And a Very Merry Christmas to All!

The Corpse in the Snowman, by “Nicholas Blake,” aka Cecil Day-Lewis (Popular Library, 1945). Cover art by H. Lawrence Hoffman.

All the Rage

Literary Hub believes it has finally identified this year’s hottest book-cover design trend. Writes Drew Broussard:

The reign of the color-blob book cover has slowly come to an end over the last several years, and various pretenders to the throne have taken their best shot at being the next trend—sans-serif minimalism (The “Cusk”); brightly-colored paper-cut-out illustrations, usually involving women (The “Bernadette”); and of course, the perennial text-over-full-jacket-evocative-photograph (The “Prestige White Author”).

We’re here to report that a new contestant is entering the field in 2024 (or at least Knopf is really trying to make fetch happen). Folks, allow me to introduce … the Pastel Sky.

Click here to enjoy a small gallery of examples.

Meanwhile, The Book Designer cites its own 2023 dust-jacket art consistencies, including head shots of authors, “colorful vector illustrations,” water and river symbolism, and “busy backgrounds with bold typography.” That Web site’s editors somehow missed spotting the whole pastel sky thing, though.

Another Look: “Naked Fury”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Naked Fury, by “Day Keene,” aka Gunnar Hjerstedt (Phantom, 1952), with a cover illustration by Jack Rickard. Right: Naked Fury (Berkley, 1959); cover art by Milo.

Manipulating Reality

Stock photography has become so ubiquitous on book fronts in recent years, that few people give it more than passing notice. But recently, while gathering info about forthcoming crime and mystery novels, I happened across a January release titled The Clinic, by Cate Quinn, that caused me to do a double-take. Not because the cover was anything special, but because part of the art used was so recognizable, it distracted me from caring about the story to be found inside.

Publisher Sourcebooks Landmark describes this book as “a thriller set in a remote rehab clinic on the Pacific Northwest coast, in which the death of a woman inside prompts her sister to enter the clinic as a patient in order to find the truth.” Its synopsis goes on to explain:

Meg works for a casino in L.A., catching cheaters and popping a few too many pain pills to cope, following a far different path than her sister Haley, a famous actress. But suddenly reports surface of Haley dying at the ... facility where she had been forced to go to get her addictions under control.

There are whispers of suicide, but Meg can’t believe it. She decides that the best way to find out what happened to her sister is to check in herself—to investigate what really happened from the inside.

Battling her own addictions and figuring out the truth will be much more difficult than she imagined, far away from friends, family—and anyone who could help her.

The Clinic’s dust jacket, with its wave-battered cliffs, recumbent fog layer, and towered Victorian edifice, certainly supports this yarn’s eerie intent. But its cover image combines at least two stock photos. And if you’re like me, it’s impossible to look past the fact that the supposedly threatening coastal institution is actually a Eureka, California, landmark that once seen, is not soon forgotten.


(Above) The Carson Mansion is far from the Pacific Northwest.

Located at the eastern extreme of Eureka’s historic quarter, the Carson Mansion was completed in 1886 for William Coleman Carson. A native of New Brunswick, Canada, Carson had ventured west in the early 1850s, hoping—like so many other young men—to get rich quick in the California Gold Rush. He stayed afterward to become one of Northern California’s first lumber barons. In the early 1880s, he commissioned San Francisco architect-brothers Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom, who Wikipedia says “specialized in designing Queen Anne-style … homes with extravagant details,” to create a showplace residence for his family in the busy coastal town of Eureka. North Coast Journal, an alternative newsweekly serving California’s Humboldt County, says Carson allowed his architects “a free hand with the design. Redwood—the wood that had made Carson wealthy—was the obvious choice for the exterior, due to its ability to resist weathering and decay. But Carson also arranged to have quantities of tropical hardwoods imported from all over for the internal construction and decoration. … Carson arranged for a schooner to bring nearly 100,000 feet of white mahogany (primavera) from Central America. In addition, shiploads of Philippine mahogany and Indian teak complimented the exterior redwood.”

