Bennett’s Beauties: Hi, Profiles

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.



The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler (Pocket, 1964); and
The Last Love, by Thomas B. Costain (Pocket, 1964).

Bennett’s Beauties: Phyllis A. Whitney

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


Harry Bennett painted a variety of covers for Japanese-born American mystery/romantic suspense novelist Phyllis A. Whitney, but these are two of my favorites: Window on the Square (Fawcett Crest, 1962); Black Amber (Crest, 1965).



READ MORE: “Woman with a Past,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(The Rap Sheet).

Bennett’s Beauties: “The Finishing Stroke”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


The Finishing Stroke, by Ellery Queen (Pocket, 1963).

Bennett’s Beauties: Agatha Christie

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.



Five novels by Agatha Christie: A Daughter’s Daughter (Dell, 1967); A Pocket Full of Rye (Pocket, 1963); A Murder Is Announced (Cardinal, 1959); Towards Zero (Pocket, 1963); Double Sin and Other Stories (Pocket, 1962); Evil Under the Sun (Pocket, 1963); and The Mystery of the Blue Train (Pocket, 1963).

Bennett’s Beauties: “The Golden Isle”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


The Golden Isle, by Frank G. Slaughter (Pocket, 1957).

Bennett’s Beauties: “Sleep with Slander”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


Sleep with Slander, by Dolores Hitchens (Permabooks, 1962).

Bennett’s Beauties: “End of a Millionaire”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


End of a Millionaire, by “P.D. Ballard,” né Willis Todhunter Ballard (Gold Medal, 1964), who also wrote the Bill Lennox series.

Bennett’s Beauties: “Marseilles”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


Marseilles, by “Alan Caillou,” né Alan Lyle-Smythe (Pocket Cardinal, 1964), the second of four books he composed about journalist Mike Benasque. Lyle-Smythe also penned 1957’s Alien Virus, about which I have written before.

Dame Is the Name of the Game

Last year at this time, I launched a “12 Dames of Christmas” series, showcasing vintage paperbacks with “dame” in their titles. I considered resuming that December 25-January 5 series this month, but never found enough free hours in my schedule to do so. (Maybe next year.) If you missed appreciating those cover dames in 2016, or would like to see them afresh, simply click here.

Bennett’s Beauties: Merry Christmas with Mary Stewart

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.



Five novels by Mary Stewart: My Brother Michael (Crest, 1964); The Gabriel Hounds (Fawcett Crest, 1973); This Rough Magic (Fawcett Crest, 1965); Thunder on the Right (Crest, 1967); and Airs Above the Ground (Fawcett Crest, 1968).





READ MORE: “Mary Stewart, Storyteller; Possible Wizard” (Pornokitsch); “Mary Stewart, British Writer Who Spanned Genres, Dies at 97,” by Anita Gates (The New York Times).

Bennett’s Beauties: “Barabbas”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


Barabbas, by Pär Lagerkvist (Bantam, 1972).

Bennett’s Beauties: “How Far to Bethlehem?”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


How Far to Bethlehem? by Norah Lofts (Fawcett Crest, 1966).

Bennett’s Beauties: “Fools’ Gold”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


Fools’ Gold, by Dolores Hitchens (Pocket, 1959).

Bennett’s Beauties: “Murder Money”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


Murder Money, by Jay Bennett (Crest, 1962).

Bennett’s Beauties: “American Gothic”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.



American Gothic, by Robert Bloch (Fawcett Crest, 1975).

Bennett’s Beauties: “Double Jeopardy”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


Double Jeopardy, by Edwin Lanham (Permabooks, 1961).

Bennett’s Beauties: “Two Souls, One Body”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


Two Souls, One Body, by Jason Marks and Howard Phillips
(Gold Medal, 1962).

Bennett’s Beauties: “Night Walker”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


Night Walker, by Donald Hamilton (Gold Medal, 1964).

Bennett’s Beauties: “The Green Wound”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


The Green Wound, by “Philip Atlee,” aka James Atlee Phillips​ (Gold Medal, 1963).

