Two-fer Tuesdays: Fears of a Clown

A twice-monthly pairing of book covers that just seem to go together. Click on either of these images to open up an enlargement.



I was listening the other day to National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday program, when I heard host Scott Simon chatting with Murray Horowitz, an ex-professional circus clown, Tony Award-winning Broadway lyricist, and former NPR executive, about the present-day shortage of clowns. During their exchange, Horowitz observed that “clown, which was a word that used to be associated with joy and laughter and happiness, now has a lot of negative connotations to it. You’ve got characters like Krusty the Clown on The Simpsons, and there are members of Congress.”

Horowitz was mostly joking, of course, but it’s true that clowns aren’t of a single variety. There are happy clowns, there are sad clowns, and there has been at least one “killer clown”--Chicago serial slayer and rapist John Wayne Gacy Jr., who once talked with undercover police detectives about his work as a registered jester. “You know …,” he confided, “clowns can get away with murder.”

That radio conversation inspired this week’s pairing of vintage paperback fronts. Above and on the left you’ll see the cover from the 1957 Permabooks edition of Stuart Palmer’s Unhappy Hooligan, with a cover illustration by James Meese. Originally released in hardcover by Harper in 1956, it’s the first of Palmer’s two mysteries featuring Howie Rook, a former newspaperman and “the least hard-boiled of all private eyes,” according to Michael E. Grost, writing on the Web site A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection. The joint venture Mysterious Press/Open Road Integrated Media, which has reissued Unhappy Hooligan in e-book format (along with its 1968 sequel, Rook Takes Knight), teases the tale’s plot thusly:

A newspaperman investigates the strange case of a
murdered society clown

Howie Rook does not care for the police. After a long career in newspapers, he has seen too many cases loused up by unimaginative detectives to have any faith in by-the-book investigation. Recently retired, he spends his leisure hours writing letters to the editor regarding police stupidity. He’s so good at pointing out the department’s screw-ups that it has decided to reach out to him. They have an impossible crime, and it requires an amateur’s eye.

Real estate magnate James McFarley is found dead in a locked room, a bullet in his chest, and clown make-up on his face. The police have no suspects, no witnesses, and no hope but Rook. The amateur’s skill is about to be put to the test. Will he find the killer, or will he end up looking sillier than a murdered clown?

I haven’t read Unhappy Hooligan (which should of course not be confused with Stuart Palmer’s 1941 Hildegarde Withers whodunit, The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan), but Grost notes that it’s “a full-fledged locked-room mystery” with “a fair, plausible solution.” At the same time, he derides the book as rather dull, “full of the fashionable Freudianism of the fifties, and contain[ing] some nasty Freudian homophobia--something which returns, briefly, in Rook Takes Knight.” I’d welcome comments below from anyone else who has read those two Howie Rook novels.

Speaking of paid funny men, check out the cover--above, on the right--from the 1963 Ace softcover edition of Charlotte Armstrong’s The Better to Eat You. “At first it looks like your run-of-the mill mystery paperback,” opines a poster on the image-hosting Web site Flickr, “but then you realize that the usual villain? That is a CLOWN. And then you put the title with that CLOWN, and then the blurb about ROMANCE and you’ve got yourself the shivers and a little nausea.”

The Better to Eat You is a standalone novel, which was first published in 1954 (and sometimes appears under the less interesting title Murder’s Nest). A review of the book, posted in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald on December 6, 1954, described it as a “comparatively unhorrifying tale of a young college professor who falls in love with a girl whose friends have a habit of dying.

She believes that he is under a curse. He does not. When his car slips down the street and kills a woman, he knows there is something human behind it all.

“Something human” turns out to be a wily ex-clown with as many twists as a snake. We know why almost right from the start, but arson, poisoned brandy, and wires on cliff paths keep up the interest all the way to the slight gooey end.

Ace Books’ 1963 paperback version of The Better to Eat You was paired in a single volume with another Armstrong suspenser, Mischief (1951). Sadly, I hear, the artist is not identified in the book, nor is there a credit to be found on the Web.

Like Palmer’s Unhappy Hooligan, both The Better to Eat You and Mischief are available as e-books from publisher Mysterious Press/Open Road.

