Designs on Bond

Somehow I missed hearing about the contest, launched last September by the James Bond fan site MI6, to design a new cover for Ian Fleming’s 13th Agent 007 novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965). “The requirements,” recalls a new post at MI6, “were that it included the title and author, the images used were original or copyright-free, and the cover did not incorporate elements from the EON Productions’ films. For the past month, readers have been voting on the finalists’ artwork, and the results are in ...”

Of the dozen entries--available for viewing here--the image embedded above, created by an artist who signs himself only as “hASEROT,” ultimately received the greatest number of votes from MI6 readers. However, I found the most remarkable submission to be another cover altogether.

In the pair of fronts displayed below, the one on the left was among the three runners-up in MI6’s Man with the Golden Gun contest, submitted by artist “Gaz1961.” However, the cover on the right, from which Gaz1961 obviously took his Golden Gun illustration, comes from a 1960 novel called North Beach Girl, credited to “John Trinian,” a pseudonym used by TV and film writer Zekial Marko, who died in the spring of 2008 and was the brother of novelist Kenn Davis (1932-2010). Credit for the North Beach Girl illustration has been given to renowned paperback artist Robert McGinnis, but there’s no signature that I see on either the novel’s front or back.



(Click on either of these images for an enlargement.)

The fact that Gaz1961, well, “borrowed” such familiar artwork for his Bond front doesn’t diminish his efforts. It’s just interesting to recognize the source.

MI6 is now challenging artists and designers to come up a fresh cover for Fleming’s 1954 Bond novel, Live and Let Die. You’ll find entry details, along with some early submissions, here.

Dangerous Elegance

Earlier this month I made note in The Rap Sheet of the exceptional new cover for a Spanish-translated paperback edition of Megan Abbott’s 2007 novel, Queenpin (Reina del Crimen). Now comes a post from Óscar Palmer, the publisher of that edition, in which he recalls the cover’s creative conception.

Click here for Google’s imperfect English translation of that post.

One-Man Band Plays On

A review blog called The Man Eating Bookworm features an interview with Jeroen Ten Berge, a Netherlands-born New Zealand graphic designer who has created covers for such American crime novelists as Blake Crouch, Brett Battles, J.D. Rhoades, and Joe Konrath, and is also responsible for the front of the new e-book, Top Suspense: 13 Classic Stories by 12 Masters of the Genre.

You’ll find a gallery of Berge’s eye-catching covers here.

(Hat tip to A Writer’s Life.)

Three Ways to Sideways

If you haven’t seen them already, check out U.S. publisher Vintage’s new horizontal covers for three classic novels by James M. Cain.

From Lawbreakers to Landscapes

Just over a year ago, when American golfing sensation Tiger Woods was in the thick of the tabloid feeding frenzy around revelations that he was having, well, some marital difficulties, I posted an item in The Rap Sheet about a suggestively illustrated novel called The Tiger’s Wife, by Wade Miller. The cover of that 1951 book--which featured a man swimming in hot pursuit of an apparently topless woman--was created by Clark Hulings, a Florida-born realist painter who, early in his career, produced a wide variety of paperback fronts for mainstream, historical, and crime-fiction works.

More recently, a blog called Lines and Colors brought the unfortunate news that Hulings died on February 2 of this year. He was 88 years old, according to an obituary in the Santa Fe New Mexican. The newspaper added that Hulings had taken his first breath on November 20, 1922; that his painting proficiency was initially recognized after the family resettled in New Jersey, when Hulings was 6; that “[a]t age 12, he began to study art”; that he later also studied physics [at Pennsylvania’s Haverford College] in order to satisfy his father, who feared that his son couldn’t make a proper living as an artist; and that “[a]fter graduation in 1944, he was appointed to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos [New Mexico], but his recurring health problems [Hulings had by then contracted tuberculosis] prevented him from working there or from joining the wartime military.” Hulings spent some time in the state capital of Santa Fe, where he painted pastel portraits of children and “had a one-man show of his landscapes at the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art.” He was subsequently employed by a rubber company in Denver, but put in his off-hours painting landscapes around that Colorado burg, and went on to live in Louisiana, before attending the Art Students League of New York. Hulings’ initial interests were in illustration and design, and he worked in advertising before heading off to Europe in the mid-1950s to study figure painting and abstract design.