Carson died in February 1912, leaving what was reportedly a substantial legacy to his five children. In 1950, his elegant four-story, 18-room home with its very distinctive tower became the headquarters of the private Ingomar Club, its membership open then—as now—only to men. Although this structure was included in 1964 on the Historic American Buildings Survey, its club owners have chosen not to apply for its placement on the better-recognized National Register of Historic Places.

While it’s located not far from Eureka’s Arcata Bay, the mansion—labeled “a baronial castle in Redwood” by one national architecture critic—doesn’t perch on an ocean-fronting precipice, as The Clinic’s jacket suggests. Nor is it occupied by a facility for patients in desperate need of physical or mental rehabilitation, though I’m sure many Ingomar regulars find succor within its grand walls.

Mann, Oh Mann!

I’ve had the opportunity over my years as a journalist and book critic to interview a great many people. They’ve ranged from relative unknowns to prominent figures such as actor James Garner, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, jazz singer Sarah Vaughn, and architect-futurist Buckminster Fuller, as well as crime novelists on the order of Ross Macdonald, Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, and Philip Kerr.

Not all encounters of this sort have gone smoothly, and scheduling difficulties have sometimes arisen. However, I don’t recall ever being so challenged in seeking to arrange an interview as I was when I tried to connect with Salt Lake City-area artist-illustrator Paul Mann (shown at right).

You may recognize Mann’s moniker from an article I posted last week about his work on the front of Too Many Bullets, the new, 19th Nate Heller private-eye novel by Max Allan Collins. Over the last half-dozen years, Mann has become a regular contributor to publisher Hard Case Crime’s cracking line of hard-boiled yarns. His mastery of retro-style imagery has made him a go-to HCC cover artist, along with Robert McGinnis, Ron Lesser, Claudia Caranfa, Mark Eastbrook, Laurel Blechman, and others. Having long been interested in book illustration, I wished to ask him about his four decades spent perfecting his craft, his creative techniques, his favorite book covers, his Hard Case assignments, and his extensive portfolio of cinema-related spec pieces.

When repeated efforts to make contact via e-mail failed, I asked Hard Case editor Charles Ardai for help in reaching Mann. Ardai said he was happy to pass along my message “with a note encouraging him to reply to you. He still might not—he’s a very nice fellow, but may not like doing interviews or might just be dealing with a lot of other commitments. But I’m glad to give it a try.”

In the end, I never heard so much as a whisper from Mann.

So I moved on. There were other people to speak with, other artists to showcase in Killer Covers, other book reviews to write. But recently Ardai mentioned on the social networking service formerly known as Twitter (sorry, I’m never going to call it “X”—that’s just too moronic a name) that Hard Case is planning next year to issue a trade paperback version of Lemons Never Lie, a 1971 novel that Donald E. Westlake released under his pseudonym Richard Stark. In 2006 HCC had published Lemons in mass-market size (with cover art by Richard B. Farrell), but copies of that ran out long ago, and as Ardai explained, Westlake’s widow “agreed we should reprint in the larger format to match all our recent editions of Don’s books.” Said forthcoming reprint will boast a new and captivating cover—exhibited atop this post—by none other than Paul Mann.

That finally kicked it over the edge. I was going to have to go ahead and exhibit Mann’s remarkable talents on this page without interviewing the man himself. Below you’ll find what I believe is his entire Hard Case oeuvre—so far. Among the titles are several by Westlake, including Forever and a Death (2017), which is said to have started out as a James Bond film treatment; Collins’ 18th Nate Heller historical tale, The Big Bundle (2022); Ardai’s Death Comes Too Late, a short-story collection due out in March of next year; and a 2019 illustrated edition of Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid (originally published in 2005 with a cover by Glen Orbik).

I look forward to seeing many more of Mann’s sexy, traditionally fashioned Hard Case Crime fronts in the near future.

Coffin, Coffee — What’s the Diff?

Back in March I posted (here) a Dime Detective magazine cover from 1943, promoting a story inside titled “You’re the Crime in My Coffee,” by D.L. Champion. More recently, I found the image below (from the March 1946 edition of Black Mask) in Pulp Covers, and at first glance thought its featured tale carried the same name. That was my mistake, but one that I’d argue was easy to make.

