Another Look: “The Judas Hour”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Judas Hour, by Howard Hunt (Gold Medal, 1951); cover artist unidentified. Right: The Judas Hour, by Howard Hunt (Gold Medal, 1959), with a front painted by Charles Binger.

“Howard Hunt” is, of course, E. Howard Hunt (1918-2007). Although he later became infamous for participating in a 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate Office Building (which earned him a three-year prison sentence), Hunt spent much of his career as an operative and officer in America’s Central Intelligence Agency. He also penned dozens of hard-boiled and espionage novels, many under pseudonyms such as Robert Dietrich, David St. John, and Gordon Davis.

Publisher Cutting Edge has reissued (in both print and Kindle versions) many of Hunt’s novels in recent years, including The Judas Hour.

READ MORE: “From Watergate with Love—Howard Hunt, the CIA Spy Who Wrote Fake 007 Novels” (Spyscape).

Another Look: “Walk with Evil”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Walk with Evil, by Robert Wilder (Crest, 1957); cover illustration by Charles Binger. Right: Walk with Evil, by Robert Wilder (Crest, 1960); with a cover by Barye Phillips.

A Treasury of Templars

The Saint in Miami, by Leslie Charteris (Avon, 1958).
Cover illustration by David Stone.

Is it mere coincidence that Halloween, which so often celebrates haunting and horrific characters, should be followed by All Saints’ Day, honoring “saints both canonized and unknown”? This Christian solemnity began working its way onto the liturgical calendar in the 9th century A.D., and was pegged to November 1 through the efforts of Pope Gregory III in the early 8th century.

But, of course, we have our own, non-religious interpretation of what sort of saint is really deserving of praise today.

That’s right, we’re talking about Simon Templar, alias “The Saint,” a Robin Hood-like protagonist who was introduced by British author Leslie Charteris in his 1928 novel, Meet the Tiger. Templar went on to star in three dozen more novels and short-story collections by Charteris until 1963. After that, other writers either collaborated with Charteris on Saint works, or—following the author’s death in 1993—penned Saint tales on their own. In addition, the hero featured in big-screen films as well as TV movies, and was portrayed by actor Roger Moore in a 1962-1969 ITV-TV spy thriller series titled simply The Saint. (A subsequent show, Return of the Saint, was broadcast from 1978 until 1972 and found Ian Ogilvy in the lead role.)

Below you will find covers from half a dozen Saint titles published during the 1950s and ’60s. We don’t have identifications of all the artists responsible for these. However, we can tell you that Charles Binger created the front for The Saint to the Rescue (Permabooks, 1961), George Ziel was responsible for Concerning the Saint (Avon, 1958), and Raymond Johnson produced the artwork for the edition shown here of The Saint Steps In (Avon, 1954).

Many more Saint paperback fronts can be enjoyed here.

Another Look: “The Case of the Smoking Chimney”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Case of the Smoking Chimney, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1950), with a cover illustration by Wayne Blickenstaff. Right: The Case of the Smoking Chimney, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1961), with cover art by Charles Binger. Originally published in 1943, this is the second of two novels featuring amateur sleuth “Gramps” Wiggins. It was preceded by The Case of the Turning Tide (1941).

Another Look: “Hotel Talleyrand”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Hotel Talleyrand, by Paul Hyde Bonner (Bantam, 1955); cover illustration by Barye Phillips. Right: Hotel Talleyrand, by Paul Hyde Bonner (Panther, 1959); cover art credited to Charles Binger. Although it’s pretty much forgotten today, Hotel Talleyrand—penned by a former diplomat—enjoyed best-seller status following its hardcover debut in 1953.

A third paperback front for this book can be found here.

Another Look: “The Little Sister”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler (Pocket, 1963); cover art by James Neil Boyle. Right: The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler (Pocket, 1957); cover illustration by Charles Binger. This fifth novel starring private eye Philip Marlowe was adapted into the 1969 film Marlowe, starring James Garner.