Bennett’s Beauties: “Hawaiian Eye”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


Hawaiian Eye, by Frank Castle (Dell, 1962). This is a tie-in novel based on the 1959-1963 ABC-TV series Hawaiian Eye, starring Anthony Eisley, Robert Conrad, and Connie Stevens.

Bennett’s Beauties: “All Night Stand”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


All Night Stand, by Thom Keyes (Ballantine, 1967). Although “All Night Stand” is the title of a 1960s song by the English rock band The Kinks, Keyes’ debut novel focuses on a fictional group called The Score, featuring “five mop-topped lads from Liverpool,” according to one source. “The book blends semi-recognizable bits from various bands of the period.” It’s hard to beat Bennett’s sexy paperback front, but you can click here to see the cover from the original, 1966 hardcover edition of All Night Stand.

Bennett’s Beauties: “The Seven Sisters”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


The Seven Sisters, by W.T. Ballard (Permabooks, 1962). This is the second of three entries in Ballard’s series starring Detective Lieutenant Max Hunter of Nevada’s Las Vegas police department.

Bennett’s Beauties: “The Intruder”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


The Intruder, by Charles Beaumont (Dell, 1962). Beaumont’s yarn was made into a film by director Roger Corman, starring future Star Trek captain William Shatner. “The story,” explains Wikipedia, “depicts the machinations of a racist named Adam Cramer (portrayed by Shatner), who arrives in the fictitious small southern town of Caxton in order to incite white townspeople to racial violence against black townspeople and court-ordered school integration.”

Bennett’s Beauties: “Murder After a Fashion”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


Murder After a Fashion, by “Spencer Dean,” aka Prentice Winchell (Pocket, 1961). This is the eighth entry in his series starring Don Cadee, the chief of security at Amblett’s, a high-end department store located on Fifth Avenue in New York City.

Bennett’s Beauties: “Without Consent”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.



Without Consent, by Theodore Pratt (Gold Medal, 1962).

Bennett’s Beauties: “The Golden Frame”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.


The Golden Frame, by Mari Wolf (Permabooks, 1961).

Bennett’s Beauties: “Under the Skin”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.



Under the Skin, by Dorothea Bennett (Crest, 1965). Author Bennett was better known for her 1977 spy novel, The Jigsaw Man, which was made into a 1983 Michael Caine film.

Bennett’s Beauties: “This Is Murder”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.



This Is Murder, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1963).

Bennett’s Beauties: “The Mantis and the Moth”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.



The Mantis and the Moth, by Max Weatherly (Pocket, 1965).

Bennett’s Beauties: “Seven Lies South”

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.



Seven Lies South, by William P. McGivern (Crest, 1962).

Bennett’s Beauties: Making the Cheap and Commonplace Oh-So-Collectible

(Above) Essence of Murder, by Henry Klinger (Permabooks, 1963; back cover here), one of several Klinger novels starring Shomri Shomar, an Israeli police lieutenant on loan to the New York Police Department. (Below, right) The Mourner, by Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake; Permabooks, 1963), the third entry in the series about a career criminal known only as Parker.

Regular Killer Covers readers know what a fan I have become of artist Harry Bennett’s profuse paperback fronts. His distinctive work has frequently been highlighted on this page—from his illustrations for novels by Dashiell Hammett, Frank Kane, Dolores Hitchens, Talmage Powell, and Don Tracy to his contributions to books by John Brunner, Agatha Christie, Noah Clad, Erle Stanley Gardner, Thomas B. Dewey, and others. The paintings he produced for U.S. publishers ranging from Permabooks and Pocket to Gold Medal and Berkley could be seductive or shocking, ominous or humorous, but they were rarely less than outstanding. During a more than three decades-long freelance career, Bennett—who passed away just over five years ago, at age 93—created the anterior imagery for everything from detective novels and Gothic romances to Hitchcockian thrillers and tales about amorous young nurses. “Literally millions of people have seen hundreds of paintings by Harry Bennett, but few would know his name,” writes a blogger who calls himself NatureGeezer and lives in Ridgefield, the historic western Connecticut town where Bennett also resided for most of his life. Along with artists such as Robert McGinnis, Mitchell Hooks, Paul Rader, Harry Schaare, Ernest Chiriacka, and Victor Kalin, Bennett made 20th-century paperbacks worth collecting simply for their covers.