In fact, whoever wrote the original headline on Pulp Covers’ item about this issue front committed that same misreading!

(Above) Black Mask, March 1946; art by Rafael DeSoto.

The Thrilling Detective Web Site says that H.H. (Herbert Hunter) Stinson, the Illinois-born author of “You’re the Cream in My Coffin,” “was a Los Angeles police reporter and playwright, as well writing for the pulps. He was one of the original ‘Black Mask Boys’ (he’s actually one of the writers in the legendary 1936 photo), as well as one of the members of The Fictioneers.” Stinson wrote two main series of stories for the pulps: one for Black Mask, starring Ken O’Hara, “a hard-boiled reporter for the Los Angeles Tribune”; the other for Dime Detective, headlined by L.A. private eye Pete Rousseau. “You’re the Crime in My Coffin” isn’t listed as featuring either of those protagonists, so it may have been a standalone.

Mystery*File reports that Stinson was born on April 27, 1896, and died on October 9, 1969. He published at least one book, a 1925 Henry Holt & Company volume titled Fingerprints.

The Inconvenience of Abundance

It was while I was putting together a rather lengthy Rap Sheet interview with Iowa fictionist Max Allan Collins, most of which had to do with his new historical crime novel, Too Many Bullets (Hard Case Crime), that I realized just how many book fronts featuring those words “too many” can be found in my computer files.

Too Many Bullets, the cover of which is displayed atop this post (with art by Paul Mann), is the fifth entry* in a sort of mini-series within Collins’ string of 19 novels starring hard-boiled, Chicago-based private investigator Nate Heller, all of them in some way featuring John F. Kennedy and/or his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy. Bullets imagines the ubiquitous Heller on hand at Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Kennedy’s 1968 slaying in Los Angeles, and then follows him as he endeavors to untangle a conspiracy meant to pin that headline-grabbing tragedy on “lone gunman” Sirhan Sirhan.

When I typed “too many” into the search window of my computer’s Picasa image viewer, looking from the jacket of Too Many Bullets—surprise!—more than one cover came up. Not just Collins’, but also the fronts from 10 other novels, none of which I remembered downloading or storing away for future use. There was the 1962 Bantam paperback cover of Rex Stout’s Too Many Clients (with art by Bill Johnson), as well as the fronts from two other Stout works: Too Many Cooks (Dell, 1951; art by Robert Stanley) and Too Many Women (Bantam, 1949; art by Hy Rubin). In addition, I found Too Many Murderers, by Manning Lee Stokes (Graphic Mystery, 1955; illustration by Clyde Ross); One Murder Too Many, by George Harmon Coxe (Pyramid, 1967; artist unidentified); Too Many Beds, by “Tony Calvano,” aka Thomas P. Ramirez (Nightstand, 1961; artwork by Harold W. McCauley); Too Many Sinners, by Sheldon Stark (Ace, 1954; artist unidentified); Too Many Crooks, by Richard S. Prather (Gold Medal, 1956, featuring a Barye Phillips illustration); Too Many Women, by Milton K. Ozaki (Handi-book Mystery, 1950; artist uncredited); and finally the third Too Many Women tucked into in my files, this one by Gerry Martin (News Stand Library, 1950; art by Syd Dyke).

There are probably still more vintage books to be found with such titles. I shall add to this post as I stumble across them.

* The previous four books were Bye Bye, Baby (2011), which found Heller probing “blonde bombshell” Marilyn Monroe’s sexual involvement with both Kennedy siblings, at the same time as he sought to determine whether it was really suicide that sent the actress to her grave in 1962; Target Lancer (2012), which revisited a plot to do away with President Kennedy in Chicago in 1963—even before his tragic public slaying in Dallas, Texas; Ask Not (2013), about a succession of suspicious deaths in 1964, involving witnesses to President Kennedy’s assassination; and Better Dead (2016), in which Heller got better acquainted with Bobby Kennedy, while he investigated the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a New York City couple convicted of espionage for having reportedly leaked U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.