Stanley’s Style: “No Mourners Present”

Part of a 100th-birthday tribute to artist Robert Stanley.


No Mourners Present, by Frank G. Presnell (Dell, 1953).

Stanley’s Style: “A Taste for Violence”

Part of a 100th-birthday tribute to artist Robert Stanley.


A Taste for Violence, by “Brett Halliday,” aka Davis Dresser (Dell, 1950). This is the 16th book in Halliday’s long-running series featuring redheaded Miami shamus Michael Shayne.

Stanley’s Style: “Keep Cool, Mr. Jones”

Part of a 100th-birthday tribute to artist Robert Stanley.


Keep Cool, Mr. Jones, by Timothy Fuller (Dell, 1952). This is the fifth and final novel starring Boston investigator Edmund “Jupiter” Jones (not to be confused, apparently, with this brainy boy detective of that same name). Previous installments in the series included Three Thirds of a Ghost and Reunion with Murder, both released originally in 1941.

Stanley’s Style: “The Gentle Hangman”

Part of a 100th-birthday tribute to artist Robert Stanley.



The Gentle Hangman, by “James M. Fox,” aka Johannes Knipscheer (Dell, 1951). This is an entry in his series featuring husband-and-wife sleuths Johnny and Suzy Marshall.

Stanley’s Style: “Passport to Peril”

Part of a 100th-birthday tribute to artist Robert Stanley.



Passport to Peril, by Robert Parker (Dell, 1952).

Stanley’s Style: “Date with Darkness”

Part of a 100th-birthday tribute to artist Robert Stanley.



Date with Darkness, by Donald Hamilton (Dell, 1950). Hamilton is now much better known, of course, for writing the Matt Helm series. But Date with Darkness was his first novel, published 13 years before Helm’s debut in Death of a Citizen.

Stanley’s Style: How a Realist Made His Mark

The Long Escape, by David Dodge (Dell, 1950).
Cover illustration by Robert Stanley.

(Editor’s note: This piece comes from Randal S. Brandt, a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Brandt is also the creator of two critically lauded Web sites: Golden Gate Mysteries, an annotated bibliography of crime fiction set in the San Francisco Bay Area; and A David Dodge Companion, which chronicles the life and works of mystery/thriller writer David Dodge.)

In the 1950s, Robert Stanley was one of the most prolific paperback cover artists employed by the Dell Publishing Company. When Dell began bringing out paperback reprints in 1943 (many in “map back” editions), the publishers originally opted for a surrealistic approach to cover illustrations, with staff artist Gerald Gregg employing a distinctive airbrush technique to render various Daliesque conceits—floating objects and fragmented body parts—and creating an instantly recognizable look. But that look changed dramatically around 1951, when the staff of the Dell art department moved to New York City from Racine, Wisconsin, where Dell’s partner, the Western Printing and Lithographing Company—one of the largest U.S. commercial printers—was located. Art director Walter Brooks engineered a shift towards romantic realism and Stanley, one of the company’s leading realist artists, became the most popular Dell cover creator.

(Right) Thrilling Western magazine, April 1939

Robert Carter Stanley Jr. was born on March 28, 1918—a century ago today—in Wichita, Kansas, the only child of Robert C. and Minnie Stanley. When he was in high school, his family relocated to Kansas City, Missouri, and, following graduation, he attended college at the Kansas City Art Institute. In 1937 he began working as a staff artist at The Kansas City Journal-Post, simultaneously selling freelance line drawings to The Kansas City Star and The Kansas City Times. In 1938 he moved to New York to establish a freelance art studio.

Stanley struggled in marketing his work to the pulp publishers, so he accepted a staff job at Standard Magazines, doing layout and graphic work. In 1939, he finally sold his first painting to the pulps, and his earliest cover appeared on the April 1939 issue of Thrilling Western. In 1940, he sold a few more covers to Mystery Magazine, Western Story, and Wild West Weekly, but steady work eluded him.