Many of the most recognizable paperback covers attributed to Hulings date back to the ’50s. He developed fronts for Avon, Cardinal Editions, Dell, Fawcett, Pocket, and assorted other publishers. His work can be spotted on the fronts of novels by Ellery Queen, Thomas B. Dewey, Day Keene, Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), and Georges Simenon. Some of his covers were powerful, others passionate; still more were sexy or haunting. A few of my personal favorites can be seen below (click on the images for blowups).

Hulings didn’t stick with paperback illustration, though. “By the early 1960s,” reports Artists Daily, he “devoted himself to easel paintings. In 1965 he debuted in New York City, at The Grand Central Art Galleries.” Huling met a woman in Manhattan named Mary Belfi, and in 1966 they were married and then relocated to Santa Fe. “In 1976 he was the subject of a solo exhibition at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Center, in Oklahoma City, which was documented in the book Hulings--A Collection of Oil Paintings (Lowell Press), followed in 1978 by a retrospective at the Museum of the Southwest, in Midland, Texas, and a 1981 exhibition at the C.M. Russell Museum, in Great Falls, Montana. Most recently, Mr. Hulings’ work was the subject of a 2007 one-man exhibition at J.N. Bartfield Galleries, New York, and Morris & Whiteside Galleries, in Hilton Head, South Carolina. His scheduled exhibition of paintings at the Forbes Galleries, New York, takes place March 23 through June 18, 2011.”

I understand that Clark Hulings continued to paint up until two years ago, when his health failed him. Examples of his still-life and landscape paintings are available at his Web site. That work is very impressive, and can bring top prices nowadays. Still, it’s hard not to regret what might have been, what Hulings could have accomplished had he pursued his book-cover art for at least a bit longer.

READ MORE: “Paperbacks 284-287: The Work of Clark Hulings,” by Rex Parker (Pop Sensation).

Putting Up a Good Front

For your viewing pleasure, I offer three Web-based galleries of classic covers: James M. Cain books, the works of W.R. Burnett, and half a dozen novels based on the American TV series Dragnet.

Wil Shows the Way

Subtropic Bob, pseudonymous proprietor of the Men’s Pulp Mags blog, looks back at the work of Wil Hulsey. Famous for his vintage pulp periodical covers featuring killer creatures and well-endowed damsels in distress, Hulsey this month celebrates his 85th birthday.

READ MORE: “Some Rare Original Wil Hulsey ‘Good Girl Art’ Paintings from the Rich Oberg Collection” and “Risque Rebel Belles and Hot Yankee Spies: Artist Wil Hulsey’s Sexy Civil War Cover Paintings,” by Subtropic Bob (Men’s Pulp Mags).

“Scene” Stealers

You can now add Mystery Scene to the publications in which my writing has appeared. The Winter 2011 edition of that magazine (No. 118) includes an article editor Kate Stine requested I write, about some of my favorite recent crime-novel book fronts. (It should come as no surprise to readers of this blog, that I have an interest in the subject.) My story begins this way:

When many people think of top-quality book jackets in the crime-fiction field, their minds turn immediately to the provocatively illustrated fronts of the mid-20th century. You know, the ones by artists such as Robert McGinnis, Norman Saunders, Ernest Chiriacka, and Victor Kalin. The ones that showed men with devilry blazing in their eyes and pistols in their paws, alleyways crawling with bent-nosed thugs, and curvaceous women with impossibly long legs. The sorts of covers that novelist Max Allan Collins once said represented “a wonderful golden age where utter sleaze meets genuine artistry.”

But crime novels didn’t shed all of their cleverness and captivation with the shift away from painted covers and toward photographic ones in the late 1960s.

Typographical innovations, graphics-editing programs, and advances in printing technology give today’s designers tools that their forerunners of 50 years ago didn’t have. Those tools alone cannot turn mediocre concepts into brilliant ones, and they don’t alter the fundamental value of these jackets. As Peter Mendelsund, the associate art director for publisher Alfred A. Knopf, puts it: “Our job is still to take a book you would read anyway, and make it look attractive enough that you won’t be embarrassed to be seen enjoying it on a subway.” However, with the right mix of creative knack, eye for commercial appeal, and talent for pushing extraordinary ideas past dubious marketing departments, designers can still deliver eye-catching covers.

