Friday Finds: “The Halfbreed”

Another in our growing line of vintage book covers we love.


The Halfbreed, by Al James (Midwood, 1961).
Illustration by Robert Maguire.

When I first saw this paperback front, I presumed that—based on the young woman’s dark hair and braids, and the vibrantly hued blanket draped across her hip—she must be this story’s titular “halfbreed.” But I was wrong, as evidenced by the back-jacket copy:

Sin—Southern Style!

They entered the water together, wading in until the warm surf swirled around their knees. Wanda raised her face to his, her gentle features contorted with passion.

Frank kissed the open mouth and felt her pleasure vibrate through his body. His hand slid around her waist and she trembled as he moved the palm, slowly, softly. She thought of her husband, Ben, her worn-out, rich old man, and suddenly it didn’t matter that he could give her nothing but money. Frank, her handsome halfbreed, was here now, and he was all man!!!

She broke the kiss. “We were going swimming,” she reminded. Her panting was audible.

“We are swimming,” Frank answered.

“I don’t want to swim, anyhow,” she moaned, twisting in his arms. “You know what I want.”

“Yes, I know,” Frank said, and he leaned her downward, down toward the sand …

LOVE! CARNAL! CONSUMING!

Turning the Florida Everglades into a Jungle of Sensuality!!!

Yuck! (Or, more appropriately in this case, Yuck!!!) That’s terrible writing, even for publisher Midwood Books, almost too dreadful to retype here. And not all that illuminating. Since I don’t own a copy of The Halfbreed, I can only assume that the mixed-blood Florida male who makes young Wanda’s blood race must be part Native American (rather than half-black, as was the case with other sleaze paperbacks that intended to shock mid-20th-century Americans). The South has a long history of interracial sexual consorting—not always acknowledged—and in the humid environs of the Sunshine State, those temptations might only be heightened.

Or at least that’s what “Al James” would have you believe. As I mentioned in a post from two years ago, which focused on a cover boasting no fewer curvaceous charms than this one, James was one of several pseudonyms behind which labored Albert James Hjertstedt, the son of seemingly inexhaustible fictionist Gunnar Hjerstedt, better known under the byline “Day Keene” (To Kiss or Kill, Dead in Bed, Too Hot to Hold, etc.). The younger Hjertstedt never surpassed his father in terms of literary output, but as Al James he racked up plenty of credits in crime-fiction periodicals (everything from Trapped Detective Story Magazine and Sure-Fire Detective Stories to the higher-prestige Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Manhunt), and copies of his novels—including Child Bride (1961), The Lover (1961), and The Shameful Breed (1973)—can still be unearthed from the dustier corners of well-stocked used bookstores.

I, myself, would love to find a copy of The Halfbreed in good condition, though I’d be buying it for the Robert Maguire cover alone. The chances of my actually reading it? Unlikely!!!

Friday Finds: “Be Still My Love”

Another in our growing line of vintage book covers we love.


Be Still, My Love, by June Truesdell (Dodd, Mead, 1947).
Illustration by Denis McLoughlin.

What a brilliantly evocative dust jacket this is, with its vintage sedan stopped at night along a sheer coastline, the beams from its headlights leaping far beyond the land’s end and reflected in the water. This could have been the poster artwork promoting any number of mid-20th-century noir films. Indeed, author June Truesdell’s suspense yarn became the basis for a 1949 Paramount motion picture retitled The Accused, which Variety said offered “high grade melodrama,” and starred Loretta Young, Robert Cummings, Wendell Corey, and Sam Jaffe. First, however, Be Still, My Love appeared in print in 1947, one of at least three crime novels attributed to Truesdell (1918-1996), the others being The Morgue the Merrier (1945) and Burden of Proof (1951).

In his excellent blog, Reading California, retired historian Don Napoli opines that Be Still, My Love “manages to be bad and fascinating at the same time.” Here’s his summation of Truesdell’s plot:

Wilma Tuttle, thirty-year-old psychology professor at a Los Angeles college, lives in terror of the real world. Small, frugal and constrained, she’s experienced none of the joys of everyday life. One day an arrogant and maliciously flirtatious student, Frank Parry, asks her out to dinner. They drive up the coast, where eventually Frank tries to rape Wilma. She kills him then tries to make the death look like an accident. Back home she soon must lie to Frank’s wannabe girlfriend, Connie Bradlet, who wonders why he’s broken a date. Meanwhile, a police investigation is underway. Tad Gowan, head of the LAPD homicide division, tricks the coroner’s jury into declaring the death an accident, hoping to put the killer off guard. Helping him build a case for murder is Warren Ford, tall and ruggedly handsome lawyer for the Parry family. When they ask Wilma, who’s teaching criminal psych that semester, to join them, she sees a chance to solidify her deception.