Curious Gems Amid the Jumble

Last November, I mentioned on this page that I was helping to clean out the phenomenally jam-packed residence formerly occupied by my wife’s mother and stepfather, both of whom have now passed away. Well, we’re now in the seventh month of that project—and probably halfway through, at best, though we’ve at least moved out of the garage and into the heated house. There’s just so much stuff to sort through and dispose of, and only a limited number of free hours that members of the family can devote to the cause. I can’t believe how many boxes we have already gone through of items—glassware, picture frames, stuffed toys, hard-to-recognize knick-knacks, etc.—that my mother-in-law purchased at garage or estate sales over the years, then stored away in corners of the house and never used. (The price tags are still on them!) And we haven’t yet touched the basement, which is stacked shoulder-high with boxes, containing 80 years of possessions from multiple households.

What makes this arduous experience bearable, is that I enjoy the other people who have volunteered to share the task. And every once in a while, I chance upon an item, usually squirreled away among well-thumbed magazines and other random clutter, that makes all of the lifting and hauling and dust-incited sneezing worthwhile.

Take, for instance, the copy I unearthed this last weekend of Ted Mark’s I Was a Teeny-Bopper for the CIA. I’d heard of this 1967 Berkley paperback novel, but never imagined that a copy (with its cover illustration by Stanley Borack) might someday fall into my hands.

“Ted Mark” was a pseudonym used by Theodore Mark Gottfried (1918-2004), a magazine editor and prolific author of non-fiction books for schoolchildren. Under the Mark moniker, though, he is most widely recognized for having penned a 15-book comedy spy-porn series starring sex researcher-cum-espionage agent Steve Victor, “The Man from O.R.G.Y.” (the Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth). Teeny-Bopper was a standalone work, but no less steamy than its predecessors. In Black Gate, Sean McLachlan calls it “a fun bit of ’60s pulp with lots of cultural insights into a ‘square’s’ view of the anti-war movement and suburban spouse swapping.” Here he synopsizes the novel’s plot:

Vance Powers [is] a recently divorced corporate lawyer whose boring life gets turned upside down when a Congressman he knows hires him for a secret mission—infiltrate his local suburban amateur theatrical group in order to find some missing CIA money. Amateur theater, you see, is a front for the Commies, and the CIA operative who was investigating this group, Arch Fink, died recently. A bunch of CIA dough disappeared with him.

Powers joins the theater group and meets a menagerie of suburban types, most of whom are hopping into bed with one another. He soon hops into bed with Joy Boxx, a bored housewife and one of the many characters with joke names. The titular teeny-bopper is named Lolly Popstick! Anyway, Powers doesn’t get much joy from Boxx because his ex-wife has an almost psychic ability to call him long distance when he’s just about to have some fun. This happens all through the novel, meaning the sex scenes are all played for laughs. While this may have been a racy book for its day, it would barely get an R rating today and the sex is watered down even more with all the witty banter and slapstick acrobatics.

While Teeny-Bopper was definitely the weekend’s most unlikely discovery, it was not the only one worth mentioning.

In the course of digging through an upstairs bedroom, I found two small bookcases, the first of which revealed a 1947 Sun Dial Press reprint of Rogues’ Gallery, an Ellery Queen-edited anthology of stories built around crooks, rather than crime fighters—“the first of its kind,” according to the jacket copy. Among the authors represented in this thick volume: Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy L. Sayers, Leslie Charteris, Agatha Christie, and less-well-remembered writers on the order of Roy Vickers, H.B. Marriott Watson, and Arnold Bennett. Not far from the Queen release was a 1977 Doubleday hardcover copy (the book club edition) of Stephen King’s The Shining. I have to confess that, while I have watched the big-screen adaptation of King’s first best-seller, I have never read the original tale. So naturally, I scooped this one up for my own library.

