Women Rule: “The Ungilded Lily”

This 11th post completes Killer Covers’ tribute to March as Women’s History Month. To enjoy the whole series, click here.



The Ungilded Lily, by Morton Cooper (Gold Medal, 1958).
Illustration by Charles Binger.

Women Rule: “The Whispered Sex”

The Whispered Sex, by Kay Martin (Hillman, 1960).
Illustration by Ernest Chiriacka, aka Darcy.

Women Rule: “Nude in Orbit”

Nude in Orbit, by “Gene Cross,” aka Arthur Jean Cox (Nightstand, 1968). Illustrator Darrel Millsap.

Women Rule: “Geisha”

Geisha, by Stephen Longstreet and Ethel Longstreet (Popular Giant, 1961). Illustrator unknown.

Women Rule: “Luck Is No Lady”

Luck Is No Lady, by “Larry Kent,” aka Ron Ingleby (Cleveland Publishing, Australia, 1969). Illustrator unknown.

Women Rule: “Demon Seed”

Demon Seed, by Dean R. Koontz (Bantam, 1973).
Illustration by Lou Feck.

Women Rule: “The Deadly Dames”

The Deadly Dames, by “Malcolm Douglas,” aka Douglas Sanderson (Gold Medal, 1956). Illustration by Bob Peak.

READ MORE: “A 1001 Midnights PI Mystery Review: Malcolm Douglas – The Deadly Dames,” by Art Scott (Mystery*File).

Women Rule: “Counter Girl”

Counter Girl, by Amy Harris (Midwood, 1962).
Illlustration by Robert Maguire. Back cover shown here.

Women Rule: “The Case of the Missing Coed”

The Case of the Missing Coed (aka A Little Sin), by William Hardy (Dell, 1960). Illustration by Ted CoConis.

Women Rule: “Look Behind You, Lady”

Look Behind You, Lady, by A.S. Fleischman (Gold Medal, 1963).
Illustration by Barye Phillips.

Women Rule: “The Savage”

Since men were the principal purchasers of crime novels during America’s mid- to late-20th century paperback-publishing heyday, the artists then contributing work to those volumes were not shy about displaying the female form in their illustrations—in all (legally permissible) states of dress and undress.

Killer Covers draws most frequently from that era’s creative output, so there’s never been a shortage of women featured on this page either. But with President Barack Obama having recently continued the tradition of declaring March to be Women’s History Month in the United States, I’ve decided that a special effort should be made to showcase book fronts that exhibit damsels in distress, sexy sweethearts, lascivious lasses, fearsome femmes fatales, and downright brash “dames.” From now until April Fool’s Day, you can expect every day at Killer Covers to offer up a new distaff delight.

Let’s begin with the 1959 Permabooks edition of The Savage, by Noel Clad, including cover art by the great Harry Bennett.

Variations on a Theme

The Invisible Guardian, by Dolores Redondo (Atria, 2016); Land of Shadows, by Priscilla Royal (Poisoned Pen Press, 2016)



One Among Us, by Paige Dearth (CreateSpace, 2014); Stealing People, by Robert Wilson (Europa Editions, 2016)

Take Fives

As I note in today’s column for the Kirkus Reviews Web site, this month marks the conclusion of my fifth year of blogging about mystery, crime, and thriller fiction for that publication. I offer a few additional thoughts on this anniversary in The Rap Sheet, but for Killer Covers, no manner of celebrating seems quite so appropriate as to display vintage paperbacks that employ “five” in their titles.

