Nothing But Lip Service

Today is Valentine’s Day, an annual holiday that apparently started out as an occasion to honor several early Christian martyrs known as Saint Valentine, but has since become an opportunity for candy, greeting card, and jewelry makers to peddle their wares. Nobody who visits this blog on a regular basis would expect me to mark this date with extravagant romantic verses. Instead, it’s a ripe chance for me to exhibit some of my favorite book covers--those endowed with romantic-sounding names, even if the stories they contain don’t offer much in the way of happily-ever-afters.

The 45 fronts embedded in this post all contain the word “kiss” in their titles. Most are works of crime fiction. But that’s about where their similarities end. You’ll find illustrations here by artists as varied as Robert K. Abbett, George Ziel, Robert Maguire, Ron Lesser, James Avati, and Barye Phillips, the last of whom painted the “good girl art” for the 1951 Gold Medal edition of To Kiss, or Kill, by Day Keene, that’s shown above. This is by no means an exhaustive gathering of covers along this theme; I’ve left out such obvious other candidates as Wallace Stroby’s The Barbed-Wire Kiss, James Patterson’s Kiss the Girls, Ronald Tierney’s Good to the Last Kiss, and of course Ed McBain’s straightforward Kiss, the wrappers of which aren’t as striking as those below). However, I think it’s a good, representative sampling. You might be amazed to discover how many novels--and not simply those plucked from the mystery and thriller stacks--incorporate “kiss” in their names. Then again, given the obvious human attractions of that word, maybe you should not be.

Click on any of the covers below for an enlargement.

ADDITIONAL ROMANTIC ENTANGLEMENTS: “Valentine’s Day Mysteries,” by Janet Rudolph (Mystery Fanfare).

An Inside Job

Part-time writer and bookseller J.F. “John” Norris has remarked often in his blog, Pretty Sinister Books, on the dust covers of vintage crime novels. Lately, though, he’s begun also posting about the interior illustrations to be found in older volumes. I was particularly interested to read his piece about prolific American-born artist Cyrus Cuneo (1878-1916), who at one point illustrated a collection of short stories about literature's most famous gentleman thief, A.J. Raffles. But his “Drawing on the Past” series has looked back as well on works by Frederick C. Yohn, Arthur I. Keller, Gordon Ross, and others.

You can, and should, keep up with Norris’ interior art posts here.

Designing Women

“Today,” writes Ontario illustrator and graphic arts instructor Leif Peng, “there are just as many women illustrators as men (perhaps even more). But it wasn’t always so.”

In a recent series of posts for his blog, Today’s Inspiration, Peng highlights the abundant artistic output of 20th-century female artists such as Marilyn Conover, Lucia Larner, Mia Carpenter, and Mary Suzuki. It isn’t clear how much these women were involved in book-cover art, but their work was often seen in magazines. You’ll find Peng’s posts here: Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

Beware, the “Devil Doctor” Is Back!

Although I have written on this page before about Sax Rohmer (né Arthur Henry Ward) and his famous succession of thrillers featuring evil Chinese genius Dr. Fu-Manchu, I must admit to not having read many works from that series. By the time I became interested in crime fiction in the late 1970s, the 13 original Fu-Manchu novels—from The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913) to Emperor Fu-Manchu (1959)—weren’t so easy to find as they had once been, and their protagonist was becoming a source of parody. (Peter Sellers’ final film, the 1980 spoof The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu-Manchu, did nothing to revive interest in Rohmer’s master criminal.) I was never provoked to delve further into the character or his creator.

But Titan Books is preparing to re-issue a complete paperback set of the Fu-Manchu novels. A Titan press release reads:

The original adventures of the character who inspired generations of villains, from Ming the Merciless to Dr. No, will now be published in brand-new editions available for the first time in years. They are eerie, violent, sexy, and controversial, involving deadly killers and exotic women against an international backdrop. Fu-Manchu is one of the most iconic characters of the 20th century, and as much a household name as Sherlock Holmes and James Bond.

The first two titles being reprinted—and set to appear in U.S. bookshops later this month, or in early March—are also the introductory works in this series: The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (with an introduction by Leslie S. Klinger, editor of The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes) and The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1916). Titan’s media alert doesn’t include this information, but I assume that succeeding releases in the series will reach booksellers in the order of their original publication. They’ll conclude with the issuance of The Wrath of Fu-Manchu (1973), a collection of four stories.

Great Britain-based Titan Publishing has done some remarkable things for the crime-fiction community over the last few years. It’s brought back into print a variety of Sherlock Holmes novels that were not penned by Arthur Conan Doyle, and is in the midst of resurrecting Harry Houdini mysteries. Last year, Titan partnered with paperback house Hard Case Crime in a deal that kept the latter active. And it promises to reissue Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm spy novels, beginning in 2013. Offering Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu to a new generation of avid readers is a further bloody feather in Titan’s cap.

What makes Titan’s resurrection of Rohmer’s books especially interesting, though, is that it has commissioned American artist Ron Lesser to create the portrait of Fu-Manchu found on these new editions. (The rest of the cover design work is credited to a UK-based studio called Amazing15.) Lesser began painting covers for crime-fiction paperbacks back in the 1950s, and though he’s branched out since into Western and historical works, he continues to contribute to our favorite genre. (His art can be spotted on several Hard Case releases: Honey in His Mouth, Quarry in the Middle, and Nobody’s Angel). Lesser was even responsible for at least two classic Fu-Manchu paperback covers—those of The Mask of Fu-Manchu and The Bride of Fu-Manchu, both released by Pyramid Books in 1962, and featured here on the left. (Click to enlarge those images.) The fronts Titan has developed for their reissues—each topped by Lesser’s image of the “Devil Doctor” as puppet master—are more uniform in look than these earlier fronts, but they’re still quite captivating.

If you’re like me—new to the world of Dr. Fu-Manchu and his longtime nemesis, Dennis Nayland Smith—then you might want to take a gander at Titan’s set of Fu-Manchu volumes. To whet your appetite, click here to read an excerpt from The Mystery of Fu-Manchu.

READ MORE: “On Yellow Peril Thrillers,” by Jess Nevins (Violet Books).