downsides as the cities with which they were associated: crime, crowding, poverty, social and racial tensions, and inadequate public works. People couldn’t outrun the problems of living together, no matter how many picket fences they put up or how many martinis were mixed by pipe-smoking dads for convivial weekly bridge groups.

Scandal inflicted the ’burbs, as well. Housewives, bored with baking brownies, seduced or were seduced by milkmen, door-to-door salesmen, and their more handsome neighbors. Husbands weary of driving home over many miles, only to find that their growing children no longer greeted them as warmly as they once had and that their stay-at-home spouses didn’t understand the work pressures they were under, found succor in the silky arms of divorcées down the street. Teenagers who were supposed to be studying or helping little old ladies across busy thoroughfares instead sneaked cigarettes outside school gymnasiums or popped bra hooks in Chevys parked at closed Dairy Queens. And those pool parties … well, who knew how many of the seven deadly sins might be committed twixt the diving board and the lemonade-sticky lounge chairs?

The perceived safety and privacy of the ’burbs could actually engender atypical societal behaviors. “There is a strong tendency in the suburban environment for certain social attitudes to retrogress,” wrote Robert Brooks in his 1967 “exposé,” Adultery in Suburbia. “A situation that highlights this particular type of throwback and negation of the usual and more normal sexual covetousness a man feels for his wife is the organized wife-swapping arrangements that have recently come into public views.”

In other words, humans didn’t lose their faults, just because they lost their urban addresses. They only hoped their indiscretions would escape notice. But no such luck. As the 1960s firmly set in, with its carnal freedoms and curiosity about drugs, suburbs fell under suspicion of harboring secrets and scandals. This was due in part to overactive imaginations, but also to authors such as John Updike, who made his name partly as a “chronicler of adultery,” writing books like Couples (1968) that exposed lustful dalliances beyond the city limits. Licentiousness was a familiar component of cities; the suburbs were fertile new territory in which to explore improprieties.

If there was any “constellation prize” (as young Beaver Cleaver would have phrased it) to be had from all of this, it was the birth of a titillating, if sometimes fairly ridiculous genre of suburban sin fiction. Contributing greatly to that field was prolific American pulpmeister Orrie Hitt (1916-1975), one of whose books, Never Cheat Alone (1960), is displayed above, with other examples embedded below. Hitt’s been pretty much forgotten over the last three decades, but he once made a name for himself turning out provocative paperbacks such as I Prowl by Night, Shabby Street, and more.

He was hardly alone, though, in quickening the pulses of readers intrigued by the illicit adventures of folks living on the urban outskirts. At the top of this post, you’ll find my favorite book cover from this genre, the one attached to Adultery in Suburbia, a 1964 novel by “Matthew Bradley,” which was apparently a pen name used by Peter T. Scott (who also churned out unauthorized Tarzan novels as “Barton Werper”). Credit for that Gold Star edition’s “good-girl art” belongs to Bernard Barton, a mid-20th-century illustrator who, on top of creating erotic novel jackets (another of which can be enjoyed here), developed crime story fronts for such publishers as Ace Books. Unlike some more explicitly painted erotic concoctions, Barton’s Adultery in Suburbia front leaves little to the imagination, yet shows nothing particularly objectionable (although I’m sure it would send more conservative readers into a lather over both its display of partial nudity and its cover teaser: “Her illness was nymphomania, but there were others in town far more disturbed.”).

There are a number of artists behind the 75 covers showcased below, including: Raymond Johnson (Love in Suburbia, Cancel These Vows, Suburbia: Jungle of Sex); Tom Miller (Crack-up in Suburbia); Harry Barton (Her Young Lover, Helena’s House, The Damned and the Innocent); Robert Maguire (Sexurbia County, The Fires Within); Robert McGinnis (Oh Careless Love, The Lion House); Al Rossi (The Empty Bed, Suburbia After Dark, The Sex Rebels, Weekday Widows); Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka (Make Mine Love, Sex Nest, The Night It Happened, The Third Lust); Gino Forte (The Big Bedroom), Fred Fixler (The Passion Hunters); Paul Rader (Spring Fever, Daytime in Suburbia), and Al Brule (Dial “M” for Man, Sex Is a Woman).

One other note about these book jackets: The Big Bedroom (1959) carries the byline “Edward Ronns.” That was just a pseudonym frequently used by Edward S. Aarons, a writer who is probably best remembered for penning the Sam Durell spy novels (Assignment: Burma Girl, Assignment: Maria Tirana, etc.).

Click on any of the covers to open an enlargement.











































































Incidentally, if you know of additional examples of suburban sin fiction, don’t hesitate to cite titles, authors, and Internet-reference locations in the Comments section of this post.