Two of the 11 covers I mention in that piece are shown below.



(Click on either of the images for an enlargement.)

Also worth reading in this latest edition of Mystery Scene are Kevin Burton Smith’s profile of Robert Crais; Art Taylor’s look back at the way journalists have been portrayed in crime films; Part I of Lawrence Block’s recollections of Evan Hunter/Ed McBain; former Mystery News editor Lynn Kaczmarek’s profile of author Jill Paton Walsh; and a second Smith submission, declaring that Kalinda Sharma of CBS-TV’s The Good Wife is “the best private eye on the tube these days. And in a long time.” I won’t argue with that.

If you’d like to procure a copy of this issue, pay a visit to your local newsstand, or order one through the Mystery Scene Web site.

I look forward to a continuing relationship with Mystery Scene.

“You’ve Got to Resist Boring and Dullness”

The blog Stodgy Is Sexy (you knew that existed, right?) has posted a very unstodgy video interview with Chip Kidd, renowned book designer and associate art director at publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Thanks to this video, his many colleagues are probably now kidding Kidd about being “a drinker and a crier.” Click here to watch.

(Hat tip to The Casual Optimist.)

Sex Sells. And Well, Indeed.

Rosa Is for Romance hosts a gallery of sexy work by Al Rossi, who’s described as “a prolific book and magazine illustrator during the 1940s to 1960s. He was the original cover artist of Junkie, the novel William Burroughs published under the pen-name of William Lee. He was also one of the main cover artists for Beacon.”

One fine book jacket that blog doesn’t happen to include, though, appeared on the 1953 Bantam edition of Air Bridge, by Hammond Innes, “a novel of crime and fanatic courage in the shadow of the Berlin Air Lift.” Click here to see the artwork.

* * *

While we’re on the subject of sex, note that the Men’s Pulp Mags blog addresses what someone far fonder of cheesiness than I might call “The Singular Scandal of the Stripped Nazi Sex Slaves.”

They Don’t Make Mags Like They Used To

If somebody had told me back when I was a boy that I would one day wish I could’ve been born much earlier in the 20th century than I was, just so I’d have had the opportunity to purchase and collect men’s adventure magazines in their skin-and-sin heyday, I would undoubtedly have scoffed at the suggestion.

But some of the illustrated features from those publications, revisited recently in the blogs Retrospace and Men’s Pulp Mags, certainly make me wish I could pick up the issues from my local newsstand and read through them. Even though many of the stories were pretty outrageous--as is evident from their headlines.

Anybody have a time machine handy?

Small Is Bountiful

I generally confine news wrap-up posts to my other blog, The Rap Sheet. However, a number of small design-related items have passed across my desk recently that, while they may not justify posts of their own, might be of interest to some readers.

• UK comics expert Steve Holland has put together several collections of covers from old Fontana Books editions of novels, some of which belong in the crime-fiction category. He’s broken down many of them according to their cover artists (John Keay, Eileen Walton, and John Rose), but others are grouped by author (Laurence Meynell, Alistair MacLean and Ngaio Marsh).

• The Casual Optimist celebrates British designer Stuart Bache “wonderfully stark” covers for Spectre’s lline of John Le Carré novels.

• I’ve spent much of my career editing print mags, so I found this video in The FontFeed utterly delightful. You should, too.

• For authors who choose (or are compelled) to go the independent-publishing route, which means they may have a greater say in how their books are presented, Jane Friedman of Writer’s Digest offers “10 Tips for Effective Book Covers.” It’s hard to argue with her simple suggestions.

• The Book Designer’s Joel Friedlander talks with Joshua Tallent of Ebookarchitects.com about “many of the issues self-publishers face when they try to move their books to e-book formats.”

• And even before actor Daniel Craig stimulated debate over super-spy James Bond’s hair color, Pan Books’ 1955 paperback edition of Casino Royale introduced the idea of a blond 007.