Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Two-fer Tuesdays: Twelfth Plight

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



Blogger August West gave the basics of Murder by the Dozen in a review he posted in 2008. “[From] 1934 through 1938,” he explained, “Hugh Wiley penned 12 short stories for Collier’s magazine featuring the Chinese-American confidential operative James Lee Wong. In 1951, Popular Library published all 12 in a paperback and I am glad they did. They are wonderful, quick, pulp who-done-its, with the educated James Lee (Wong is rarely used in the stories) solving cases for the [U.S.] Department of Justice or as a private man for [San Francisco’s] Chinese community. If you enjoyed John Marquand’s Mr. Moto novels or Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan novels, you’ll want to include Hugh Wiley’s Oriental sleuth in the grouping.”

After finding all this information on the Web, it took me a few minutes to recall why the name Mr. Wong was so familiar. Then it hit me: The character was portrayed by Boris Karloff in a succession of five movies shot during the late 1930s and early ’40s, beginning with Mr. Wong, Detective (1938). A sixth entry in the series, Phantom of Chinatown, hit theaters in 1940, and rather than Karloff, it starred Chinese-American actor Keye Luke, who had previously played “Number One Son” in the Charlie Chan films, and would go on to feature as blind Master Po in the 1972-1975 TV series Kung Fu.

According to a brief biography on the Web, author Wiley was born in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1884, and “became an engineer during the first decade of the 20th century.” Following a stint with the U.S. Army in France during World War I, he “began writing professionally, beginning with an adventure tale entitled ‘Four Leaved Wildcat,’ which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on March 8, 1919. He followed this with a series of stories, ‘Mister Lady Luck,’ ‘Hop,’ ‘Junk,’ and ‘Solitaire’ among them, through the year 1920, and these were followed by his first books, The Wildcat in 1920 and The Prowler in 1921. … It wasn’t until 1934, however, that Wiley created the character that would give him his most lasting impact on Hollywood. That year, he published a story entitled ‘Medium Well Done’ in Collier’s magazine, in which he introduced the character of James Lee Wong, an educated, articulate, gentlemanly Chinese-American sleuth whose expertise at solving crimes carries him into contact with the most brutal of murders, and a world of opium dens and other presumed attributes of the Chinatown underworld.”

“Medium Well Done” is of course included in Murder by the Dozen, a paperback original that does its best to attract readers--not only with its cover art showing a woman being attacked at the door of an automobile, but with its back-jacket copy:
KIDNAPPED!

A woman’s scream pierced the silence of the Chinese cemetery. James Lee Wong raced to the scene, only to hear the distant grinding of gears as a ruthless abductor sped off into the night with a frightened victim. The case had started with a corpse in a dark alley--and a missing $200,000 which Fang Yut, a wealthy importer, had used to smuggle opium into the States. The worried lords of Frisco’s Chinatown called Detective James Lee to clean up the scandal. Lee soon found himself thrown into a whirlpool of violence which was to culminate in the strange death of Fang Yut and in the brutal kidnapping of a white girl. This is only one of twelve exciting action-packed stories featuring the famous Chinese master sleuth, James Lee Wong.
Unfortunately, I don’t find an artist credit for the illustration fronting Murder by the Dozen. If I had to guess, I’d say it was the work of Rudolph Belarski, whose talents were also exhibited on this book and this book, and who took many assignments for Popular Library during the mid-1900s. But I have no proof. So any knowledge readers can offer on this subject would be appreciated.

Meanwhile, though, I can say confidently that the painting that adorns the façade of Butcher’s Dozen--shown on the right at the top of this post--was done by Harry Schaare, about whom I last wrote here. Despite what said cover might suggest, this is apparently a non-fiction volume published by Signet in 1951. Its author, John Bartlow Martin, was described in his 1987 New York Times obituary as an “author, speechwriter and confidant of Democratic politicians who also served as Ambassador to the Dominican Republic …” The same piece notes that this Hamilton, Ohio-born son of a carpenter “became interested in modern literature in high school, and after graduating at the age of 16 he entered [Indiana’s] DePauw University [from which] he was expelled before the end of the year for drinking in his room.
He began his journalistic career as a $9-a-week “gofer” in the Indianapolis bureau of the Associated Press. He later went on to graduate from DePauw where he edited the school paper and wrote for The Indianapolis Times.

With a check for $175, the profits from his first freelance magazine article, Mr. Martin moved to Chicago with one suitcase, a portable typewriter and a desire to write.

After several years divided between writing for pulp detective magazines, more serious journals and service in the army, Mr. Martin established his national reputation with an article for
Harper’s magazine about an explosion at a mine in Centralia, Ill., that killed about 100 people. The article, which at 18,500 words was the longest in the magazine’s history, helped lead to a new Federal mine safety code.

