Doing Dewey Up Delightfully

I’ve written at some length about Indiana-born novelist Thomas B. Dewey once before on this page. But the posting today of my latest Kirkus Reviews column, which revisits Dewey’s life and his many contributions to crime fiction, provides another opportunity for me to remark on this guy who Bill Pronzini called “one of detective fiction’s severely underrated writers.” You’ll find my column here.

In addition to composing the Kirkus piece, I have put together a rather extensive--but still far from comprehensive--collection of Dewey’s book covers over the years, which I hope you will take a few minutes to study below. Most of them come from his two principal series, featuring either compassionate Chicago gumshoe Mac (“one of the most consistently satisfying private-eye series,” as David Geherin wrote in 1985’s The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction) or happily married Los Angeles shamus Pete Schofield. There are also a couple of works here that he published as “Tom Brandt” (one of two pseudonyms he employed, the other being “Cord Wainer”). The illustrators represented in this set include Victor Kalin (Go, Honeylou, The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees, The Girl in the Punchbowl, Nude in Nevada), Ron Lesser (A Season for Violence, Only on Tuesdays), Robert Maguire (Dame in Danger), James Meese (The Mean Streets), Ray Johnson (And Where She Stops), Barye Phillips (The Golden Hooligan), Victor Olson (Mourning After), and Robert K. Abbett (Hunter at Large). The front from the 1965 Pocket Books edition of A Sad Song Singing, embedded at the top of this post, is credited to the immensely talented Harry Bennett, about whom I first wrote in connection with his artwork for Frank Kane thrillers.

Click on any of the images below to open an enlargement.



































Because you’ve been such a fine audience, I am going to toss you a bonus. Below you’ll find the introductory spread for Cosmopolitan magazine’s September 1958 excerpt from Dewey’s The Case of the Chased and the Unchaste. The art is credited to Denver Gillan.



And click here to see facsimiles of the original dust jackets from U.S. and UK hardcover releases of Dewey’s novels.

Dissecting Bama’s Process

It’s been more than a month between installments, but blogger Robert Deis (aka Subtropic Bob) has finally posted the second part of his recent phone interview with artist James Bama in Men’s Pulp Mags. This section of their exchange covers Bama’s work with “legendary art teacher” Frank J. Reilly, how comic-strip illustrators Alex Raymond and Hal Foster influenced his work, and his use of male and female models over the years.

Part I of the interview is available here. And now Deis is promising a third installment as well, which--if recent history is any guide--should be available for our consideration sometime in early August.

READ MORE: “Doc Savage Paperback Covers by James Bama”
(The Golden Age).

Two-fer Tuesdays: Their Aim Is True

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 combination is dedicated to all those people who sometimes feel besieged by bosses, spouses, or louses of one variety or another. Being marked for attack is no picnic whatsoever, as the characters in these two novels can well attest.

On the left we find the 1959 Pocket Books edition of The Moving Target, the first novel to feature Los Angeles private eye Lew Archer, written by “John Macdonald” (actually, Kenneth Millar, who would soon change his nom de plume to Ross Macdonald). The man behind that paperback’s glowing imagery was Jerry Allison, who has also been credited with illustrating this book, as well as this one.

Now look to the right, and you’ll find the cover of The Hired Target, by Wilson Tucker. It was released in 1957 as by Ace Books as a “Double Edition” paperback, combined with Harry Whittington’s One Deadly Dawn. The prolific Lou Marchetti was responsible for creating this book’s striking cover art, which fulfills the challenging assignment of being both tender and threatening.

Vivid, Violent, and Varied

It’s been a while since I last heard from Óscar Palmer, the translator and designer behind Es Pop Ediciones, a small Spanish book publisher. In 2010 he released a Spanish translation of Money Shot, Christa Faust’s 2007 novel. A year later, he brought crime-fiction followers a Spanish version of Queenpin, by Megan Abbott, which had also been released originally in 2007. Now Palmer writes to announce the Iberian Peninsula debut of Es Pop’s Arte Salvaje, a high-quality Spanish-language edition of Robert Polito’s acclaimed 1996 work, Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. In addition, he has created an affiliated Web property, which he introduces this way:

… inspired in part by your great blog Killer Covers, we’ve launched  a “companion” Tumblr [page] in which I’ll be posting a Jim Thompson cover every day, up to his first collaborations with true-crime magazines. My goal is to assemble in one site the covers for each American first edition of every Thompson novel, plus an assortment of rarities (Pyramid reprints, Popular Library novelizations, etc.), magazine covers and movie posters. I’m proceeding backwards, with [filmmaker] Michael Winterbottom’s Killer Inside Me as starting point, and we’ve just reached the [19]50s, so we’ll be getting to his Lion books and other prime Thompson materials very soon.

I’m extremely flattered that Palmer should credit Killer Covers with giving him the idea for this new Thompson page. It’s a beauty, to be sure, filled with very familiar--and carefully credited (when possible)--book jackets. I look forward to seeing what he’ll place there next. Click here to see the already posted novel fronts.