One brief online review of Hollywood’s adaptation of this tale makes clearer the inspiration for the dramatic cover illustration shown above: “When Perry* tries to rape Tuttle, she beats him to death with a tire iron. She covers up her crime by making it seem as though Perry was killed while diving into the sea from a precipitous cliff.” Unfortunately for the naïve Miss Tuttle, in the end her conscience—as well as her “burgeoning romance” with attorney Ford—undermine her desperate efforts to escape a murder conviction.

If the artistic style of this book front appears familiar, it’s likely because the painting was done by Denis McLoughlin (1918-2002), one of the most prolific and now revered British illustrators of the 20th century. David Ashford, who put together a handsome 2012 volume called The Art of Denis McLoughlin (Book Palace), declared that “In the history of British Illustration there is no one who can be reasonably compared to him.” McLoughlin’s contributions to comic books, pulp magazines, and especially hard-boiled crime novels have won him a worldwide following, though his name is rather less familiar than the art he left behind.

Born in Bolton, Lancashire, England, and asthmatic as a child, McLoughlin won a scholarship to a local art school at age 14. Yet soon afterward, he took a job drawing for a Manchester-based mail-order company. In 1940, near the start of World War II, McLoughlin was called up to military service as a gunner with the Royal Artillery Depot at Woolwich (near London). “However,” explains this informative Web biography, “because of his safe posting and his skills with a brush, he soon found himself painting murals on canteen walls, and making a bob or two by sketching officers’ portraits. More importantly, his billet also gave him an unwarranted freedom to go up to London and show his artwork to various publishers.” After first wielding his paints and pens on behalf of publisher Wells Gardner, Darton & Company, in the mid-1940s McLoughlin made the commercial contact that would eventually bring him renown, with UK publisher T.V. Boardman Ltd. (aka Boardman Books). It was for Boardman that he developed three-color rotogravure comic series starring private investigator Roy Carson and science-fiction hero Swift Morgan, plus a best-selling succession of Buffalo Bill Annuals that drew on McLoughlin’s great interest in the American West. For the same house, he also became a fast but inventive painter of novel fronts.

The Guardian’s 2002 obituary of this artist notes that “During 20 years with T.V. Boardman, then the fifth largest British publisher, McLoughlin produced 700 dust jackets, scores of paperback and magazine covers, strips and illustrations … It was McLoughlin who designed the pipe-smoking, deerstalker-wearing Bloodhound emblem”—shown on the left—“that graced the Boardman Bloodhound Mystery series, and a total of some 600 crime novels alone, most of them featuring his distinctive, lower-case signature.”

That same obit says that McLoughlin’s early books “featured fully air-brushed art (around 1957, the color was reduced to save money) … Later books were pen and ink drawings, another cost-cutting decision, but McLoughlin was able to get the maximum potential from each medium. Over the years, his work ranged from fully painted action illustrations to minimalist designs. He was not frightened to experiment with layouts, incorporate photographs, or mix realism and metaphor. With his brother Colin, he often acted out scenes for reference photographs, and both starred in more than one cover.”

There are so many McLoughlin dust jackets from which to choose, it would take a book-length study such as David Ashford’s to do his portfolio justice. But I can at least offer here a few other examples of his talent—books by authors such as Henry Kane, Thomas B. Dewey,  Richard Deming, Ed McBain, and yes, one other by June Truesdell.

(Enjoy more of McLoughlin’s artistry here, here, and here.)

Wikipedia’s McLoughlin page points out that the artist’s career “spanned eight decades” but concluded sadly:

Like many others who devoted their life to commercial art in the first half of the 20th century, Denis McLoughlin was never paid a great deal for his work. Many pieces of his artwork, the Boardman book covers in particular, which Denis had been promised would be returned to him, were either lost or ended up in private collections. While he made a living, Denis never accumulated much money. Although he had a pension from the British government, he was forced to augment his income by working long past retirement age. He once commented that he never particularly liked illustrating military topics and yet that is what he found himself doing for the last 20 years of his life. Perhaps, had he been given cowboy stories to illustrate, he might have been happier.