Several articles and books followed, and Mr. Martin’s name became a familiar [sight] on the cover of the great mass-circulation magazines of the 1940’s and 1950’s:
The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Look, Collier’s, and The Atlantic.
Butcher’s Dozen, first published in book form by Harper & Bros. back in 1950 (and later abridged for the Signet paperback edition), employs what Kirkus Reviews called “a direct, documentary approach for the retelling of six criminal cases.” That same periodical went on to explain that the work’s contents cover, among other infamous offenses, “Chicago’s Bookie Gang which ended up by fighting the Syndicate as well as the police,” “Clara Belle Penn who was strangled in Houston, Texas,” and--in its title story, which appeared originally in 1949--Cleveland, Ohio’s unsolved torso murders of the 1930s, a serial-killing spree that claimed 12 victims.

The back cover of Butcher’s Dozen can be seen here.

Adventure Stylings

Blogger Ben Boulden, who admits to having been a big reader of Don Pendleton’s adventure series featuring Mack Bolan (aka The Executioner) during his impressionable middle-school years, has gathered together an assortment of Executioner covers dating back to the Nixon administration. “I made a brief survey of the Internet,” Boulden explains, “and identified 12 variations of style, and each of them, particularly those published pre-1990, really spoke to me.” You’ll find his gallery of fronts in Gravetapping.

READ MORE:The Book You Have to Read: War Against the Mafia, by Don Pendleton,” by Matt Hilton (The Rap Sheet).

Monday, May 19, 2014

Nymphs Just Wanna Have Fun



News broke late last week that the skeleton of a 13-year-old girl, who’d been dead for some 12,000 to 13,000 years, was discovered by scientists in an underwater cave off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. When I read in Slate that the divers who found this long-missing miss named her Naia--Greek for “water nymph”--it brought to mind how many novel titles over the years have contained the word “nymph” (or a provocative variation on that noun).

The gallery featured below hardly exhausts this theme, but it includes some fine examples of “nymph” tales. Plus cover illustrations by a variety of notable 20th-century artists.

Credit for painting the captivating, 1963 façade of Nymph in Suburbia (a work that also belongs among this collection) goes to Al Brule, while Paul Rader was responsible for the artwork on both the ’63 Midwood edition of Sea Nymph, by Peggy Swenson (a pseudonym employed by Richard E. Geis), and the 1968 edition of Reluctant Nympho, by Joan Ellis. The front of John Carver’s Campus Nymphs (Beacon, 1964) is credited to Al Rossi, while the illustration introducing the 1963 Signet edition of Nymph to the Slaughter, by Carter Brown, came from the talented hands of Robert McGinnis (who later produced an even more beautiful cover for that same novel); Harry Barton created the front of Midwood’s 1968 Campus Nympho/Ex-Virgin two-fer; Robert Bonfils did the artwork for Boudoir Nymph (Ember Library, 1966) and $1,000 Nymph (Merit, 1962); and Britain’s Sam Peffer, aka Peff, provided the painting of a woman for the 1958 Pan edition of The Case of the Negligent Nymph, by Erle Stanley Gardner. Finally, Fred Fixler gave us the fronts for both Beat Nymph (Brandon House, 1965), another sexy concoction by Swenson/Geis, and Nympho Twins, a 1977 Casino Books release by Jeff David. (One other work that might have fit right in with Nympho Twins was previously showcased here.)

Click on any of these images to open an enlargement.















Once Around the Blogs, Please

I spent much of this last weekend fielding and posting (in The Rap Sheet) information from UK correspondent Ali Karim, all having to do with award winners and other goings-on at CrimeFest 2014. However, I managed at the same time to organize some recent book-cover-related links, and am presenting those below.

• It wasn’t long ago that I added the oddly named Ragged Claws Network to Killer Covers’ blogroll (under the heading “Book Design/Illustration”), and I’m glad I did. Two recent postings of note there: this piece about Dashiell Hammett paperbacks from the 1940s; and this other one that displays J. Lombardero’s Sax Rohmer covers for Pyramid. Learn more about those Rohmer releases here.

• Nick Jones spotlights" Peter Cheyney’s eight-book “Dark Series” of spy novels in Existential Ennui. “The novels,” writes Jones, “detail the exploits--both wartime and postwar--of a rotating cast of counter-espionage agents of British Intelligence, notably Michael Kane and Ernie Guelvada, along with their boss, Peter Quayle.”