Those same shelves offered a handful of entries from the early 20th-century Motor Boys series. I’d never heard of that Stratemeyer Syndicate line before. Wikipedia says it comprised 22 volumes (published between 1906 and 1924), all popular adventure yarns for boys, and all starring the trio of Bob Baker, “son of a rich banker”; Ned Slade, “son of the proprietor of a large department store”; and Jerry Hopkins, “son of a well–to–do widow.” The books were credited to “Clarence Young,” but that was apparently a Stratemeyer house name behind which labored several authors, principally (in the case of the Motor Boys) Howard R. Garis.

Because it was stuck away at the shadowy end of a bookcase’s bottom rack, I nearly missed spotting the pocket-size, red-covered 10th volume of The World’s Best One Hundred Detective Stories, edited by Eugene Thwing and published by Funk & Wagnalls in 1929. Sadly, I didn’t also locate the preceding nine volumes of that collection. However, the 10th includes short stories by the Baroness Orczy, Herbert Jenkins, and the “largely forgotten” Karl W. Detzer. It also boasts an author and title index to the whole collection, so I know what I’m missing. Among the other stories deemed the “best 100” are works by G.K. Chesterton, Octavus Roy Cohen, Anna Katharine Green, Freeman Wills Crofts, Marie Belloc Lowndes, and Vincent Starrett. There’s no Hammett here, but then the Black Mask bunch were often overlooked by literary critics in those days, and Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, had only just come out in 1929.

The balance of my latest surprise finds are all paperbacks: the 1969 release of Charlotte Armstrong’s The Balloon Man, with cover art by Harry Bennett; a distinctive 1970 Fawcett Crest edition of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, also with a Bennett illustration; a 1958 copy of Divine Mistress, by Frank G. Slaughter (cover artwork by Charles Binger); Cardinal’s 1959 version of Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow (again fronted by a Binger painting); Pocket Books’ 1961 release of Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister; and a 1966 edition of John D. MacDonald’s Cry Hard, Cry Fast.*

As I said before, we still have a long way to go before my in-laws’ house is clean, so there may be plenty of odd treasures yet to excavate. I’ll let you know what else I come across.

* Several sources around the Web claim the cover art on this Fawcett Gold Medal edition of Cry Hard, Cry Fast was painted by Robert McGinnis. But McGinnis expert Art Scott says that identification is incorrect.

Killer Covers at 10: “Wait, Son, October Is Near”

A decade in business, 12 months’ worth of paperback fronts.



Wait, Son, October Is Near, by John Bell Clayton (Bantam, 1954). Cover illustration by Charles Binger.

Because I Needed a Gardner Fix …

The Case of the Hesitant Hostess, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1959). Illustration by Charles Binger.

Duped: “The Ivy Trap”

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.



Douglas Angus (1909-2002) was born in the Canadian town of Amherst, Nova Scotia. According to the back-jacket copy on his only suspense novel, 1963’s Death on Jerusalem Road, Angus was “the son of a Canadian fur trapper. He came to the United States in 1936, acquired a Ph.D. from Ohio State University, and has since taught in a number of American colleges in the East and Midwest. … He is currently on the faculty of St. Lawrence University” in northern New York state. That same mini-biography noted that Angus was the author of three novels prior to the publication of Death on the Jerusalem Road: The Green and the Burning (1958), The Lions Fed the Tigers (1958), and The Ivy Trap (1959).

In its plot précis of The Ivy Trap, Kirkus Reviews wrote:

Allan Hazard, 47, an associate professor in a large school, has until now a fine record to which a well-reviewed book has contributed, and a more than reasonably happy marriage with Margaret, as well as two children. His attraction to one of his students, Laurel, a lovely if highly neurotic girl, is not to be resisted and becomes increasingly intense. They are seen by the Dean’s wife and by some students; news travels quickly—to Margaret—who can forgive him the lapse but not the transfer of a ring—hers—to Laurel. And while he finally is given the full professorship coveted by the entire department, it is only a week before his resignation is demanded—and Laurel’s ruin is complete, as well as his own.