For instance, The Five Faces of Murder, by Jay Flynn (Avon, 1962), features cover art by Robert Maguire, while the illustration introducing the 1959 Dell edition of The Five Pennies, Grady Johnson’s biography of American jazz cornettist Red Nichols, is credited to Victor Kalin. Jack Finney’s 5 Against the House (Pocket, 1955), is fronted by a George Erickson painting; John Klempner’s Letter to Five Wives (Dell, 1951) showcases artwork by Bob Hilbert; Griffith Foxley was responsible for the cover of Five Alarm Funeral, by Stewart Sterling (Dell, 1954); it’s James Meese’s talent behind the façade of Neither Five Nor Three, by Helen MacInnes (Popular Library, 1952); and the 1945 Avon Murder Mystery Monthly release of Raymond Chandler stories, Five Sinister Characters, puts up a good front by Paul Stahr. The cover of 5 Murderers, another collection in that same Avon line, might also have been executed by Stahr, though I find no confirmation of that credit online. And sadly, the illustrations decorating the final two novels shown below—The Late Mrs. Five, by Richard Wormser (Gold Medal, 1960), and The Man Who Held Five Aces, by Jean Leslie (Pocket, 1950)—are uncredited.

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

FOLLOW-UP: I’ve now found several places on the Web where Paul Stahr is credited as the cover artist for the above edition of 5 Murderers, so I guess we can assume he created it. Other examples of Stahr’s cover artwork can be found on Flickr.

Up in Arms

I was going through some files of book images today, and I happened to notice a remarkable similarity between the fronts of three different vintage works by hyper-productive American pulp writer Bruno Fischer (1908-1992). Although they’re painted by at least two separate artists, the editions of his work featured here—Stairway to Death (Pyramid, 1957, with cover art by Harry Schaare; originally titled So Much Blood, 1939), Knee-Deep in Death (Gold Medal, 1956, with cover art by Lu Kimmel), and Murder in the Raw (Gold Medal, 1957, artist unidentified)—all feature beleaguered or belligerent men with unconscious, or perhaps deceased, women in their arms. Is Fischer to blame here for reusing similar events over and over in his fiction, or did the artists get a little … well, carried away?

Desperate Much?

If this crime novel from the late 1940s offers one of the cleverest titles, then the book below certainly carries one of the worst.



Seduce Me … Anybody! (Bee-Line, 1967) is credited to “Cynthia Mann.” However, the fictionist behind that pseudonym was Leonard Liebman (1909-1991), who for a quarter-century was married to Emmy Award-winning actress and author Ann Loring (1914-2005), a longtime star of the CBS-TV soap opera Love of Life.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Twisted Justice

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



One thing I enjoy about writing this blog is discovering authors I’d never heard of before. Such a practitioner is Nancy Hermione Bodington, who, from the 1940s through the swinging ’70s, produced a string of mystery and psychological suspense novels under the pseudonym Shelley Smith—books that earned her acclaim from at least one eminent authority on the genre: Julian Symons. As critic Mike Ripley recalled in a “Getting Away with Murder” column he penned for Shots back in 2012, “Symons likened [Bodington/Smith] to a cross between Mary Roberts Rinehart and Francis Iles—good company to be in.” Ripley added that another reviewer called her, “rather generously, ‘the English Patricia Highsmith’ although the Shelley Smith books are far more genteel.”

A bit of Web searching tells me the author was born Nancy Hermione Courlander in Surrey, England, on July 12, 1912. According to the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, “she was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris and married Stephen Bodington in 1933.” Her premiere as Shelley Smith came with the 1942 publication of Background for Murder, a novel that modern British mystery writer Martin Edwards describes as “a genuine whodunit, with a dizzying list of suspects.” It was that book in which Smith introduced Jacob Chaos, an English detective who would reappear in one later yarn, 1947’s He Died of Murder! Most of Smith’s tales were standalones, including The Woman in the Sea (1941), The Man with a Calico Face (1950), An Afternoon to Kill (1953, which Edwards calls “a real tour de force”), The Party at No. 5 (1954), The Lord Have Mercy (1956, aka The Shrew Is Dead), The Ballad of the Running Man (1961), and A Grave Affair (1973).

