Two-fer Tuesdays: Corpse Posing

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



While putting together these fortnightly pairings, I occasionally have to search for a while before I am completely satisfied with the cover images. Other times, the task is considerably simpler. The two paperback fronts featured above just leaped out at me earlier today, probably because last night I sat through the first episode of Forever, a new ABC-TV crime drama about a New York City medical examiner--played by Hornblower’s Ioan Gruffudd--who also happens to be immortal. (If you think that premise sounds familiar, you’re not alone.) While not a real grabber, that episode at least persuaded me to try Forever again, which is more than I can say about most of the  shows on this season’s new U.S. TV schedule.

In any case, the image embedded above and on the left comes from the 1959 Pocket Books edition of Meet Me at the Morgue. It’s one of only six novels by Ross Macdonald that doesn’t feature his classic Los Angeles private eye, Lew Archer (although a tagline on the 1980 Bantam edition of this book claims that it does). Meet Me at the Morgue originally saw print in 1953, which means it appeared in stores and on newsstands between The Ivory Grin (1952) and Find a Victim (1954), two of the early Archer outings. A post in the excellent blog Crime Fiction Lover synopsizes Morgue’s story line:

… Howard Cross is a parole officer who becomes entangled in a child kidnapping. Fred Miner is on parole after causing the death of a stranger whilst driving drunk. To an extent he seems to have been rehabilitated, and has found some stability driving for local industrialist Abel Johnson. However Johnson’s young son goes missing and Fred was the last person seen with the boy, and now he can’t be contacted. So it seems Fred has graduated from an accidental killing to something far more serious.

Prevented from contacting the police by the young and glamorous Mrs. Johnson in case something should happen to her boy, Cross is forced to investigate on his own. It becomes clear there is more happening than first appears as bag men wind up dead, and sinister new faces arrive in town, including Miner’s disgraced navy buddies and a failed and embittered ex-starlet. What starts as a kidnapping ends with murder and blackmail.

The particular cover I have selected of Meet Me at the Morgue boasts an illustration by the great Victor Kalin, whose daughter, Rebecca, developed this handsome Web site dedicated to his work.

To the right of Kalin’s cover is Robert K. Abbett’s artwork for publisher Pocket’s 1958 version of The Lady in the Morgue, Jonathan Latimer’s second “comic hard-boiled detective novel” featuring Bill Crane. As The Thrilling Detective Web Site explains, Crane--one of several operatives for Colonel Black’s New York-based detective agency--was “a booze-soaked, seemingly inept detective who somehow always managed, despite always being either drunk or hungover, to crack the case …” Crane debuted in 1935’s Headed for a Hearse and tackled his last of four literary assignments in Red Gardenias (1939); The Lady in the Morgue was No. 3 in Latimer’s series, released in 1936.

A blog entitled Mostly Crappy Books (hmm--does that name really make you want to read any further?) offers the following description of The Lady in the Morgue’s plot:

Crane, sent to Chicago on a case arrives on time for the body of “Alice Ross,” a suicide, to vanish. Both the cops and two local gangsters think that he is responsible for the disappearance, so through most the book he is almost as busy avoiding them as he is solving the case. Going from strange beds to alcohol to cheap dance halls to alcohol to weed-wasted bohemian ceremonies to alcohol to acts of grave robbing to alcohol to alcohol to alcohol and so forth, the hunt for both the missing body and murderer and various missing women is convoluted but logical. Crane’s detective abilities can’t be faulted, even if his character can be.

Wikipedia adds that the novel “is remembered for its frank treatment of drug addiction among artists, for its frequent references to contemporary jazz and swing music, and for its bizarre setting (morgues, cemeteries).” A 1938 “B-movie” adaptation of The Lady in the Morgue starred Preston Foster as Crane. You can watch a clip from that film right here.

Random Discoveries

While I was putting together a rather lengthy news compilation yesterday for The Rap Sheet, I came across a few tidbits that deserve to be mentioned on this page, instead:

• Pulp International has assembled a rather terrific themed collection of vintage paperback façades, all of which feature “one figure looming menacingly in the foreground as a second cowers in the triangular negative space created by the first’s spread legs. This pose is so common,” the blog remarks, “it should have a name. We’re thinking ‘the alpha,’ because it signifies male dominance and because of the a-shape the pose makes.”