At the age of 22, in January 1941, Stanley enlisted in the National Guard Cavalry. During his service in World War II, he met Rhoda Rosenzweig. A classically trained ballerina, the redheaded Rhoda had been born on May 12, 1921, in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Julius and Florence Rosenzweig, a pair of Jewish immigrants from Austria. Stanley and Rhoda married in 1942 and had one child, Barbara, who entered their lives in 1944.

After the war, the Stanleys relocated to Westport, Connecticut, where he resumed his efforts to become a freelance illustrator—this time finding greater success. At first, Robert Stanley sold interior story illustrations to Argosy magazine, but soon his paintings were also gracing the fronts of pulp magazines such as Adventure, All Mystery, All Western, Big Book Western, Dime Detective, Dime Mystery, .44 Western, New Detective, New Western, Fifteen Sports Stories, Fifteen Western Tales, Star Western, Western Action, and Western Story. He also painted covers for the digest magazines Zane Grey’s Western and Spur Western Novels. In the 1950s he began collecting assignments from paperback publishers, including Bantam, Beacon, Eagle, Lancer, Lion Books, Popular Library, and Pyramid Books.

But it was his work for Dell that really put Robert Stanley’s career on the map (so to speak).

Stanley’s first published cover, for Clarence Budington Kelland’s Double Treasure (Dell 335), appeared in September 1949 and contains several of the elements that became typical of his work: men engaged in violent action and a beautiful, seductive woman. Stanley primarily painted fronts for mysteries and Westerns, and his illustrations are notable for their sexy, realistic, and action-packed images of men fighting, cowboys riding, and women either threatening or being threatened. His covers were a major ingredient of the Dell “look” of the 1950s. Most of Stanley’s paperback fronts are immediately recognizable, since he almost always enlisted himself and Rhoda as models. His men tend to appear serious, usually with tight jaws and unblinking eyes, and they are typically fully clothed—the cover for B.M. Bower’s Pirates of the Range (Dell 466, 1950) being a particular exception. His women are portrayed as alluring, menacing, terrified, and occasionally semi-nude.

Robert Stanley was responsible for painting history’s only altered Dell cover, introducing Erle Stanley Gardner’s Fools Die on Friday—the lawyer-turned-author’s 11th Bertha Cool/Donald Lam mystery. That artwork appears in two different versions (to be seen here). William H. Lyles, in his 1983 history of the publishing house, Putting Dell on the Map (Greenwood Press), explained the substitution: “The first Dell edition of Fools Die on Friday (#542, 1951) features a view of a woman zipping up her dress in response to private detective Donald Lam ordering her out of his room. The suggestion is implicitly post-coital and rushed. The revised cover (#1542, 1953) has no such suggestion; Stanley painted over the revealed undergarments and the blurb was changed to a bland statement. The incident in the novel is considerably more innocent than either cover suggests. No sex is implied in the incident, and both blurbs distort the actual dialogue. Either the hardcover publisher (Morrow) or the author (Erle Stanley Gardner) may have objected to the first version.”

The March 1951 issue of The Westerner (the house organ of the Western Printing and Lithographing Company) profiled Stanley during a visit he made with Rhoda to Western’s printing plant in Poughkeepsie, New York, providing details of his artistic methods:

Bob Stanley, an artist who furnishes Western with oil paintings which are used on the covers of the Dell 10-cent and 25-cent books, came to Poughkeepsie with Rhoda, his wife, to go through the plant and incidentally to see a window display in which they were featured.

Rhoda, who before her marriage to Bob, was a ballet dancer, at one time lived in Poughkeepsie, and although she can’t remember the city, she feels a closeness to Western because of its location and because of Bob’s connections with the Company.

Rhoda and Bob work as a team. We furnish Bob with a rough sketch of what we want. From this he makes a color sketch. After this has been approved, Rhoda plans and makes a photograph which Bob uses as a model from which he can paint the final picture. When Bob is the model, Rhoda takes the picture, and vice versa. When they appear together, the modern camera with the delayed-action shutter is used. Other models are their seven-year-old daughter, Barbara, who combines the talents of her parents by painting and studying ballet, and Rhoda’s father, Julius Rosenzweig, who also is brought into the picture at times.

