A Face to Fall For

This cover of Angel Face (Macfadden, 1970) makes no visual sense. In the upper left-hand corner, we have the giant noggin of ubiquitous paperback model Steve Holland. In the middle appears a shapely blonde wearing either a blouse or a short, see-through negligee, and high heels on her feet, but evidently nothing in between. Finally, there’s a dark-haired, dark-suited gent falling to his death from the heights of a brick building--he’s the only one, it seems, who is unable to defy gravity in this illustration. I can only surmise by the cover line (“Her profession was love, but all she knew was hate”) that the blonde had some complicity in that man’s tumble.


I don’t know who was responsible for this peculiar artwork, but the author of Angel Face was Fan Nichols (married name Frances Nichols Hanna), who concocted romance and crime novels during the mid-20th century. Among Nichols’ other books were Be Silent, Love, One by One, and The Loner.

Two-fer Tuesdays: That First Step’s a Doozy!

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



“Robert Standish,” author of the 1960 Four Square paperback on the left, The Big One Got Away, was a pseudonym often used by Englishman Digby George Gerahty (1898-1981), who wrote some three dozen novels, in addition to numerous short stories. Among his books was the Ceylon-set Elephant Walk (1948), which was filmed in 1954 with Elizabeth Taylor, Dana Andrews, and Peter Finch. The cover shown here features an illustration by Roy Carnon, another Brit, who worked primarily in advertising, but also painted fronts for some of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ science-fiction novels and created concept illustrations for the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On the right is shown Deadly Night Call, the 1951 Graphic Books paperback edition of Cornell Woolrich’s 1950 short-story collection, Somebody on the Phone, which he published under his nom de plume William Irish. The title of that book comes from a story about blackmail, suicide, and revenge. I don’t find mentioned anywhere on the Web the identity of the artist responsible for this paperback’s shocking cover, but the site Vintage Paperback Archive mentions that “Graphic Books only existed from 1949 till 1957. During that time they focused on mysteries and hard-boiled detective.”

READ MORE: “Cornell Woolrich’s Mysterious Tales of Sorrow & Horror,” by Jessica Amanda Salmonson (The Weird Review); “Falling Bodies” (Pulp International).

Not Exactly a Ringing Endorsement

Generally speaking, when a publisher goes hunting for recommendations to highlight on its book jackets, the quotes sought are at least somewhat more enthusiastic than this one that appeared on the 1959 Ace Double mystery paperback edition of Harry Whittington’s Play for Keeps (the full hardcover edition of which was released by Abelard Schuman two years before).

By the way, the novel on the flip side of Ace’s Play for Keeps was The Corpse Without a Country, by Louis Trimble (1917-1988).