A rather short review in the January 3, 1960, edition of Nebraska’s Lincoln Evening Journal called The Ivy Trap “a case-study of how passion can sweep over a man, destroying all of his reasonableness.”

The cover featured atop this post comes from the 1961 Crest Giant paperback version of Angus’ book, featuring what I think is a rather beautiful piece of art by English-American illustrator Charles Binger (despite the fact that the young woman depicted is a brunette, while Laurel in the novel is a blonde). Apparently, my attraction to that painting was shared, for the same painting showed up—also in 1961—on the façade of a British paperback, Alien Virus (Panther). The book is credited to “Alan Caillou,” but that was a pseudonym used by Surrey-born fictionist Alan Lyle-Smythe (1914-2006). Lyle-Smythe—who also wrote as “Alex Webb”—proved to be prolific, turning out more than three dozen novels, including series starring a journalist named Mike Benasque, an Interpol-serving “athletic genius” by the name of Cabot Cain, and a gentleman scholar called Ian Quayle.

Alien Virus was one of Lyle-Smyth’s non-series books, an adventure/espionage tale originally published in 1957, but reissued in 1974 as Cairo Cabal. Since I do not have either edition on my shelves, I was forced onto the Web in search of more information, but could find only a single plot summation of Alien Virus, from the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It calls the yarn “a thriller set arguably … in an alternate-history Egypt,” involving Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

READ MORE: “Alan Caillou: Colorful Writer-Actor,” by Bill Koenig
(The Spy Command).

MacDonald’s Century: “Slam the Big Door”

Part of a two-week celebration of John D. MacDonald’s birthday.



Slam the Big Door, by John D. MacDonald (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1965). Illustration by Charles Binger.

Women Rule: “The Ungilded Lily”

This 11th post completes Killer Covers’ tribute to March as Women’s History Month. To enjoy the whole series, click here.



The Ungilded Lily, by Morton Cooper (Gold Medal, 1958).
Illustration by Charles Binger.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Hard Times Ahead

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



What kind of a moniker is Ovid Demaris? Apparently, it’s better than Ovide E. Desmarais, which is the name this 20th-century newsman turned novelist was given at the time of his birth in 1919. A native of Biddeford, Maine, Demaris went on to become a newspaper reporter and a correspondent for the United Press (later United Press International) news agency. During his time (he lived to be 79 years old, finally passing away in 1998), Demaris also penned a number of books. Some of those were non-fiction, such as 1961’s The Dillinger Story (aka Dillinger), 1966’s The Boardwalk Jungle, and 1980’s The Last Mafioso. He even worked with Judith Exner--who claimed to have been a mistress, during the early 1960s, of both President John F. Kennedy and Mafia boss Sam Giancana--on her 1977 memoir, Judith Exner: My Story. In addition, however, Demaris concocted at least 17 novels, among them Ride the Gold Mare (1957), The Gold-Plated Sewer (1960), The Organization (1965), and what has been called an “anti-Mafia potboiler,” Ricochet (1988).

The Long Night was, as far as I can tell, Demaris’ fourth novel, a paperback-only Avon release from 1959. It marked the second appearance (after 1957’s The Hoods Take Over and before 1960’s The Gold-Plated Sewer) of fictional Los Angeles private eye Vince Slader, described by The Thrilling Detective Web Site as “an ex-cop with a weakness for booze and dames in trouble.” (In other words, he was very much like other for-hire gumshoes of the Eisenhower era.) In the blog Vintage Hardboiled Reads, August West noted that

The Long Night has a unique start. Slader is in front of a Senate Crime Committee hearing, sassing it up against two powerful senators. It seems that the private eyes in L.A. have been getting a bit out of control and Slader is the committee’s poster boy. He leaves the hearings with warnings that they will be watching him and he better keep his nose clean. Like that’s going to happen. Slader is hired by a scumbag casino owner to find a guy called Ben Russell. Russell has a $28,000 gambling debt and Slader gets a percentage if Russell pays up. Russell also has a young wife who has plans of her own, and those include a life insurance scam. Of course P.I. Vince Slader gets caught in it. He first gets set up to be murdered and burned to a crisp in Russell’s car; the idea is that the authorities will believe he was Russell. Slader gets banged up pretty bad, but survives. Next he walks in on Ben Russell’s actual murder, and here is where he gets pegged as the murderer. Along with Mrs. Russell’s motives to get her husband’s life insurance money, elements of the local crime organization have an interest in this case. So besides the Senate Committee, Slader has thugs and cops after him now.