According to this piece in Nick Jones’ blog, Existential Ennui, Denis McLoughlin committed suicide at age 84, “shooting himself … with ‘the only non-replica gun that he possessed and for which he had only the one bullet’ … because he was ‘worried about the loss of feeling in his right arm and feared that he wouldn't be able to draw again.”

* There seems to have been a change in the spelling of student Frank Parry’s last name. The novel apparently gives it as Parry with an “a,” while reviews of the movie spell it “Perry.” The things Hollywood does—go figure.

Friday Finds: “The Faces of Love”

Another in our growing line of vintage book covers we love.


The Faces of Love, by John Hearne (WDL Books, 1959).
Illustration by Edgar Hodges.

I had intended to write about this 1959 paperback novel only because of the egregious typo in its top cover line. How in the world did the obvious misspelling “Carribean” make it past editors and art directors, and into print? This must have been particularly galling to its author, John Hearne, who—though he was born in Montreal, Canada, in February 1926—was the light-skinned, mixed-race son of Jamaican parents, did his first undergraduate studies at Jamaica College in the island capital of Kingston, and spent much of his adulthood teaching and writing in the West Indies.

However, as I researched John Edgar Colwell (or Caulwell) Hearne, I came to realize that The Faces of Love—originally published in hardcover in 1957—deserved more than a snarky comment about oblivious proofreading. This was the author’s third novel, following Voices Under the Window (a 1955 yarn said to be “narrated entirely in flashback, … focus[ing] on a young lawyer at the point of death reflecting on his ultimately lethal involvement in Jamaican politics and his racial origins”) and Stranger at the Gate (1956). Like that latter work, The Faces of Love (which was first released in the United States under the title The Eye of the Storm) was set, according to Wikipedia, “in the imaginary island of Cayuna, which is a fictionalized Jamaica” (“right down to Green Stripe beer,” adds Jamaican poet-professor Mervyn Morris). A non-fiction work, The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 (2016), edited by Simon Gikandi, explains that Hearne’s novels

generally focus on the educated, brown-skinned middle-class stratus of Caribbean society. Hearne was clearly interested in class position and anti-colonial politics … However, Hearne is most famous for his rich and sensitive depictions of everyday middle-class life and love on the fictional Caribbean island of Cayuna. The Faces of Love (1957), for example, details a multiplicity of love relationships between characters, concentrating on the dilemma of Rachel Ascom, a newly wealthy and powerful [mixed-race] newspaper executive choosing between the love of a rowdy local builder and a British expatriate brought in to edit her newspaper.

After The Faces of Love, this author’s next pair of novels—The Autumn Equinox (1959) and Land of the Living (1961)—also used Cayuna as their backdrop and “referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the [1950s] Cuban Revolution.” Hearne later produced The Sure Salvation (1981), an alternately pessimistic and terrifying tale set aboard a slave ship, which Britain’s Times Literary Supplement called “an absorbing novel. The old power of the sea story to provide pleasure and instruction seems to be as potent as ever ...” And again per Wikipedia: “In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers—Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym ‘John Morris.’”

(Right) The 1957 Faber and Faber hardcover edition of The Faces of Love.

Yet in the wake of his Cayuna series seeing publication, Hearne’s novel-writing career tapered off noticeably. “After 1961,” recalls an excerpt from the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, “Hearne busied himself teaching, working for the government, writing plays and commentaries for radio and television, and producing a regular newspaper column in one of the leading daily papers of Jamaica [The Gleaner]. His articles appeared in Public Opinion, News Week, New Statesman, Nation, Pagoda, and Spotlight. Several of his radio plays were aired by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Between 1962 and 1992 Hearne served as director of the Creative Arts Center at the University of the West Indies, and as chair of the Institute of Jamaica. He also taught for short periods at several universities in Canada and the United States.”

And following his death in Jamaica in 1994, at age 68, Hearne’s books slowly began to disappear. “John Hearne almost suffered the fate most writers dread most: oblivion,” observed a feature piece in the Caribbean Airlines magazine, Caribbean Beat, in 2005. “His works quickly became unavailable and his reputation faded just as rapidly.” Kwame Dawes, a Ghana-born poet who grew up in Jamaica, was quoted in that article as saying, Hearne “sadly, proves that it is quite possible for a writer of significant ability and accomplishment to go out of print and be virtually forgotten.”