The Crooked Man was Smith’s eighth novel to see print, published in the States by Harper & Brothers in 1952 (and in Great Britain under the title Man Alone). The 1954 Perma Star paperback edition—shown atop this post, with a beautiful but ominous cover painting by George Erickson—calls it “the terrifying story of a man whose mind was warped by strange desires.” Kirkus Reviews offered the following assessment:

The downgrade from meticulous petty thievery to murder in the life and crimes of Thomas Bates. There’s Grace Pickering, whose life he saves and who rewards him with an affection he avoids until he finds out about her savings account which he can only disengage through marriage. His next victim, a man, he is forced to kill. He marries again, for a dowry in jewels, but returns to Grace until he disposes of her with greater finality. But when his last enterprise, marriage to a wealthy woman whom he removes from an asylum, ends in suicide, his innocence of the crime is invalidated by the past. An unsavory study which is precise in pathology and cold in ridicule.

A couple of Smith’s works were adapted as screen dramas: The Party at No. 5 became an episode of the series Climax! in 1957, and barrister-author John Mortimer—later famous for his Horace Rumpole stories—turned The Running Man into a 1963 film of the same name. In addition, Smith contributed a couple of scripts to TV anthology series in the UK, and she co-wrote (with John Hawkesworth) the screenplay for Tiger Bay, a 1959 crime drama—“the story of a girl, a gun, and a killer,” to quote blogger John “J.F.” Norris—that featured the first major role for young actress Hayley Mills. However, The Crooked Man appears never to have been launched past its early print existence. The author reportedly passed away on April 15, 1998, at the Carisbrook Lodge Nursing Home in Sussex, England.

Now let us shift our focus over to this week’s second featured work, the similarly titled There Was a Crooked Man (Gold Medal, 1954), by Day Keene. As any regular reader of this blog should know, Keene was a nom de plume employed by Gunnar Hjerstedt (1904-1969), described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “one of the leading paperback mystery writers of the 1950s.” Just looking down the lengthy list of his published titles is enough to make any aspiring fictionist go green with envy. Keene created only a single recurring protagonist—half-Irish, half-Hawaiian L.A. private eye Johnny Aloha, the star of Dead in Bed (1959) and Payola (1960); the rest of his books were standalones—“some crap,” opines The Thrilling Detective Web Site’s Kevin Burton Smith, “but what’s amazing is how much of it was good stuff.”

There Was a Crooked Man was brought to the public marketplace early in Keene’s book-writing career, which had begun with Framed in Guilt (1949) and would conclude with Acapulco G.P.O. (1967). Perhaps not surprisingly, Texas author-blogger Bill Crider, who has repeatedly expressed his “affection” for Keene’s prodigious output, composed a “forgotten books” post about There Was a Crooked Man in 2011. It described the novel’s plot thusly:

The “crooked man” of the title is Clay Burgess, a good cop in a corrupt town, who goes along to get along and soon finds himself liking the money that comes with being bent. Eventually he’s as bad as anybody, but then his daughter gets polio. He steals a bundle and disappears, but it’s too late for his daughter. I’m not spoiling anything here, by the way. We learn all this in the first chapter, which sets up a flashback in which we find out all about the decline and fall of Clay Burgess. Okay, maybe not all about him, but nobody who reads this blog is going to be surprised by the big reveal at the end. I doubt that Keene expected anyone to be. He does throw a nice curve in the ending, though. A little sentimental? Sure. But I don’t mind.

Even if you know where things are going, Keene’s propulsive writing carries the day. You keep right on reading to find out about Burgess and what drives him and how low he’s going to go. At 144 pages, the perfect Gold Medal length, the story covers a heck of a lot of ground, and it’s just right for a few hours of good reading.

The artist responsible for illustrating the Gold Medal façade of There Was a Crooked Man was Raymond Johnson, whose fine work I’ve showcased on several occasions in the past.

Friday Finds: “Lower Than Angels”

Another in our growing line of vintage book covers we love.



Lower Than Angels, by Walter Karig (Popular Library, 1952).
Illustration by Rafael DeSoto.

Most contemporary readers have probably never heard of Walter Karig (1898-1956). However, he was once well-recognized not only in literary circles, but in military ones as well.