According to his 2012 obituary in The Ridgefield Press, Harry Raymond Bennett’s long life began on May 15, 1919, in South Salem, New York. “His father,” the newspaper explained, “was a native Ridgefielder whose roots in Ridgefield went back to the 18th century. Bennett was born months after his own father, Harry Bennett, died of the 1918 flu epidemic.” His Swedish-descended mother, Anna Karlsson, is said to have reared Harry and his two sisters, Dorothy and Lillian, “earning income by operating a laundry business.” Bennett graduated from Ridgefield High School in 1937, after first earning acclaim on that institution’s basketball team and being named the president of his class.

He subsequently took a job as a commercial artist with the Magazine Photo Engraving Corporation in Stamford, Connecticut. But in late 1940, as tensions in Europe threatened to boil over, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Bennett eventually earned the rank of major, and he participated in a 1944 engagement with Japanese forces in the South Pacific that scored him a Bronze Star for heroism.

Following the end of World War II, Bennett—newly wed to a fellow Ridgefielder, Margaret Shean—sought to enhance his creative skills. He attended the venerable School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Academy of Art in that same Illinois city, and then returned to Connecticut to resume his labors in commercial design, illustrating advertisements for clients on the order of Buick, Pepsi-Cola, and the Keds shoe company. He lived in a large, historic home (complete with wraparound porch) on Ridgefield’s Main Street, where he also maintained his studio. It was a convenient situation. As the Press notes, “He would use his family [including his five children] and neighbors as models for over 1,000 book covers and illustrations over the years.”

Bennett took his painting seriously and enjoyed passing his hard-won knowledge on to less-experienced brush-wielders. As his daughter Deborah (also a painter) recalls, “He was a fine artist of artistic integrity who could tell you the formulas of the old masters, often ground his own paint, and had a lifelong interest in experimenting with different techniques.”

The excellence of Bennett’s artistry, coupled with the energy he brought to his assignments (“Harry had a strong work ethic,” says the Press obit, “always wanted to be painting or preparing for a painting.”) made him a go-to illustrator for big paperback houses hungry to capture the eyes of busy book buyers. The crime-fiction authors mentioned above benefited from his efforts, but so did best-selling writers such as Mary Stewart, Victoria Holt, Frank G. Slaughter, and Charlotte Armstrong. Bennett’s art won him wide recognition, both in the public arena and among his colleagues. A set of ink paintings he produced “to illustrate a boxed collectors’ edition of Dante’s Divine Comedy, published in 1966,” resulted in Bennett receiving both a bronze medal from the New York Society of Illustrators and a one-man exhibit at the New York Public Library. (Three of the pieces from that set can be seen here, here, and here.)

But in 1986, with what had once been a significant market for hand-painted paperback-cover illustrations having all but disappeared (as publishers opted instead for photographic imagery), Bennett decided to retire from the commercial art field and depart New England. He struck out west, painting for himself and doing a bit of teaching, before he and his wife finally settled in Astoria, Oregon, a historic burg at the mouth of the Columbia River. He went on to place his canvases with galleries around Astoria, and it must have been surprising to viewers if and when they discovered that the same dexterous hands responsible for those hanging coastal landscapes and reclining nudes had previously created some of the most memorable book fronts on their home shelves.

Almost two decades after leaving the East Coast, in 2008 the Bennetts moved to Towson, Maryland, near Baltimore, to be closer to their family. Harry Bennett died four years later, on November 29, 2012, from complications of pneumonia.

Bennett may no longer be among us, but the abundant book façades he illustrated certainly are. I claim a small variety of such volumes in my personal library, but scans of a great many more inhabit my computer’s hard drive. With the fifth anniversary of this artist’s demise having passed so recently, I decided to honor his memory with a succession of posts showcasing his work’s diversity. To demonstrate my regard for his talents, I am calling this series “Bennett’s Beauties” (even though that title reminds me of a less-than-steller Nancy Walker TV series from 1977). It will run on at least through the end of December. Please let me know what you think of the cover selections as their numbers increase day by day.