The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.
I’ve been holding onto the cover above for months now, trying to recall why that image of a rather well-endowed young brunette looked so darn familiar. I just couldn’t put my finger on the answer.
I knew that the man responsible for the painting that fronts this 1958 Popular Giant paperback edition of
The Deadly Reasons was Owen Kampen (1922-1982), a Madison, Wisconsin-born artist and illustrator who once worked as an instructor with the
Famous Artists School. I also knew that
The Deadly Reasons was written by
Edward D. Radin (1909-1966), an American criminologist and journalist whose best-known work is probably
Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story (1961).
The Deadly Reasons was the book he published just prior to that Borden history. Nominated for the
1959 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category, it’s a collection of 10 true-crime tales about homicides and the people who commit them. As Radin explains
in an Author’s Note, “in each of the cases in this book, a different motive was the cause that led to murder. While there are many motives in the broad range of human emotions, the ten deadly reasons in this book--Love, Fear, Revenge, Pride, Passion, Hate, Lust, Greed, Profit, Jealousy--are the most frequent causes of homicide I have found in a study of more than two thousand different murders.”
Of course, knowing all of that helped me not one iota when it came to pinning down why I recognized the
Deadly Reasons cover illustration. But then one day last week, during a mostly frustrating Web search for an entirely unrelated book, I
suddenly came across what was described as a “prostitution novel,”
Martha Crane, by Charles Gorham (Popular Library, 1954). Imagine my delight at seeing that its cover--displayed on the left--used
the original, larger Kampen painting from which the image on
The Deadly Reasons was taken.
A short biographical note found
on the backside of the 1949 Signet paperback edition of Gorham’s second novel,
The Future Mister Dolan (released originally in 1948, following his publication of
The Gilded Hearse), says the author “was born in Philadelphia, attended Columbia, [and] saw war service as navigator with the RAF and 8th Air Force. He has worked on newspapers and in publishing houses.”
Kirkus Reviews offers this synopsis of
Martha Crane’s plot:
An autopsy on Martha Crane omits flowers and provides a case history of a girl whose heart and conscience had been numbed--to refrigerated--by her father. Enlisting at eighteen in the WACS to escape him, Martha now at 24 is still embattled in her emancipation but a chance night on the town finds her pregnant. The attempt made by a home for unwed mothers in St. Louis to contact the father of the child she will bear drives her on to New York and the chance encounter with Farkas, a pimp, who arranges for the care, delivery and disposal of the child. Back in shape again, she goes to work for Farkas as a high-class call girl; her attraction to him has an unhealthy aura which is also a reminder of the father she hates; she submits to every degradation and contributes to the suicide of a client; and finally, with the knowledge that Farkas is using her child as a means of expensive extortion from the family who has adopted it, she kills him. … An anatomy of a driven as well as fallen woman, this is for those who stimulate rather than shock easily and is thoroughly demoralized.
Not exactly the most glowing review, eh? Fortunately for the author, it wasn’t the only one. The
Boston Herald was kinder to
Martha Crane, saying that “Mr. Gorham has created here a frightening character, one who will repel you and at the same time hit you so hard that her agony will remain with you a long time after you have put the book down.” Gorham went on to pen such works as
Trial by Darkness (1952),
The Gold in Their Bodies: A Novel About Gaughin (1955),
McCaffery (1961), and a biography of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie titled
The Lion of Judah (1966).