Born in New York City, Karig went on as a young man to study art in both his hometown and in Paris. But any dreams he might have harbored about a life spent in creative circles, attending gallery openings or literary salons, were sidetracked by the start of the 20th century’s two world wars. According to Karig’s biography on the Naval History and Heritage Command Web site, “During World War I he served in the French Foreign Legion and Free Polish Legion, completing his service in the latter as Captain of Infantry. He was appointed Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve in September 1942, and subsequently attained the tank of Captain on 15 January 1946. Transferred to the Retired List of the U.S. Naval Reserve, effective 1 June 1948, he was immediately recalled to active duty.”

(Right) Walter Karig during his many years with the U.S. Navy.

Although Karig had battlefield experience, most of his assignments in the military seem to have revolved around public relations or public information endeavors. “In October 1943,” recalls the Naval History site, “he assumed additional duty as Officer in Charge of the Navy Narrative History Project, and two years later became Assistant Director of Public Relations. He received a Letter of Commendation, with ribbon, from the Secretary of the Navy, as follows: ‘For outstanding performance as a Public Information Officer from September 1, 1942, to October 10, 1945. Volunteering his services in publicizing naval activities during the early critical period of the war, Commander Karig organized and became Head of the Magazine and Book Section of Public Information. A brilliant writer and editor, he applied his fine talents and broad knowledge of the techniques of publishing to the production of hundreds of books and more than one thousand major magazine articles concerning the Navy at war.” Prominent among his wartime writing efforts were half a dozen volumes of Battle Report, a popular history of Allied engagements during World War II.


An ad for the Armed Services Edition of Lower Than Angels.

Karig didn’t spend all of his time on U.S. Navy business. During the early 1930s, between the wars, he took some work from the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a publisher of mystery fiction for children. He evidently wrote—under “house names”—books in the Perry Pierce and Doris Force series, as well as three of Stratemeyer’s earliest Nancy Drew tales (all of which carried the “Carolyn Keene” byline). In addition, he was the Washington, D.C., correspondent for the Newark Evening News and England’s Guardian, and contributed prose to both The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s magazine.

While sources often refer to Karig as having been “prolific” in a variety of fiction genres, I have yet to find anything resembling a complete catalogue of his book titles. The online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction explains that he penned a 1946 young-adult novel called War in the Atomic Age?, which “compresses into very few pages—beginning with a description of World War Three in 1976—a sequence of superscience duels between the USA and Galaxia, including nuclear warfare, force fields, biological weapons and underwater robot tanks. The USA wins hands down.” It adds that “in his science fantasy, Zotz! (1947), filmed as Zotz! (1962), a man—after deciphering an ancient screed that gives him the Psi Power or superpower of killing by pointing his hand and saying ‘Zotz!’—is frustrated by bureaucracy in his attempts to help the USA win World War Two; the effect is mildly but pervasively satirical.” Among Karig’s other works were Death Is a Tory (a 1935 crime yarn published under the pseudonym Keats Patrick—a moniker inspired by the names of his daughters Keating and Patricia), The Fortunate Islands (1948), Caroline Hicks (1950), Neely (1953), and Don’t Tread on Me (1954), a novel starring Revolutionary War hero John Paul Jones.

Lower Than Angels—characterized briefly as “a realistic and unsparing account of the life story of one Marvin Lang, whose father ran a delicatessen shop on Staten Island”—was first published by Farrar & Rinehart back in 1945. (A paperback Armed Forces Edition was apparently released in the same year, though Popular Library’s more attractive softcover edition—shown atop this post—didn’t appear for another seven years.) Kirkus Reviews’ remarks about the novel might, initially, have brought the author some pleasure:

A story of a little man on his painful and tortuous way up the ladder—of adolescence and its revelations—of small business, always on the ragged edge—of knee-high aspirations, awkwardly achieved. It is that of Marvin Lang, told with an authentic sense of the psychology of the Langs of this world. The content, form and tempo of the dialogue carries conviction. Karig has a perfect ear for the need [sic] and mode that [one] hears in crowded subways, on New York streets, in any milling throng of people. The period spans the years 1905 to the present; Marvin’s parents here acquired the distinction of owning a deli shop in Staten Island, but live from hand to mouth, [their hopes] always bigger than [their] income. Marvin was in and out of jobs, but with the war, his job as butcher, briefly achieved, put him into the commissary until his father’s death brought him home, to run the business.