However, in 2005 the UK-based publisher Peepal Tree Press—which claims to be the “Home of the Best in Caribbean & Black British Writing”—reprinted Hearne’s debut novel, Voices Under the Window, for a whole new generation of readers. Most of whom, I’d bet, know perfectly well how many Rs and Bs there should be in “Caribbean.” (Forgive me, but I had to get in one snide remark.)

READ MORE: “‘I Am Looking for a Hero,’” by F.S.J. Ledgister (The Caribbean Review of Books).

Friday Finds: “The Voyagers”

Another in our growing line of vintage book covers we love.



The Voyagers, by Dale Van Every (Bantam, 1959).
Illustration by Stanley Zuckerberg.

In a newspaper column syndicated by Indiana’s Anderson Daily Bulletin on September 4, 1957, Associated Press writer Hal Boyle introduced then 61-year-old author Dale Van Every with these words:

Most writers dream of turning out a novel they can sell in Hollywood and become rich.

Dale Van Every, a top authority on America’s early frontier, did it the other way. He quit a $75,000-a-year job in Hollywood in 1943 to become a historical novelist.

“I was making $1,500 a week—which made me a working picture writer, not a celebrity,” he remarked drily. “My only regret is that I didn’t quit sooner.”

Born on July 23, 1896, in Emmet County, Michigan—located atop that state’s Lower Peninsula—Dale Baron Van Every subsequently moved with his parents to Southern California, graduated in 1914 from a San Bernardino high school, and went on to attend Stanford University in Palo Alto. According to this short notice, published in the San Bernardino Sun back in 1922, his college education was interrupted by World War I, when he “enlisted with the Stanford ambulance unit, serving overseas for about three years, first in the ambulance corps, later as a commissioned officer in the Convois Automobils and finally closing his European sojourn with an art course at the University of Lyons” in France. With the war at an end, Van Every returned to Stanford, finally won his diploma in 1920, and took a job with the United Press newswire service in New York City. His U.P. assignments included working as a staff correspondent in Washington, D.C., covering the summer activities of President Calvin Coolidge, and serving as the bureau chief in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In April 1922 he wed Ellen Mein Calhoun. The daughter of a Seattle family, she had also matriculated from Stanford, and had for a time been the women’s editor of the Daily Palo Alto. After bringing two children into the world, the couple would divorce in 1935.

Van Every resigned from the U.P. sometime during the mid- to late-1920s, and co-authored (with Morris DeHaven Tracy) a biography of aviator Charles Lindbergh, which was published in 1927—the same year

Dale Van Every, 1928

Lindbergh made his famous non-stop flight from New York to Paris. Van Every’s debut novel, Telling the World, followed soon afterward, and was made into a 1928 silent film of the same name, starring William Haines as journalist Don Davis, whose romantic tendencies involve him in a murder case that takes Davis all the way to China. In short order, Van Every’s face became familiar in Los Angeles, and especially at the Hollywood film studios, as he undertook the creation of screenplays for 1931’s East of Borneo, 1932’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1937’s Captains Courageous (which earned him an Academy Award nomination), and 1951’s Sealed Cargo, among numerous other productions. His résumé, as recorded at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), can be found here.

Wikipedia says that by 1934—in the midst of the Great Depression—Van Every was being paid “a salary of $52,500 by Paramount Pictures, $250 less than Mary Pickford and $1,000 more than Walt Disney.” That was income enough to keep him living in high style and make sure his name appeared on party guest lists; but it was apparently insufficient to win from him a lifelong commitment to screenwriting. Van Every remained in the biz till 1957, but by that time he had begun penning novels again. Long fascinated by American history (one of his grandfathers was allegedly a Tory combatant during the Revolutionary War), and after employing some of his Hollywood proceeds to amass an extensive library of resource volumes, Van Every put his name to a string of yarns about America’s 18th-century frontier, ranging from The Shining Mountains (1948) and Bridal Journey (1950), to The Captive Witch (1951), The Trembling Earth (1952), and The Scarlet Feather (1959). On top of those, between 1961 and 1964 he sent to bookstores a four-part non-fiction series called “The Frontier People of America.”