As for a plot, there is really no new ground breaking in this one. It’s your typical P.I. being played for a patsy story. But that’s OK, it still was an enjoyable read. The Senate Committee angle in the story was different and refreshing. Slader has an ex-con as an assistant called Emilio Caruso, who he kiddingly refers to as his “little wop.” I liked the guy, unfortunately he doesn’t make it through to the end of the novel. There is a good dose of explosive (and descriptive) gunplay in The Long Night. One of the best takes place in the desert outside of Las Vegas, with Slader having some fun with two hired killers. Slader plays the ladies throughout the story and even with his rough mug, they are attracted to him. He even gets serious with a redhead who helps him survive in the end.

Having not yet read The Long Night myself, I’m not sure of the identity of the dead woman decorating its façade (above); I presume the male figure is supposed to be Slader. What else I can tell you is that illustration was done by Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka, one of my favorites among book cover artists of the last century. Nobody should be at all confused about what kind of story can be found inside. The front--with its wonderful hand-lettered title--positively screams “crime fiction.”

Less obvious about the nature of its contents is The Long Nightmare (Crest, 1958), displayed above and on the right. Credit for its cover painting goes to Charles Binger, but authorship of the tale inside belongs to John Roeburt (1909-1972), who has been described as “an American writer and criminologist.” Roeburt’s hard climb to recognition in the mystery- and detective-fiction field might have begun with the publication, in 1944, of Jigger Moran, which introduced J. Howard “Jigger” Moran, characterized (again by Thrilling Detective) as “a disbarred Illinois attorney and sometime-cabbie who now cruises the streets of Manhattan at night, keeping an eye open for the main chance, when he’s not shooting craps.” Moran starred in two more post-war novels, There Are Dead Men in Manhattan (1946) and Corpse on the Town (1950). During the same period, Roeburt took jobs as a scriptwriter for the radio mystery series Inner Sanctum and won an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1949 for Best Radio Drama. He subsequently did some TV writing.

But it was novels into which John Roeburt seemed to invest most of his heart. His résumé soon ballooned to include Manhattan Underworld (1951), The Case of the Hypnotized Virgin (1956), Sing Out Sweet Homicide (1961), and The Mobster (1972). The Long Nightmare was originally published in hardcover as The Climate of Hell (Abelard-Schuman, 1958). It was a standalone yarn with a plot that Kirkus Reviews described this way:

Larry Stevens, a fisherman in Florida, is brainwashed into the identity of Kirk Reynolds, taken--by three men--to New York to live the life of a gilded bum, to renew his marriage with Laura, a lush, and to witness the murder of his presumed father--before his will is changed. Running away--to give himself up--he must finally face the revelation of his own responsibility in the situation to which his sick, truant conduct has led. Up from the pulps, loud and lewd and lurid.

The back cover of Crest’s The Long Nightmare (embedded above, on the right) features a quote from now-famous New York Times critic Anthony Boucher, praising Roeburt’s novel as “a memorable nightmare of menace.” Honestly, though, I think “loud and lewd and lurid” beats that judgment by a long shot.

Six for Six: The Way Some People Die

On January 19, 2009--six years ago today--I acted rather impulsively and created a book-design blog, the one you’re reading now, Killer Covers. For some time before that, I had produced occasional posts about crime-novel fronts in The Rap Sheet. But such covers interested me enough to try building a blog focused specifically around them. Little did I know what I was getting into. Yes, there’s much to be said on the topic of book design, especially if one focuses, as I do, on vintage paperbacks. Too much, in fact. It’s sometimes been challenging to divide my efforts between Killer Covers and The Rap Sheet.

