Behind an Overlooked McGinnis

(Above) Robert McGinnis’ “forgotten” Florinda front.

When Randal S. Brandt, a librarian at the University of California, Berkeley, went looking for background on Dana Wilson, the author of a peculiarly titled 1946 novel, Make with the Brains, Pierre, that he had acquired for the library’s California Detective Fiction Collection, he discovered there was more mystery in the writer’s identity than there was in Wilson’s “grim tale of psychological suspense.” As he explained recently for The Rap Sheet:

The book itself, including the original dust jacket, was no help at all. There is no author’s biography, photograph, or blurb on this edition. I didn’t even know if Dana was a man or a woman ..., or whether the name was real or a pseudonym. The Library of Congress, usually the authority on matters of book authorship, was no help whatsoever here. In its catalogue, the novel was entered under the simple heading of “Wilson, Dana,” which was linked to a composer and professor of music born in 1946. Nope, definitely not the author of this 1946 novel. The database contained entries for several other similarly named writers, but none were the one I was looking for. Disambiguating authors from one another and identifying them with the works that they produce is called, in library parlance, “authority control” and is a critical component of cataloguing, so I was determined to do something to distinguish Dana Wilson the mystery writer from the other Dana Wilsons.

Eventually, thanks to help from the genealogical database Ancestry, a vague dedication in the novel’s opening pages, and a soupçon of good fortune, Brandt succeeding in finding his answers. Wilson, it turns out, was a New York-born Hollywood actress who, following her divorce from Lewis Wilson—the first man ever to play Batman on film—went on to marry Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, one of two partners (Harry Saltzman being the other) now famous for bringing Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels to life on the silver screen.

Despite her modest success with Make with the Brains, Pierre (republished in paperback during the late 1940s as Scenario for Murder and Uneasy Virtue), Dana Broccoli produced only one more book: the 1977 hardcover release Florinda. Brandt describes it as “a historical novel set in 8th-century Spain, which was apparently inspired while [she and Cubby were] scouting locations for the Bond series.” The story’s protagonist is Florinda la Cava, or simply La Cava, said by Wikipedia to have “played a central role in the downfall of the Visigothic kingdom in Spain in 711. Although she was treated as historical in Spain for centuries, there is no evidence for her existence whatsoever and her name is certainly a later concoction.”

(Right) Dana Broccoli’s author portrait from the historical yarn Florinda.

Mere legend Florinda may be—the lover (or else the rape victim) of the last Visigothic king, Roderic, whose powerful father sought to avenge that dishonor by siding with Muslim conquerors against Roderic—but she appears every inch the callipygous seductress in the cover illustration for Broccoli’s Florinda shown atop this post, painted by renowned paperback and movie poster artist Robert McGinnis. How McGinnis came to be hired by Broccoli’s small publisher, Two Continents, to create that book front is a story now lost to time. The artwork itself has been largely forgotten, as well.

“Wow, Jeff! That’s an impressive piece,” replied Tim Hewitt, a former tech writer and paperback collector in South Carolina, after I asked him to confirm the identity of Florinda’s cover creator. “Yes, it’s McGinnis! After some close examination, I’m confident that’s McGinnis’ signature (what you can see of it) just below Dana Broccoli’s name on the cover. And honestly, if this isn’t McGinnis I’ll eat my hat, as the old saying goes.”

Art Scott, the co-author (with the painter himself) of 2014’s The Art of Robert E. McGinnis, concurs. “[A]s a self-made McGinnis authority,” he wrote me in a recent e-mail note, “I’ll sign off on this one as being genuine McGinnis. I also checked through my file of photos of the paintings held by Bob when we were working on the book, but didn’t expect to find Florinda—and didn't. I imagine it’s in the hand of the Broccoli heirs.”

Available copies of Broccoli’s novel are few and far between, and vary in price. Checking today, for instance, I see two to be had on the AbeBooks Web site—one going for a modest $33.75, the other valued at $150, both described as being in “fine” (or “as new”) condition. For a committed McGinnis fan, though, one to whom this art was previously unknown, cost may be of little significance.

A Worthy Coupling of Talents

If it seems I’ve spent a lot of time here recently writing about the works of Ross Macdonald … well, there’s a good reason, as will become clear soon enough. Meanwhile, I want to draw your attention to the cover above, from Bantam Books’ 1968 edition of The Three Roads, by Ross Macdonald. This standalone novel was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1948 under Macdonald’s real name, Kenneth Millar. It was his fourth book, after 1947’s Blue City.

Would you be surprised to learn that the cover painting on this edition of The Three Roads was done by Robert McGinnis? I certainly was, when informed of that fact by McGinnis biographer Art Scott. He records this as the only book front McGinnis created specifically for a Macdonald work (though other McGinnis paintings, especially those he did for M.E. Chaber’s Milo March series in the early 1970s, found their way onto European editions of Macdonald’s work). Scott tells me that The Three Roads was “one of my early triumphs as a McGinnis spotter. No signature, no credit, and certainly not a typical McGinnis design or look, but I felt a McGinnis vibe nevertheless.”

The rear cover of this paperback can be enjoyed here. Click here and here to see earlier editions of The Three Roads.

READ MORE: “A Mystery Review by Tony Baer: Kenneth Millar—The Three Roads” (Mystery*File).

Happy Birthday, Robert McGinnis!

Above: Revenge, by Jack Ehrlich (Dell, 1958). Below right: The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper, by John D. MacDonald (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1981), the 10th Travis McGee novel.

