Front to Back: Just a Matter of Crime

Part III of a series spotlighting wraparound paperback art.


The Red Lamp, by Mary Roberts Rinehart (Dell, 1961).
Cover illustration by Victor Kalin.

What’s that saying about there being no accounting for taste? While this series has already brought you abundant examples of knockout painted artwork for the wraparound covers of science-fiction and historical novels, many of the specimens I find in the crime and thriller genre feature photographs, instead. Most of them are pretty cheesy, such as those fronting the 1970s James Hadley Chase releases displayed below. Only rarely does a mystery or detective yarn boasting a front-to-back camera shot rise to the level of being memorable—an example being the Signet softcover edition of Mickey Spillane’s 1972 standalone novel, The Erection Set, which captured the author’s second wife, actress Sherri Malinou, in the buff.

Nonetheless, this literary field is not without its handsome wraparound covers. Two of the best actually appeared on hardcover editions of James Bond espionage adventures, brought to market by British publisher Jonathan Cape: the 1965 version of Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun, with an illustration by Richard Chopping; and the first 007 continuation novel, 1968’s Colonel Sun, by “Robert Markham” (aka Kingsley Amis), which features a painting by Tom Adams. American artist Robert McGinnis took multiple opportunities to create elongated cover art. Of the paperbacks you’ll see by scrolling down this post, he was behind the fronts of The Girl Who Was Possessed, The Bump and Grind Murders, and A Corpse for Christmas (all entries in Alan Geoffrey Yates’ long-running Carter Brown series), as well as Brooks Wilson, Ltd. and Virgin Cay.

I’m sorry to say that my collection contains none of the crime, mystery, and thriller books with painted fronts that are showcased below. I can only share scans of them borrowed from other sources. Among the artists whose work is to be found here are Arthur Sarnoff (Driven), Richard M. Powers (Blood on the Desert), Tom Adams again (Hickory Dickory Death and Mrs. McGinty’s Dead), Barye Phillips (Death Is a Lovely Dame), Victor Kalin (The Red Lamp, Episode of the Wandering Knife, The Confession and Sight Unseen, The Dry and Lawless Years, and Hillside Strangler), Michael Codd (First Blood), Charles Moll (Cocaine Blues), Mitchell Hooks (The Ranch Cat), Gordon Johnson (Devil’s Gamble), and Tom Simmonds (Jaws).

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

Should things work out as planned, I shall produce one final post about wraparound book fronts before wrapping up this latest series. It’s likely to show up in Killer Covers sometime in November.