Nonetheless, the last half-dozen years have presented me with numerous welcome opportunities to collect obscure paperbacks from the past and share with you, my faithful readers, what knowledge I’ve gleaned regarding their cover artists. As a way of celebrating this latest anniversary, I shall spend the next six days showcasing novel fronts I discovered within the last twelvemonth. One cover per day through Saturday. The artists won’t all be new to regular readers of this blog, but I hope the works themselves will bring fresh delights to everybody.



First up: The Way Some People Die, by John Ross Macdonald (Pocket, 1961). Illustration by Charles Binger. California-born author Kenneth Millar (1915-1983) employed his real name when he started penning crime novels in the early 1940s, but subsequently adopted the pseudonym John Macdonald, which he hoped would prevent his works from being mistaken for those by his then better-known wife, Margaret Millar. Of course, this change only created confusion with his fellow wordsmith, John D. MacDonald, author of the Travis McGee adventures. Millar eventually altered his nom de plume to John Ross Macdonald, and later to Ross Macdonald. The Way Some People Die was his third novel starring Los Angeles private eye Lew Archer.

READ MORE: “Ross Macdonald: The Way Some People Die,” by Peter (Postmodern Deconstruction Madhouse).

The Heat Is On: The Beach Girls

Celebrating the delights of summer. Click here for the full set.


The Beach Girls, by John D. MacDonald (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1963). Illustration by Charles Binger.

I’m posting this today in recognition of what would be author MacDonald’s 98th birthday, were he still alive (he died in 1986). A subsequent edition of the same novel can be seen here.

Just Making the Rounds

• I’ve never paid much attention to Saber Books, a line of paperback novels published during the 1950s and ’60s that, as the blog Eleven-Nineteen explains, specialized in “cheatin’ wives and wanton women.” But this morning’s post in Pulp International about 1963’s Call of the Flesh, by Jack Moore (and featuring art by Bill Edwards), caused me to investigate further. Check out Eleven-Nineteen’s collection of Saber fronts here. Vintage Sleaze has its own set here, and there are more on Flickr.

• This is a book I very much look forward to adding to my library: The Art of Robert E. McGinnis. Slated for release by Titan in October, and put together by McGinnis and co-author Art Scott, it will trace the career of this Ohio-born artist “best known for his book cover and movie poster work”--someone whose illustrations I have frequently highlighted in this blog. I can’t tell, by reading the brief Amazon write-up, whether this is an expansion of a 2001 book McGinnis and Scott put together, or a wholly new volume; I hope it’s the latter. By the way, the cover art decorating this Titan book appeared originally on the 1960 novel Kill Now, Pay Later, by Robert Kyle.

• French artist-illustrator Alex Pinon (1900-1961) wasn’t familiar to me until I happened across this post about his 1953 cover for Elle ondule du popotin. After appreciating that image, though, plus one of his contributions to keyhold-themed pulp art, I am hoping to learn more about Pinon as time goes by.

• I concur with “Jade Pussycat” (a nom de plume, if ever there was one!) that this cover--which Jade says “kind of reminds me of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase”--is a winner. It comes from Addicted to Murder, a 1960 “sex and drugs novel” by public health official/author Theodore S. Drachman. By the way, if you haven’t explored Jade’s blog, The Pulp Fiction Project, you really should.

• This has to be one of the most beautifully suggestive covers ever!

• Robert Deis (aka “Subtropic Bob”) has written several times in his blog, Men’s Pulp Mags, about “the legendary artists’ model, pinup glamour girl and actress” Eva Lynd. But he has still more to say in this new post, which elaborates on Lynd’s collaboration with paperback illustrator Al Rossi and manages to throw in some of McGinnis’ work, pretty much just for the hell of it.