Not everybody lives to be 93 years old. But that’s the age renowned Ohio-born artist-illustrator Robert McGinnis will turn this coming Sunday, February 3. To celebrate this occasion, I’ve composed a small tribute to McGinnis for CrimeReads. You will find that here.

The piece is enhanced with almost 40 scans of covers McGinnis has painted over the last 60 years for crime, mystery, thriller, and suspense novels. Believe it or not, that’s a paltry selection, compared with this artist’s full output. As I explain in the article,

[McGinnis] has produced more than 1,000 unique paintings employed on American paperback book covers. His works are distinguished by their precise use of color, the artist’s preference for portraiture over depicting story scenes, and especially the lithe and luscious women who are so often the focal point of his canvases. Women whom Vanity Fair once described as “a mix of Greek goddess and man-eating Ursula Andress.”

I own several stacks of McGinnis-illustrated paperbacks, and my computer files contain scans of hundreds more. Choosing just over three dozen prime examples to help readers understand the range and distinction of McGinnis’ artistry was no elementary task, and I kept adding and subtracting until I decided I’d found the right combination.

Some of the book fronts I dropped (with regret) in my concluding round of cutting have been used to illustrate this post.

A handful of the scans I’ve employed in CrimeReads came from Art Scott, an erstwhile California chemist turned author, who co-wrote—with the painter himself—2014’s The Art of Robert E. McGinnis (Titan). As Scott told me during an interview I conducted with him at the time that gorgeous hardcover publication saw print, he’s a “compulsive collector” of McGinnis’ book covers. When I spoke with him five years ago, he estimated the number of those works in his collection at 1,088. More recently, he updated that count:

The number is now 1,101. Last entry is So Many Doors, the [Hard Case Crime release] by Oakley Hall—the [Robert] Maguire-McGinnis “collaboration.” I think I’m current with all books issued since the 1,088 number, but there’s always a chance I missed a book somewhere. There are four paperbacks—two Avon Gothics and two Dells—that are on my Desperately Needing Upgrade shortlist. Were there time and funds enough, I could chase foreign paperback editions forever, but I have to be content with occasionally getting on Google Images and similar sites to download interesting foreign covers—[which] reprint, and sometimes mangle, Bob’s original paintings.

I have done my best to not mangle any of the images used in today’s CrimeReads salute to one of the foremost American paperback illustrators. Click here to read it.

Left: Flush Times, by Warren Miller (Fawcett Crest, 1963); click here to see the original painting. Right: The Case of the Duplicate Daughter, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1962).

Left: Daily Bread, by Ralph Moloney (Fawcett Crest, 1961). Right: No More Dying Then, by Ruth Rendell (Bantam, 1974). I, for one, did not remember that McGinnis had created any covers for Rendell’s novels; this is apparently the only one.

Left: No Place to Hide, by Charles Runyon (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1970). Right: The Left Leg, by “Alice Tilton,” aka Phoebe Atwood Taylor (Popular Library, 1968).

Left: Take a Murder, Darling, by Richard S. Prather (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1965). Right: Never Kill a Client, by “Brett Halliday,” aka Davis Dresser (Dell, 1963).

Left: Death Comes Early, by William R. Cox (Dell, 1961).
Right: W.H.O.R.E., by “Carter Brown,” aka Alan Geoffrey Yates (Signet, 1971).

My, You’ve Got Some Brass!

A particularly handsome brass bed front: Grounds for Murder, by John Appleby (Dell, 1958), with art by James Hill.

Late last month, after I posted on this page the cover from the 1959 paperback edition of Noel Clad’s The Savage—featuring a young blonde tied to a brass bed frame—I received a note from Art Scott, co-author of the wonderful 2014 book, The Art of Robert E. McGinnis, saying that he’d like to share with me his collection of 25 other vintage novels on which brass beds have appeared. “More than anything,” he explained, “[those beds] seem to be a universal symbolic indicator for ‘cheap rooming house.’ Not having experience staying in same, I’ll have to take it as gospel, but you’d think brass bedsteads would be a lot more expensive than wood. However, they would also be much more durable, and no doubt the beds found homes in a succession of cheap rooming houses on the used market.”

Once I started flipping around through my files of book scans and searching the far corners of the Web, I realized that brass beds have been even more ubiquitous on paperback fronts than Scott suggested. Some examples have been used previously in a Killer Covers post I wrote back in 2014 about beds as places where danger and death might lurk. (Note there, for instance, the façades from Paul E. Walsh’s The Murder Room, William Holder’s The Case of the Dead Divorcee, Van Wyck Mason’s Secret Mission to Bangkok, and Richard Stark’s The Sour Lemon Score). But I am showcasing below more than four dozen additional such covers, boasting paintings by Robert Maguire (the first, purple covers from The Brass Bed), Victor Kalin (Sinners Wild and the first cover shown below from Berton Roueché’s Rooming House), Robert McGinnis (Assignment: Maltese Maiden, State Department Murders, The Sometime Wife, and The Star Trap), Harry Schaare (The Attic Lover), Paul Rader (A Woman), Rafael DeSoto (The Bed She Made, So Deadly Fair, This Bed We Made), Vic Prezio (The Bed Sharers), James Avati (Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye), and James Meese (Worse than Murder).

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

American artist Mitchell Hooks, Scott added, “seemed to be particularly fond” of using those frequently ornate brass furnishings (either polished or painted) in his cover illustrations. Indeed, what follows are eight of Hooks’ attractive paperback wrappers, among them the 1957 Bantam edition of The Wench Is Dead, by Fredric Brown, which I remarked on in an early Killer Covers post.