But that critique ends on a down note, applauding Karig’s sincerity and sense of realism but knocking his “lack of warmth, of humor.” Those faults, Kirkus opined, prevent Lower Than Angels from “reaching the status of greatness the publishers claim.”

By the 1950s, Karig’s naval career was coming to an end. (He was finally “relieved of all active duty” in 1954.) From 1952 to 1953, he earned a second paycheck as a “technical advisor” to the TV documentary series Victory at Sea. However, Karig wasn’t yet out of the writing business. A 2013 piece in The Washington Post (open to subscribers only) relates that Karig served for several years as that paper’s book editor, while he lived in a “handsome white house across from the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria.” He was brought down by a heart attack in 1956, at age 57, and is buried with his wife, Eleanor, at Arlington National Cemetery.

Is That a Great Title, or What?

The 1949 Dell Mapback edition of Stuart Brock’s Just Around the Coroner, with cover art by Gerald Gregg.

There have been so many mediocre and downright awful crime-fiction titles (in how many ways can “kill,” “murder,” and “death” be employed before readers start doubting the imaginations of authors and editors alike?), that finding one with a more offbeat or lighthearted bent can only make a reader smile. Such a case is the punning Just Around the Coroner, a private-eye novel first published in 1948 and credited to one “Stuart Brock.” As it turns out, however, Brock was a pseudonym used by Louis Trimble (1917-1988), an academic who, in the mid-20th century, also penned novels for the mystery, science fiction, and Western markets.

Wikipedia explains that Trimble was born in scenic Seattle, Washington, and went on to become “an instructor and professor in humanities and social studies at the University of Washington from 1956 onward.” So it’s no surprise that Just Around the Coroner should have starred a “tough” but “sensitive” Seattle gumshoe named Peter Cory. In fact, it’s the only book that character was ever recruited to headline. According to The Thrilling Detective Web Site, Cory was “a top op for Boldman Investigations,” with a “virginal, yet money-hungry girlfriend, Terry James.” He admits that he “lost his conscience a long time ago” and is “not above a little ‘malarkey peddling’ or anything else to get the job done.”

As The Thrilling Detective’s Kevin Burton Smith synopsizes this novel’s plot, Just Around the Coroner finds Cory being “sent in to clear up a rash of jewel thefts in the swank Towne Hotel where [girlfriend] Terry works [in the gift shop], and soon runs into murder, mayhem, and a couple of old enemies he’d rather have never seen again.” Mike Grost, commenting in the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, adds:

The best parts of this book are Chapters 1-5, in which Cory is sent to investigate jewel robberies at a swank hotel. These sections show Brock celebrating America’s newfound post-war affluence. He seems extremely proud of the modernistic elegance of his hotel, and the book looks forward to all the executive suites and modernistic offices and hotels that will be built during the 1950s. His detective, too, while having tough-guy mannerisms, is calculated to express a new sophistication in America. Cory is a former tennis bum with a Nob Hill background and an elegant wardrobe of $200 suits. He has an upper-class appearance, which is why he is sent undercover as a wealthy hotel guest in the novel. His character is an Ordinary Guy who gets to move among the economic elite. He clearly represents the dream of many returning vets that they could move into the upper middle classes, a dream that would become a reality for many ordinary Americans during the next thirty years, as America moved from the mass poverty of the Depression to the mass affluence of the 1960s.

Author Trimble seemed to make a specialty of composing one-off P.I. novels. He wrote about another Seattle shamus, Bert Norden, in 1956’s Killer’s Choice, and about a Mexico City private dick, Tom Blane, in a 1959 mystery called Till Death Do Us Part.

READ MORE: “Review: Stuart Brock—Bring Back Her Body,” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File); “Archived Review—Louis Trimble, Fit to Kill,” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File).