• And can we all agree that the title Death of a Ladies’ Man has now been used often enough to be retired? Of the assortment of paperback covers available at that link, I’m particularly fond of the one from Lee Roberts’ 1960 novel, featuring artwork by Charles Binger. More of Binger’s creations can be enjoyed here.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Death Is So Inconvenient

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



Enjoy, on the left, the suggestive front from Too Young to Die, a 1958 Gold Medal release by Lionel White. Although the artwork isn’t credited, it may have been created by Charles Binger. Meanwhile, the cover on the right comes from Too Busy to Die (Dell Books, 1944), the second of H.W. Roden’s Sid Ames/Johnny Knight mysteries. Gerald Gregg was responsible for that cover painting.

READ MORE: “Archived Review: H.W. Roden – Too Busy to Die,” by Steve Lewis (Mystery*File).

Peek-a-Boo, I See You

It’s one of the offenses I remember best from my early schooling. During the spring of my seventh-grade year (or maybe it was eighth grade), a group of boys from my class decided to take advantage of a maintenance truck that had been parked innocently beneath the high windows of the girl’s gymnasium locker room. While others of us were busy in class, those scallywags scampered to the top of that vehicle and slowly lifted their wide eyes above the windowsill. I don’t know how long they remained unseen, but once discovered, their presence set off shrieks that threatened to shatter glass throughout that level of the school. Even before the young ladies caught bare-assed and red-faced could formally complain (along with their mothers) about such indignities, our very proper female principal had identified the guilty parties and called them on the carpet. I don’t remember what disciplinary actions followed, but I do recall thanking my lucky stars that I had not been invited to take part in this pubescent prank. At the least, it saved me from having to endure the ugly looks—and I do mean cut-off-your-balls ugly—that those embarrassed misses shot at the offenders each time they passed them in the echoing hallways.

It was from that incident that I learned the meaning of “Peeping Tom.” However, the term goes back much farther in history, to the legend of Lady Godiva. According to the tale, Godiva was the wife of an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon nobleman who had recently imposed onerous taxes on the residents of Coventry, in England’s West Midlands region. Sympathizing with the locals, she asked her hubby to roll back the levies. Finally wearying of her repeated entreaties, he agreed to do so—but only if she would ride a horse naked through the Coventry streets. Godiva took him up on the dare, but first ordered that the townspeople remain inside and shutter their windows. Everyone obeyed, it’s said, except for a tailor who couldn’t resist a glimpse of the noblewoman’s beauty as she trotted by concealed only in her cascading tresses. The story has it that Godiva’s husband made good on his promise, while the reckless voyeur—thereafter known as Peeping Tom—was struck blind for his transgression.

Usually voyeurism doesn’t result in one losing his or her eyesight. (Thank goodness!) But it can lead to legal action. Only this last summer, for instance, a video circulated on the Internet showing Erin Andrews, a 31-year-old ESPN-TV sideline reporter, curling her long blond hair and putting on makeup while standing nude in front of a hotel mirror. The quality of the image wasn’t great, but that’s partly because it was shot without the subject’s knowledge, through a modified hotel room keyhole. When Andrews learned of this footage, she complained of invasion of privacy, and ESPN made an effort to strike the video from numerous Web sites. Just last week, 48-year-old Michael David Barrett was arrested in Chicago for stalking the ESPN “siren” and shooting eight videos of her through hotel keyholes in Nashville, Tennessee, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The Andrews saga sent me back to my collection of vintage paperback jackets. Believe it or not, the 20th century produced a whole genre of “Peeping Tom covers.” Some decorated cheap books designed for “adult reading,” including a number by the prolific Orrie Hitt (The Peeper, I Prowl by Night, Too Hot to Handle, The Love Season, Peeping Tom, etc.). Others fronted works by Clifton Adams (Whom Gods Destroy), Harold Q. Masur (Bury Me Deep), and Stephen Ransome (Some Must Watch). A couple of specimens were added in more recent years by Hard Case Crime (House Dick, by the notorious E. Howard Hunt, and The Last Quarry, by Max Allan Collins)—obvious odes to the genre, conceived by publisher Charles Ardai and his team of talented artists.