Bob has a yearning to paint landscapes. As it stands now, though, we keep him so busy (he does about six covers a month for us), he hasn’t found time to go off on his own. Perhaps some day he will be able to have a one-man show.

From 1949 to 1962, Stanley executed 242 covers for Dell, including some of the publisher’s most iconic books, such as Dashiell Hammett’s Nightmare Town (Dell 379, 1950), Anthony Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue (Dell 591, 1952), and David Dodge’s The Long Escape (Dell 406, 1950). In addition, his self-portrait—as Brett Halliday’s private eye Michael Shayne—appeared on 28 Dell covers painted by Robert McGinnis (an example is shown here).

In the 1970s, Robert Stanley and Rhoda divorced. Stanley went on to wed again, moving with his new wife to Big Pine Key, Florida. He passed away on August 12, 1996, at age 78. Rhoda also remarried but stayed in Westport, where she died at 91, on June 24, 2012.

100 Years of Robert Stanley

Killer Covers has become known for its extended tributes to both artists and authors. In the past, we’ve celebrated the careers of Robert McGinnis, Paul Rader, Harry Bennett, and Travis McGee creator John D. MacDonald. Today we begin a week-and-a-half-long salute to Robert C. Stanley (1918-1996), whose realistic artistry graced more than 200 covers of paperback releases from Dell Books during the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, giving that line an immediately familiar style.

We’ll kick things off later this morning with librarian Randal S. Brandt’s introduction to Stanley’s life and labors, and then follow up by posting different Stanley covers each day through Friday, April 6.

Please let us know what you think of this series as it proceeds.

Because I Needed a Fredric Brown Fix …

One for the Road, by Fredric Brown (Bantam, 1959).
Illustration by Barye Phillips.

Two-fer Tuesdays: To Each His (or Her) Own

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



Comfort Me with Apples, by Peter De Vries (Signet, 1957); Comfort Me with Love, by “W.E. Butterworth,” aka W.E.B. Griffin (Signet, 1950). Both cover paintings were done by Barye Phillips.

Hitting the Links

• Oh, how I wish I were in London, England! Through this coming Saturday, March 24, that city’s Lever Gallery, in Clerkenwell, is hosting “Uncovered: Illustrating the Sixties and Seventies,” a showcase of the original art from paperback covers of that era. “Artists selected for this exhibition,” explains the gallery’s Web site, “include Ian Robertson, Yorkshire born Michael Johnson, who, with his Fine Art background and distinctive style, soon became one of the most sought after illustrators of the period, and a group of Italian illustrators who worked and lived around Soho and Chelsea, including the highly influential and style-setting Renato Fratini, and other colleagues—many of whom had previously worked in the Italian film industry, such as Gianluigi Coppola, Giorgio De Gaspari, and Pino Dell’Orco.” Flashbak, a photo-obsessed Internet resource, collects a handful of the more than 40 works on display, including Fratini paintings that grace several Mickey Spillane books (The Twisted Thing, The Girl Hunters, etc.) and Johnson’s gorgeous artwork for the 1965 novel A Crowd of Voices, by Richard Lortz. Flashbak’s presentation of these pieces is so captivating, I can even forgive the site its misuse of the term “pulp fiction” and its misspelling of Erle Stanley Gardner’s name. If you’d like to see more of the works on display (sadly, in smaller representations), click here.

• I apparently missed spotting this earlier: Mystery Tribune’s choices of “The 53 Best Mystery and Thriller Covers of 2017”—several of which were also rivals last year for honors in The Rap Sheet’s Best Crime Fiction Cover of the Year contest.

• Literary Hub picks “33 of the Weirdest Philip K. Dick Covers We Could Find.” That description is totally appropriate.

• In a piece for Criminal Element, Eric Beetner looks at some of the ways in which crime-novel fronts can evolve over time.

• Which brings us to Penguin UK’s new-this-month designs for its paperback editions of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Gone are the “block colours, masculine silhouette graphics, and naïve poster-style lettering” of that publisher’s previous Chandler line, replaced by “a subtler photograph[y]-based approach with high contrast [and] full-cap serif typography.” I can get used to this revised look.