• Speaking of themes, when was the last time you checked out Existential Ennui’s page of “Beautiful British Book Jacket Design of the 1950s and 1960s”? Blogger Nick Jones points out that it now contains “well over 100 dust jackets,” including fronts by artists such as Val Biro, Sheila Perry, Craig Dodd (I dearly love his artwork for the 1969 Hodder & Stoughton edition of Richard Stark’s The Dame), Kenneth Farnhill, Donald Green, and Denis McLoughlin.

• Jones also directs our attention to this provocative front from the 1960 Midwood Books edition of All the Girls Were Willing, by Alan Marshall (aka Donald E. Westlake).

• And though Edward Gorey may not be remembered best for illustrating the covers of other people’s books, he certainly did some splendid work of that sort.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Extracurricular Activities

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



Another academic year begins this month in the United States, and what better way to celebrate than with a couple of school-related covers? Actually, these might best represent parents’ worst fears of the salacious endeavors taking place on the campuses of the institutions to which they send their offspring.

On the left we find the front from Midwood Books’ 1962 edition of Campus Jungle, by Joan Ellis (one of several pen names employed by the prolific Julie Ellis). The cover illustration is credited to Paul Rader, who I’ve mentioned several times on this page--and about whom I intend to write more in the near future. The aptly monikered blog Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books explains that Campus Jungle is an “absurd and un-realistic” tale focusing on

Ravenwood College, a small Eastern institution somewhat like William and Mary or Bennington, [that] has been voted by a [New York] newspaper as the country’s Most Typical College. But there are also rumors of wild sexual abandon, not only among students but [between] students and faculty.

Seeking her Big Break, scandal, and to make a name for herself, Annie Winters, a cub reporter, has talked the New York Comet, a daily paper like the Observer or Post, [into sending] her undercover to the college [to] find out if the rumors are true. She’s 24 but can pass off as a 19-year-old undergrad.

The story that follows features copious carnality, the liberal dissemination of booze, and even “a secret lust cabin where the old Dean, and some faculty, lure young women to and have sex.” (Hey, it sounds like my college experience! Just kidding ...) Author Ellis eventually wrings a cheerful ending from this short work, copies of which are easily available online and not terribly expensive.

Now shift your eyes to the right, above, and you’ll find the façade from Campus Affair, a 1966 Beacon Books release by someone named Mame Christy. Sadly, I don’t find any background for Christy on the Web, but I do notice that the cover art for this novel about an older woman seducing younger men was executed by Victor Olson (1927-2007), a graduate of New York City’s Art Career School and a lifelong resident of the area around Bridgeport, Connecticut. Over the decades, Olson worked for publishers such as Bantam, Doubleday, Avon, and Monarch, in addition to Beacon. A few other examples of his fine artistry can and should be appreciated here.

READ MORE: “Duped: Awake to Love,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(Killer Covers).

Four Play

• Between 1943 and 1951, American publisher Dell Books did something rather remarkable with the rear sides of hundreds of its releases, especially crime novels. As Wikipedia explains, “the entire back covers [were] given over to maps, or variously charts, blueprints, or what have you to represent story locale or scene of the crime: a stretch of California highway, the interior of an apartment, a sheik’s ‘city of stones.’ It was an enjoyable if slightly goofy gimmick and, amazingly, managed to last nearly ten years.” As Gary Lovisi explained in this article for Mystery Scene, “Dell editor Lloyd Smith … came up with the idea for the back cover maps (or someone at Western Publishing suggested the idea to him). Smith was, in essence, a one-man publishing whirlwind. According to most accounts, he designed and envisioned the series, originating the maps, casts of characters and other features, and even suggested the airbrushed covers that Gerald Gregg and others would paint so effectively.” To honor that classic series, Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph began last month to post “mapbacks” every Monday. You can keep up with her offerings by clicking here.

• British comics historian Steve Holland pays deserved tribute to the work of Scottish-American espionage novelist Helen MacInnes by posting this gallery of her many book fronts.

• The blog Battered, Tattered, Yellowed & Creased showcases some of the illustrations Robert Maguire did during the last half of the 20th century for a variety of paperback publishers. If you would like to see more of Maguire’s artwork, track down a copy of Jim Silke’s terrific 2009 volume, Dames, Dolls, and Gun Molls. Or clickety-clack here to find Killer Covers posts highlighting his efforts.

• Finally, Yvette Banek has collected a wealth of paperback façades featuring old-time nurses in all their starched and proper glory.