• A blog called Quartz (yeah, that’s a new Web resource for me, too) points out the design similarities among dozens of volumes “either set in Africa or written by African writers. The texts of the books were as diverse as the geography they covered: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly divergent styles, by writers that included several Nobel Prize winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orange sunset over the veld, or both.” The full post is here.

• British comics historian Steve Holland delivers another eye-catching gallery of book covers in his blog, Bear Alley. This time, his focus is on Martin Cruz Smith’s novels, everything from Gypsy in Amber to last year’s Tatiana. He’s even thrown in the fronts from a trio of tales Smith contributed to the Nick Carter series.

• In Too Much Horror Fiction, Will Errickson offers a line-up of façades from John Saul’s numerous suspense novels.

• And I recently mentioned a couple of titles from the sexually suggestive Beacon Books line of paperbacks. Now The Golden Age rolls out more than 30 illustrations that once fronted those books.

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Two-fer Tuesdays: Title Shots

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



This week’s classic cover convergence hinges on two very different definitions of the word “shot.”

Looking to the left, above, you’ll find the front from the 1960 Avon softcover edition of All Shot Up, Chester Himes’ fourth novel featuring black Harlem police detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones (characters introduced in 1959’s A Rage in Harlem). The tale finds our badass heroes investigating a wild hit-and-run accident as well as a deadly shoot-out at a gay bar, the latter of which sends them off to question living drag queens and look into the colorful backgrounds of their deceased rivals. In a recent--and rather profane--critique of All Shot Up, the blog Alpha-60 Books (yes, that’s a new one to me too) says:
Chaotic stuff, fucking bloody mayhem racing relentlessly with a blinding pace. Hard to follow at times (especially at [the] start) but nevertheless immensely enjoyable to read. Story just sticks together and at times it seems that [the] glue that keeps everything from falling apart is violence. It’s [a] continuous thread throughout the novel but it’s far from some glorified and over-the-top cheap shit. Very realistic and believable.
The handsome artwork for the façade of this Avon paperback was done by George Ziel (né Jerzy Zielezinski), a Polish-born Holocaust survivor who relocated to the States after World War II and soon found employment as a commercial illustrator. But Ziel “came bursting out of the gate in the mid-1950s with a series of earthy, sensual covers that demanded our attention,” according to a piece by bookseller and vintage books historian Lynn Munroe. “Many of them featured a cover model who had an African American look about her.” Ziel wound up creating numerous fronts for Avon, not only decorating novels by Himes, but also showing up on yarns by Leslie Charteris, Day Keene, Rex Stout, Gypsy Rose Lee, and others.

Now on to that second image embedded above, on the right. It uses the word “shot” in the sense of “an opportunity”--in this case, the prospect of scoring big betting on racehorses. A Kirkus Reviews summation of the plot of David Mark’s Long Shot (published originally in 1955 as The Long Chance) says it
follows Evan Loeser backwards and forwards through the gambling passion that dominates him to the point of near madness. A boy of great promise determined on acting, his weaknesses are known to his mom--and are the cause of her death; malnutrition brings him to Ruth, whom he marries; an office party, in which he plays the fool introduces him to Carol; … his money and his love for horses, puts Katy in his life--and he cheats, robs, lies and playacts for all of them for the sake of the kill--that never comes, except in tantalizing dribbles. This opening day of a new season is his chance to redeem--debts, the windup of his marriage, his relation[ship] with Carol--and himself, and as his bets go wrong, right, and totally wrong he is on his way out to a night of more lies, crazed attempts to borrow, grandiose plans--and a return to the track the next morning on stolen money.
The illustration that introduces this 1959 Dell paperback release of Long Shot has often been miscredited as the work of Robert McGinnis; it was actually done by the talented Mitchell Hooks, about whom I have written several times on this page, including here.

“One of the Few Artists Alive Today Who Is Legendary for Several Different Types of Artwork”

This is quite a catch! Our friend Robert Deis, aka Subtropic Bob, over at Men’s Pulp Mags, has just posted the first installment of a two-part interview he did recently with James Bama, whose artwork is recognizable from so many paperback covers and magazine spreads of the mid-20th century. As Deis explains, “Jim is now 88 years old. He no longer paints. Due to a degenerative eye condition he is virtually blind. But he remains busy dealing with museums, galleries, printmakers, book publishers, reporters, and fans. And, his mind is still razor-sharp. He is also amazingly affable and cheery. It was a wonderful experience to talk with him and I learned some details about his life and art that I had not read anywhere.”

You will find Part I of their quite extensive exchange here. Part II, Deis promises, is “coming soon.”

No Stranger to the Opposite Sex

I’m always a sucker for Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka’s women.