• Crime novel covers sure know how to overwork a theme.

• The cover illustrations on Hard Case Crime’s new graphic-novel line, Quarry’s War—penned by Max Allan Collins and starring his series hit man, Quarry—are as powerful as they are beautiful.

• In Men’s Adventure Mags, Bob Deis has posted a new interview with Gil Cohen, who, he explains, “was one of the top men’s adventure magazine artists in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. He did hundreds of cover and interior paintings for MAMs. He also did hundreds of paperback covers and movie posters. Then he became one of one of the world’s premier aviation artists, creating fine-art paintings of planes and their crews that sell for thousands of dollars and are used for high-end lithographic prints.” Also check out Deis’ previous interview with Cohen, which has additional artwork.

• And how can I not applaud an Alberto Vargas pictorial? This one comes from a blog that’s new to me, Slice of Cheesecake.

Bennett’s Beauties: Cuddled or Cursed

The Wakefield Witches, by Daoma Winston (Pocket, 1975).
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett.

Connecticut artist Harry Bennett (1919-2012) is probably best remembered as an astoundingly prolific painter of covers for paperback detective, thriller, and mainstream novels. However, he may have been equally productive as a creator of artwork in the fiction fields of Gothic romance, romantic suspense/intrigue, and horror. Over the decades, his talents were applied to façades of books by Mary Stewart, Charlotte Armstrong, Dorothy Eden, Virginia Coffman, Barbara Michaels, Phyllis A. Whitney, Victoria Holt, Andre Norton, Joseph Shearing, and others. Bennett apparently painted the first, 1973 paperback cover for Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (a satirical tale originally released in the States in September 1972). He was also kept busy developing imagery for a frequently ignored sub-genre of love stories: nurse romance novels.

For the final installment in Killer Covers’ “Bennett’s Beauties” series, I have pulled together more than 50 of this artist’s book fronts from the romance and horror categories, all issued by one of three publishers: Pocket, Fawcett Crest, and Berkley. You may notice—as evidenced in, say, Susan Howatch’s The Waiting Sands and Holt’s The House of a Thousand Lanterns (both published back in 1975)—that many of the covers displayed below boast a classic, color-rich character that can be quite different from the paintings he supplied for crime novels. Barrymore Tebbs observes in his Gothic-fiction blog, The Midnight Room, that Bennett, “along with Pocket Books’ art director, Milton Charles [1921-2002], … helped create a lushly romantic and easily recognizable style that was often imitated by other artists throughout the genre’s two-decade heyday.”

“Easily recognizable”? Yes, in many instances Bennett’s diverse artistic touch is clear. But the ubiquity of his handsome covers on the Web seems to have left many folks overconfident that illustrations similar to his must, indeed, have flowed straight from his paintbrushes. (The same thing happens frequently with Robert McGinnis.) It’s hardly uncommon to find novel fronts online that have been mistakenly attributed to Harry Bennett.

Knowing how paperback publishers don’t always go to the trouble of crediting cover artists, Bennett sought to make identifications of his efforts easier by prominently signing his paintings. However, “publishers cropped much of the work to exclude signatures,” explains his youngest son, Tom (who I interviewed here). “My father learned to sign in specific places to ensure his name showed up.” (Notice, for instance, on Whitney’s Sea Jade [1965], how the autograph “Harry Bennett” has been neatly integrated into the wharf planking just to the left of the red-dressed woman. There was no neat way to excise that from the picture).

Tom Bennett, himself an artist, was remarkably patient in helping me to cull cover scans from my computer files that did not actually represent the fruits of his father’s labor. If there are mistakes in the selections below, the fault is mine, not his.

Click on any of these images to open an enlargement.

Incidentally, that last cover—from an early 1970s Fawcett Crest edition of Ammie, Come Home, by “Barbara Michaels,” aka Barbara Mertz—was the second of two fronts Bennett painted for the same novel. His 1969 version is shown below, on the left. The same artwork was adapted (with more mesmerized eyes on the floating woman) for the 1973 Five Star release of The Black Dog, by Georgena Goff.