“I use fiction only as a kind of sugar-coating for the facts,” Van Every told the AP’s Boyle. “It is the facts that interest me. My pleasure in writing is the delight in re-creating a lost world—the period between 1780 and 1811, when America really became a nation.”

The Voyagers, which was published originally by Henry Holt & Company in 1957, fit squarely within those historical parameters, being set in the Ohio River valley in 1788. Kirkus Reviews called the novel “another tale of derring-do against the background of the American frontier,” and went on to note:

The story begins and ends in Traners Landing, below Pittsburgh [Pennsylvania]. And the central figure is Abel Traner, the only responsible one of the family, who breaks away from responsibility to shift for himself on the river he knows and loves. His adventures included some brushes with Wilkinson, of the grandiose schemes; [as well as] some give and take—mostly take—in acquisition of riches beyond his dreaming, and their equally undreamed-of loss. Of women, [the story’s cast ranges from] the exquisite Madame Baynton, for whom he ultimately paid the price of his own freedom, to the undependable Magda, to Hagar, who won her man, and back to Eather, at home, grown up and ready to give him the security he’d learned to want. Good period adventure.

The rear side of the 1959 Bantam edition of The Voyagers (shown on the right) quotes Virginia’s Richmond Times-Dispatch newspaper as promising that among this tale’s attributes are “river pirates, spies, Indian massacres, murders, thefts, chicanery, rapes, last-minute rescues, beautiful and amorous women.” It adds, “The Voyagers has everything.” While I’m not sure many copies of Van Every’s book were sold on the basis of it incorporating “rapes,” I can understand the draw of those other plot turns.

The cover of that Bantam paperback, too, was a significant attraction. As displayed atop this post, it shows a man with what appears to be a flintlock rifle, pulling a nude and curvaceous young woman into a small boat. Or maybe he’s just protecting her from the party of canoe-borne Native Americans firing arrows in their general direction; it’s hard to be sure. What I do know is that this quite striking painting was done by Stanley Zuckerberg, an artist born in Long Beach, New York, circa 1920. According to a boilerplate biography found several places on the Web (for example, here), Zuckerberg “began to draw at age 6. He received an Art Scholarship to [the] Pratt Institute of Fine Arts beginning [in] 1939. He also studied at the Art Students League with Khosrov Ajootian, William Gorham, Thomas Benrimo, and Alexander Kostellow. … Some of the authors whose books he illustrated were John Dos Passos, Somerset Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, James Michener, Vladimir Nabokov, Irving Stone, and Norman Mailer.” This Web site adds that Zuckerberg was “among the most accomplished of the [mid-20th-century] James Avati-influenced cover artists who strove for an emotional-realistic style.”

I’ve featured Zuckerberg’s work in several Killer Covers galleries over the years, and focused on one excellent example—the 1957 front from Robert Wilder’s Flamingo Road—four months ago. However, this artist deserves greater attention. So I am embedding, below, 30 book façades credited to him. They include the 1961 movie tie-in edition of Wirt Williams’ Ada Dallas; the 1953 Signet release of Mailer’s Barbary Shore; the 1962 Crest version of Charles Gorham’s controversial McCaffery; the ever-captivating 1957 edition of Jonathan Craig’s The Case of the Body Beautiful; the 1963 Gold Medal issue of Message from Marise, by “Paul Kruger,” aka Roberta Elizabeth Sebenthal; and Zuckerberg’s 1958 front for Silver Spoon, by Edwin Gilbert.

Click on any of these images for an enlargement.

From what I can tell, Zuckerberg’s single contribution to Dale Van Every’s oeuvre was that illustration he did for The Voyagers. Yet that 1957 romantic adventure wasn’t Van Every’s final offering. He went on to compose works of both fiction and non-fiction, such as Our Country Then (1958), Disinherited: The Lost Birthright of the American Indian (1965), and The Day the Sun Died (1971). According to this bookstore Web site, he married at least twice more during his life, and left behind a daughter, Joan Van Every Frost, who made her own mark on the world as a novelist before passing away in 2012.

Dale Van Every, himself, died on May 28, 1976, in Santa Barbara, California. He was just short of 79 years old. Given how hard he had labored during his later years to re-establish himself as a novelist, rather than as a screenwriter—someone whose imaginative explorations of the old American frontier set the stage for later authors on the order of Douglas C. Jones and Allan W. Eckert—it was a bit sad that obituaries tended to focus on his Hollywood years.