Seeing the Light

Much is being made of this week’s first look at the British cover of Lee Child’s 19th Jack Reacher adventure, Personal (due out in August from Bantam Press). The funniest response, though, came from Facebook poster Marcus Bryce, who penned a brief plot synopsis of this novel, based solely on its hardcover front: “Personal … where Reacher goes on hunt for the nefarious bastards who stole the shadows from the lamp-posts.” See the cover here.

And a Sixth: Footsteps in the Night

Last month, when Killer Covers celebrated its fifth anniversary, I posted here five different vintage book fronts that had caught my attention. To hit that number perfectly, of course, it was necessary to toss out a few other options I liked almost as well. The best of those was this 1962 Permabooks paperback edition of Footsteps in the Night, by Dolores Hitchens (a work that had been released in hardcover by Crime Club/Doubleday a year earlier). Rather than let that cover gather dust, I’m posting it today. The illustration on Footsteps’ front was done by the great Harry Bennett.

You Can Go Holmes Again

Few readers of this blog will be surprised to learn that I own an entire annotated set of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novels and stories, as well as separate editions of several of the novels. However, I’d still like to possess The Heirloom Collection’s Complete Sherlock Holmes, pictured here and available here.

The Call of “Wild”

Pseudonymous blogger Rex Parker insists that the 1957, Robert Maguire-illustrated paperback front of Jim Thompson’s Wild Town is “pretty much the quintessential cover. It’s the first book I brought home (almost 20 years ago now) that made me feel like I had committed; I was really doing this; I was a collector.” Read more of Parker’s observations on Maguire’s talents here.

I’ve used Maguire’s Wild Town artwork myself, to help illustrate this post about classic paperback crime-fiction fronts.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Grave Affections

A twice-monthly pairing of book covers that just seem to go together. Click on either of these images to open up an enlargement.



With this Friday being Valentine’s Day, I thought it only right to go with a romantic theme for my latest Tuesday pairing. Or at least sort of romantic, in what seems an appropriately twisted, crime fiction kind of way. On the left you will find the 1951 White Circle paperback cover from She’ll Love You Dead, a novel I believe was first published in Britain by Collins a year prior to that. According to the French version of Wikipedia, “Charles Franklin” was a nom de plume employed by Hugh Frank Usher (1909-1976). Under that name, explains the online encyclopedia, “he published his first novel, Exit Without Permit, in 1946,” featuring his eventually best-recognized protagonist, Grant Garfield, “a young and fearless lawyer” who often “leads with [an] iron fist” and was assisted by his “charming secretary Barbara Wentworth.” Usher/Franklin later wrote series featuring either Inspector Jim Burgess or Maxine Dangerfield, the latter being “a kind of James Bond in petticoats.” She’ll Love You Dead is listed among the Garfield titles. Sadly, I don’t see the illustrator’s identity provided anywhere on the Web.

Meanwhile, above and on the right, is the front of Love Me to Death, by Frank Diamond. It was released by Ace Books in 1955 as half of a double-edition paperback; on the other side readers found Gil Brewer’s The Squeeze. The cover of Love Me to Death is credited to Verne Tossey, about whom I’ve previously written on this page.

Once Around the Web, Please

• The last time I read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915) was probably in a high-school English class, and I wasn’t all that hot on it. I never figured to own a copy. However, this New York Times story convinced me to purchase the new Norton paperback edition of Kafka’s book, based solely on designer Jamie Keenan’s cover. Maybe I’ll appreciate the story better on second reading.

• I already knew about a few of the eye-catching venetian blind covers Pulp International featured recently, but not all.

• The very first, 1953 issue of Manhunt!

• A particularly beautiful cover of The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales.

• I, for one, had never heard of this “novel about the abortion racket,” but it must have made a huge, likely negative impact when it was published back in 1950.

• And here’s more information about Syd Dyke, the post-World War II illustrator who gave that controversial novel its cover image.

• Finally, Print magazine recently posted the distinctive jackets from 19 new books that are already in stores or will be on their way there soon. I’m particularly fond of Peter Mendelsund’s front for Silence Once Begun as well as the cover of Never Love a Gambler, designed by Rodrigo Corral and Rachel Adam Rogers.

