Two-fer Tuesdays: Comfortable with Duplicity

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



Temptresses tend to be pretty standard feature in espionage fiction, as these two look-alike paperback fronts appear to make clear. The cover on the left comes from the 1959 Corgi Books edition of Agent of the Devil. That novel was written by Hungarian-Austrian author-publisher János Békessy under his well-known pseudonym, Hans Habe. It was originally released in 1956 as Im Namen des Teufels (In the Name of the Devil), but was translated into English and first published in the UK two years later as Agent of the Devil. (I’ve also seen editions carry the title The Devil’s Agent.)

Sadly, the only write-up I could locate online about Agent of the Devil’s plot is this one from GoodReads, posted five years ago by a reviewer known as “Velvetink”:

Written in 1958, the New York Times hails Agent of the Devil as a “nerve-shattering spy classic.” Maybe in 1958 it shocked people. For 2010, it’s a bit ho hum. The author, Habe, was an intelligence officer during WWII for the U.S. Army in command of Psychological Warfare operations on the Italian front, and later a journalist, and he uses his knowledge of intelligence agencies a little too educationally here … [The book] is saved only by the character George Droste falling in love and his love for his adopted son.

Credit for the illustration showing a woman in red, reclining before a presumed spy, goes to James E. McConnell, a British book and magazine cover artist known for painting historical and Old West scenes, though he also branched out to create the covers for science-fiction novels. The terrific blog Pulp Covers: The Best of the Worst offers a small collection of McConnell’s book art here.

You will probably recognize the front of Legacy of a Spy (right) as the work of Robert McGinnis, whose talents I showcased on this page last October. Can it be a coincidence that this Crest Book cover, like McConnell’s for Agent of the Devil, comes from 1959?

Legacy of a Spy was the debut novel by Henry S. Maxfield (1923-2013). A World War II airplane navigator, who later became a Central Intelligence Agency employee during the Korean War and eventually established himself as a real-estate broker in New Hampshire, Maxfield earned some critical plaudits for Legacy of a Spy, including this brief assessment by Kirkus Reviews:

Bill Slater, known as Montague, the best agent in U.S. counterespionage, here becomes Bruce Carmichael, when he isn’t Slater, to hunt down those responsible for the disappearance of Webber in the Consulate in Zurich, who suspects Wyman of betraying information. Slater is tricked by the first move …; attacks the enemy spy net organizationally; evades an assassin; skis to safety. Brisk.

Furthermore, Legacy of a Spy was adapted by Hollywood in 1967 as The Double Man, an action flick set largely in the Austrian Alps, starring Yul Brynner and Brit Ekland. Maxfield went on to publish a second novel, Another Spring (1974), “about life in a small New Hampshire summer resort,” and followed that in 2007 with Justice Justice, about a newly elected U.S. president who, disappointed with the state of legal ethics, determines to appoint a non-lawyer, Bradford Justice, to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Can You See the Fear on Their Faces?

Check out Curtis Evans’ excellent collection, in The Passing Tramp, of 20th-century paperback cover art by Rudolph Belarski (1900-1983).

That’s What I Call Saucy

As odd as it may seem now, there was once--back in the 1960s, early ’70s--a fairly profitable market for paperback fiction about spouse swapping. A good number of those novels came from William Hamling’s Greenleaf Publishing, which owned imprints such as Nightstand Books, Leisure Books, and Companion Books. Now-prominent authors on the order of Lawrence Block, Ed McBain, Donald E. Westlake, and Harlan Ellison wrote for those imprints (under noms de plume, of course). But most of the cover artwork seemed to be executed by Robert Bonfils.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, back in 1922, Bonfils later served a stint with the U.S. Army during World War II, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and eventually went to work in Chicago for the prestigious art agency of Stevens, Hall, Biondi creating illustrations for advertisements, magazines, record jackets, and children’s books. During the 1960s--the “swinging ’60s,” remember--he started working for the Greenleaf imprints, turning out as many as 50 cover illustrations a month, many of them decorating vintage sleazeworks such as Swap Now, Pay Later, The Swapping Urge, Swappers All, Make Her Swap, Acapulco Swap, and the distinctly non-Shakespearean The Swapping of the Shrew.