Within this genre of book covers, there seem to be three predominant varieties. The first type offers glimpses of titillating action through keyholes—the sort of action Ms. Andrews’ stalker was undoubtedly hoping to capture. Jay de Bekker’s Keyhole Peeper (Beacon, 1955)—shown at the top of this post—is a splendid example. “De Beeker” was in fact a pseudonym used by pulp novelist Prentice Winchell (1895-1976), who also published as “Spencer Dean” and, perhaps most memorably, as “Stewart Sterling.” For more than two decades, from the early 1940s through the mid-’60s, Winchell wrote New York City-based series featuring fire marshal Ben Pedley (Five Alarm Funeral), department store troubleshooter Don Cadee (The Scent of Fear), and Manhattan hotel security chief Gil Vine (Dead Right, aka The Hotel Murders). The author evidently had a particular interest in hotel sleuthing; in 1954, he and co-author Dev Collans published I Was a Hotel Detective, a non-fiction work described as “a startling exposé of life in a big-city hotel.” Keyhole Peeper appears not to be a Vine book, but instead a standalone novel. “A house detective spills his guts,” announces its front-cover teaser. “Behind every door lay a temptation!” Another description of the story’s plot reads: “It was not easy for Holcumbe to make the grade as house detective. Day and night he had to cope with party girls, hustlers, con men ... but toughest of all was his battle with himself.”

At least, if we’re to judge from the jacket of Keyhole Peeper, he didn’t lack for entertainment during the course of that battle.

The second sort of Peeping Tom cover involves windows (or, alternatively, doorways) through which men or women catch furtive, often hungry ganders at other people in various stages of undress, romantic endeavor, or other normally private activity. There are many such book fronts, though few are quite as distinctive as the façade of Bantam’s 1949 edition of Dead Ringer, by Fredric Brown (an entry in his Ed and Am Hunter private-eye series). One of my personal favorites is Frances Loren’s Bachelor Girl (Beacon, 1963), with a painting by Robert Maguire. It’s unusual in that the person treated to a surreptitious sighting of supple feminine flesh through glass is the reader, rather than some character in the book.

Finally come the jackets, such as that on Max Collier’s 1962 novel, Thorn of Evil (illustrated by Paul Rader), in which folks avail themselves of salacious perspectives from behind bushes, camera lenses, curtains, transoms, and such. And somehow they all get away with it—unlike my curious grade-school classmates.

The talents of many familiar artists are represented in the paperbacks featured below. Beyond works from Maguire and Rader, you’ll find cover paintings by George Ziel, Robert McGinnis, Griffith Foxley, Rudy Nappi, Victor Kalin, Tom Miller, Lou Marchetti, Stanley Borack, James Meese, Darrel Greene, Glen Orbik, Fred Fixler, George Gross, James Avati, Casey Jones, Mitchell Hooks, Barye Phillips, Bill Edwards, Al Rossi, Charles Binger, Robert Stanley, Bernard Safran, Verne Tossey, and of course Robert Bonfils (who gave us no fewer than half a dozen of these book fronts—many of the “not safe for work” specimens—including Sex Cinema, Swapping Cousins, and the deliciously titled Night Train to Sodom).

All I can say, before you scroll down any further, is “enjoy the view.” Just click on the covers to bring up enlargements.

Incidentally, I am indebted to a couple of Web sites for putting me on the trail of some covers highlighted here: Vintage Paperbacks: Good Girl Art, where I discovered several of the jackets featured in this post; and Pulp Covers: The Best of the Worst, which offers an amazing variety of vintage book and magazine illustrations. Thanks, as well, to veteran critic and Rap Sheet contributor Dick Adler, who added one or two novel fronts to my trove.

READ MORE: “Too Hot to Handle by Orrie Hitt (Beacon, 1959),” by Michael Hemmingson (Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books).