Eiffel Eyefuls

There’s nothing more recognizable in Paris than the Eiffel Tower, which opened in 1889. So it is understandable that book-cover artists would be drawn to that iron-lattice landmark. But until Pulp International posted this collection, I hadn’t considered the scope of entertainment Gustave Eiffel’s monument has given bookshop hunters. Sadly, I don’t own any of the featured works.

Week’s Worth: Saturday Double Feature

Seven days of paperback attractions. Click here for the full set.


Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, by Alan Sillitoe
(Signet, 1960). Illustration by Barye Phillips.

Saturday Games, by Brown Meggs (Fawcett, 1976). The back cover can be seen here. Illustration by Tom Miller.

(Thanks to Tim Hewitt for the cover art.)

READ MORE: “Forgotten Books: Saturday Games, by Brown Meggs” (Ed Gorman’s Blog).

Week’s Worth: Friday

Seven days of paperback attractions. Click here for the full set.



Friday for Death, by Lawrence Lariar (Avon, 1951).
Illustrator unknown.

Week’s Worth: Thursday

Seven days of paperback attractions. Click here for the full set.



The Thursday Turkey Murders, by Craig Rice (Pocket, 1948).
Illustration by William Wirts.

READ MORE: “Home Is Where the Corpse Is,” by Jeffrey Marks (January Magazine).

Week’s Worth: Wednesday

Seven days of paperback attractions. Click here for the full set.



Orange Wednesday, by Leslie Thomas (Dell, 1969).
Illustrator unknown. Back cover here.

Seeing Double

Pulp International has dug up this example of a notably bizarre bit of artwork featured on two editions of a Robert O. Saber novel.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Baby Got Back

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



Sometimes, no matter how hard I try (and I’m a pretty diligent Web sleuth), I simply cannot figure out who to credit for creating a particular vintage book jacket. Sadly, that’s the case with both of this week’s picks. On the left we have the front from the 1958 paperback edition of The Young Who Sin, the debut novel by John Haase (1923-2006), a German-born dentist, travel writer, and fictionist whose parents--wary of the Nazi buildup prior to the outbreak of World War II hostilities--had fled with him to California. Haase would go on, in 1966, to publish Me and the Arch Kook Petulia, a “charming novel” that was adapted in 1968 into the motion-picture Petulia, starring Julie Christie and George C. Scott. The Young Who Sin never enjoyed such Hollywood attenion. It told the story of Al Barnaby, who, in the early 1950s, ran away from his family’s comfortable digs in San Francisco and landed in the Mexican border town of Tijuana. There he encountered “floozies, punks, addicts, and weekend Romeos,” and--according to a write-up on the AbeBooks site--became most familiar with four people in particular:

FIFI, who danced for two-bit jokers along Strip-tease Row; MARIA, a young beginner in what’s called the world’s oldest profession; CONSUELA, who had forgotten there was such a thing as love above a price; HERMAN, who lived high and cruelly, off the low.

But Al was looking for more than a cheap thrill, and from these lost souls he learned that compassion and human understanding can redeem even the most abandoned of God’s sinners.

Above and on the right, meanwhile, you’ll see the cover from the 1957 Avon paperback original, Death on the Double, one of several short-story collections by Henry Kane (1908-1988??). Kane’s reputation derived principally from his creation of Peter Chambers, a Manhattan private eye who may have inspired the TV series character Peter Gunn. Chambers had his own success, leaping from the pages of novels into a short-lived NBC radio series, Crime and Peter Chambers, that starred Dane Clark and debuted in 1954 (and can be heard here). Death on the Double features at least three of Chambers’ investigations.

Finally, if anyone out there knows who illustrated this pair of covers, please don’t hesitate to drop that information into the Comments section below. We can all stand to learn something.

Week’s Worth: Tuesday

Seven days of paperback attractions. Click here for the full set.



Die Anytime, After Tuesday, by Carter Brown (Signet, 1969).
Illustration by Robert McGinnis.

Week’s Worth: Monday

Seven days of paperback attractions. Click here for the full set.



Murder on Monday, by Robert Patrick Wilmot (Pocket, 1954). Illustration by George Mayers.

That’s the Point of It All

Apparently, you can never have too many arrows on book covers.

Sensual, Not Just Sexual

Are these really the “7 Sexiest Book Covers of All Time”? Included among the candidates fielded by The Book Haven blog are fronts from the 2012 Vertigo graphic-novel adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and artwork decorating an edition of Peter O’Donnell’s Modesty Blaise that originally appeared on John Trinian’s 1960 novel, North Beach Girl.

Week’s Worth: Sunday

I noticed recently that I have an abundance of vintage books in my cover-illustration collection that feature days of the week in their titles. So as we storm into yet another busy seven-day stretch, I am going to roll out some of those paperback fronts, one per day. In most cases, I know who created the cover artwork, but occasionally not, so your help in identifying their painters would be appreciated.



Fury on Sunday, by Richard Matheson (Lion, 1953).
Illustrator unknown.