That’s What I Call a Body of Work

While doing some research recently on American private-eye novelist Ross Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar), I realized that among the scans housed in my computer was a profusion of semi-provocative covers produced during the 1970s by British publisher Fontana, the paperback imprint of William Collins, Sons.

The ’70s was not necessarily a great period of UK book-cover design. Photographs—many of them featuring carefully arranged props such as guns, opened file folders, knives, skulls, and apparent corpses—were rapidly replacing more classic but expensive painted illustrations on crime, mystery and thriller novels, giving the lot a largely disappointing homogeneity. Because those books were then still marketed primarily to male readers, negligibly clothed women were also a recurring feature.

Fontana’s Macdonald line—all of the books starring his series protagonist, Los Angeles gumshoe Lew Archer—employed lovely young females, too, though its focus was tighter than usual. As Nick Jones explained several years ago in his blog, Existential Ennui, most of those Archer books boasted “variations on the same titillating theme of a close-up of part of a woman’s body in conjunction with a target or a gun or a badge or somesuch.” The props were clearly identifiable; occasionally, the anatomical backdrop was less so.

I own a good-sized collection of Bantam Books’ Ross Macdonald paperbacks from the 1970s, but none of the Fontana editions shown above and below are in my possession. At least not yet.