Image Enhancement

With a record 1,039 votes registered, The Rap Sheet’s Best Crime Fiction Covers of 2013 contest closed at the end of last week. But only today were the results announced. Click here to see the winners.

Marlowe Makes an Entrance

One in a series of Raymond Chandler novel covers, created by artist Tom Adams and published by Ballantine Books in 1971.

John Dugdale of The Guardian was good enough to point out that it was 75 years ago today—on February 6, 1939—that Raymond Chandler’s first private-eye novel, The Big Sleep, was released by U.S. publisher Alfred A. Knopf. “Reviews in 1939,” he notes, “were wary and unenthusiastic, however, and only gradually was it recognised that Chandler had pulled off a bold fusion of highbrow and lowbrow—much-applauded by authors such as W.H. Auden, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but also much-imitated by fellow chroniclers of murder.”

Other shamuses had trod the fictional mean streets of America, among them Dashiell Hammett’s The Continental Op and Sam Spade, Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams, and more birthed in the rough-paper pages of Black Mask magazine. But the P.I. genre was new to Great Britain in those World War II years, and Dugdale argues that The Big Sleep offered even readers in the States “a very different kind of detective” in Los Angeles’ Philip Marlowe.

What was so new? Almost everything in the first chapter, which introduces Philip Marlowe as he visits the Sternwood family mansion. Marlowe speaks to us. Whereas Holmes, Poirot, Maigret, Sam Spade are observed externally, Marlowe is the detective as autobiographer, starting three consecutive sentences in the first paragraph with “I” (ending with “I was calling on four million dollars”).

He is a private detective, yet not patrician. By showing him meeting his social betters, Chandler’s opening contrasts him as a man of the people (like a cop in this, but too nonconformist to be one) with the likes of Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey, who don’t need the money. Even calling on a potential client—Holmes waits for them to call on him, Poirot has agreeable invitations to country houses—sets him apart.

He is single, and attracted and attractive to women. The opening’s flirtatious encounter with kittenish Carmen Sternwood differentiates him from his predecessors, who tend to be either sexless or married.

He is a dandy, as fond of fine clothes as he is of fine prose: the book’s second sentence mentions his “powder-blue suit” and even describes his socks (“black wool … with dark blue clocks on them”).

He is very literary. His first sentence—“It was about 11 o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills”—could be Scott Fitzgerald. In The Big Sleep the initial nexus of crime is … a bookshop.

(Right) The original, 1939 Knopf edition of The Big Sleep.

After three quarters of a century, we’re still admiring Chandler’s graceful and evocative prose, if not always his novel’s plots (which, as in The Big Sleep, could be a bit ragged). Although some people among us refuse the opportunity to become Big Sleep fans (case in point here), the novel spawned what the majority of this genre’s critics would certainly acknowledge is one of the most influential—if not one of the longest (comprising only seven entries)—gumshoe series of the 20th century. More than three decades after Chandler’s death in 1959, another important shaper of the American school of detective fiction, Robert B. Parker, was interested enough in The Big Sleep’s story and characters that he penned a not-altogether satisfying sequel, 1991’s Perchance to Dream. And it’s hardly surprising to find that Chandler’s 1939 novel remains in print and also remains an instigator of lively discussion in popular literature classes and at crime-fiction conventions.

There have been numerous editions of The Big Sleep released over the years, some more eye-catching than others. Below are just a few of them. Click on any of the images for an enlargement.










Interestingly, last year, publisher Penguin invited aspiring designers to come up with fresh cover concepts for The Big Sleep. You can see them all here, but below I’ve embedded three of my favorites. The first is by Philippa “Pip” Watkins, the second by Sam Barley. The third cover, which won the contest, is by Hayley Warnham.

READ MORE: “Penguin Book Jacket Design” (Speelio Design); “The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler” (The Blog of Hannah Yapp); “Raymond Chandler Book Covers,” by Eduardo (Illmatic); “The Art of The Big Sleep,” by Evan Lewis (Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and the Wild West).

Master at Work

Author Bill Crider reminds me that today marks the 88th birthday of renowned American illustrator Robert McGinnis. To enjoy some excellent examples of McGinnis' work, click here.