Bonfils’ artistry was generally far superior to the quality of the novels on which it featured (often uncredited), but his silliest, least appealing cover might have been for Spicy Meatball Swap, a 1971 Companion release credited to H.C. Hawkes (whose other titles included the literary classics For Couples Only and Threesomes, Foursomes, and Moresomes). Somehow it’s hard for me to imagine anybody looking at the cover of Spicy Meatball Swap on a newsstand--or, more likely, tucked onto a shelf in some poorly lighted back room of a bookstore--and thinking, Oh, yeah! I have to read that immediately! Or maybe after lunch ...

Once Around the Web, Please

• Way back in 2010, Rebecca Kalin, the daughter of renowned artist Victor Kalin, launched an excellent Web site devoted primarily to her father’s numerous paperback illustrations. More recently, she’s created this second site, which features other examples of his work, including record covers and portraits of famous folk.

• Because I’ve occasionally showcased the covers of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer private-eye novels on this page, my eye was caught recently by this gallery of Macdonald’s works in the blog Fragments of Noir. It includes several examples of artist Mitchell Hooks’ beautiful Archer paperback fronts from the 1970s (The Far Side of the Dollar and The Underground Man, for instance). Damn! I was busy collecting Macdonald’s work back then; I could have--and should have--bought all of those Hooks editions, rather than a mere handful. But I reasoned that I didn’t need duplicates of works I already owned. What a fool I was!

• No matter how obscure the theme, it’s almost always possible to dig up vintage paperback covers to illustrate it. Consider this set, from Pulp International, of book fronts featuring men with women in their arms--only some of them conscious.

• This could have been another choice along that line.

• And Andrew Nette, the Australian writer responsible for the blog Pulp Curry, has assembled this collection of covers from The World of Suzie Wong, a 1957 novel penned by Richard Mason and adapted three years later as a film starring William Holden and Nancy Kwan. I’m particularly fond of the 1963 Horwitz Publications edition he’s embedded at the top of his page, though this is a better representation of that book. (Look also at the link for another Suzie Wong cover, by James Avati, that Nette doesn’t mention.)

Two-fer Tuesdays: Neck and Neck

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



It can be easy sometimes to understand why literary reductionists dismiss crime and mystery fiction as being merely about murder and mayhem. Certainly that’s the impression a person might be given, if the covers posted above were his or her only references.

On the left we have Yesterday’s Man, a 1965 release from Leisure Books, which by then had a history of publishing soft porn penned (pseudonymously) by the likes of Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, and others. This paperback novel, too, was by an author with a far better future: Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter), who by ’65 had established himself as the man behind the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals. According to blogger Jerry House, during the 1960s and ’70s McBain delivered to Leisure “a book a month for a flat fee of $1,000.00 cash,” which he used “to finance some of his baser habits.” These works appeared under the byline “Dean Hudson.” As House observes, such soft-core fiction was “pretty mild; most of today’s women's romance books are more graphic. The formula was simple: any type of plot (logical or not) with sex scenes every so-many pages. Metaphors for sex and body parts were preferred, and no really bad words.” House suggests there were at least 74 “Dean Hudson” titles (Wikipedia puts the count at 93), some of which might actually have been composed by McBain’s writing students.

The front of Yesterday’s Man shows a young woman stripped down to her dainties, being strangled by a man at the edge of a lake--or maybe it’s a creek; or could it be an iceberg? (It’s damnably hard to tell!) The artwork was by Robert Bonfils, who began his illustration career in Chicago during the 1950s, and went on to create some of the most provocative and over-the-top paperback covers of the late 20th century. You can enjoy more of his artistry here.

A remarkably similar pose, equally violent, is struck by the couple on Night Extra, by William McGivern. That novel was originally published by Dodd, Mead in 1957, but the cover shown above is from the 1960 paperback edition of Night Extra, released by Fontana Books, an imprint of William Collins, Sons (now part of HarperCollins). The blog Mystery*File offers this plot synopsis of the tale:

A big city reporter (which McGivern was at one time) investigates the murder of a woman whose body was found in the house of a reform mayoral candidate. It soon becomes clear that the entrenched political machine has engineered a frame-up and appears likely to succeed in destroying a feared political opponent.

The novel is set in an unnamed East Coast city that suffers from pervasive corruption. Anyone who fights against the corruption places their job, if not their life, in jeopardy. Crusading reporter Sam Terrell spends much of the story trying to convince witnesses to come forward and tell what they know. He also must navigate through the city’s numerous layers of civic, political and bureaucratic corruption in order to find allies who might advance his investigation.

Credit for the illustration on this Fontana title goes to John L. Baker, a native of Birmingham, England, who was born in 1922 and went on to create fronts for a variety of Agatha Christie novels as well as other crime and thriller novels.