Pull Up a Chair and Stay Awhile

Every once in a while I need to revisit a theme here in Killer Covers. Today, it’s the use of butterfly chairs on paperback fronts.

My first gallery of such covers was posted way back in 2015. Seven years later, I included butterfly chairs in a CrimeReads feature focused on “seven colorful cover themes from crime fiction’s past.” Now I bring you a couple of new examples fitting this motif, plus three that I didn’t include in the 2015 Killer Covers selection.

The image shown above comes from Counterfeit Kill, a 1963 Gold Medal release attributed to “Gordon Davis,” which was one of several pseudonyms employed by E. Howard Hunt (later infamous for his role in Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal). The artwork for that standalone novel is attributed to the great Mitchell Hooks. Meanwhile, Harry Barton created the front of Hank Janson’s Cold Dead Coed (Gold Star, 1964). The cover image for Tudor from Lesbos (Beacon, 1964) is regrettably uncredited. Murder on Ice (Ensign, 1973), by “Michael Bardsley,” aka Anthony Nuttall, carries an illustration by Spanish comics artist Manfred Sommer. And Hooks was again behind the cover of John D. MacDonald’s On the Make (Dell, 1960).

If I owned a butterfly chair, I’d happily sit back in it and fully appreciate all five of these vintage works.

The Twelve Dames of Christmas, 2021: #10

Celebrating this festive season with brassy bombshells.



The Violent Lady, by Michael E. Knerr (Monarch, 1963). Many years ago, science-fiction writer and editor John F. Carr explained in Mystery*File that Knerr was “born on May 31, 1936, in Williamsport, PA ... He was a hunter, Civil War re-enactor, horseman, built flintlock rifles, and loved boats and sailing. Mike was a former newspaper man ([with] the Shamokin [Pennsylvania] newspaper), and in 1973 moved permanently (except for a short time in Woolrich, PA) to Southern California, specifically Alameda, Sausalito and L.A.” Among Knerr’s early works were Travis (1962), which introduced Mike Travis, a Travis McGee-like “sailor of fortune” turned private investigator; something called Operation Lust (1962); and a straight-out soft-core porn novel titled The Sex Life of the Gods (1963). The Violent Lady, which also first appeared in ’63, sounds more like a hard-boiled crime yarn, if you go by this back-cover plot description:

You’re Clint Sheldon, a man with a mission—to raise the $6,000 to save your 49-foot yawl, Restless.

So you charter the ship out to Malvino Gia and his hot-eyed wife, Lois. But once under sail you find out they aren’t after pleasure; they’re after treasure—$250,000 worth of jewels lying at the bottom of the sea—and they need you to get it.

But you nix the deal. Only Gia pulls a gun and you’re forced to go along. Then Lois comes to you with a proposition. All you have to do is help her double-cross Gia and you can walk off with the loot—and her.

Suddenly you find yourself in a tight squeeze between Gia’s gun, Lois’ charms and Hurricane Donna’s fury. Now you stand to lose the dame, the dough and the debt you owe unless you can find a way to get out before all hell breaks loose.

Knerr went on to produce such now-forgotten books as the 1977 horror yarn Sasquatch: Monster of the Northwest Woods and Suicide in Guyana (1979), a non-fiction recounting of the 1978 mass-murder suicide of cult leader Jim Jones’ followers in Guyana. He reportedly died in 1999 at age 64.

Cover illustration by Harry Barton.

Angling for Extra Credit

While speaking last week with a teacher friend of mine, I was reminded that I’d intended to update my collection of back-to-school covers, originally posted on this page in 2015. With classrooms again filling across the United States this month, I wanted to add a dozen paperback fronts I have come across during 2021 to my already extensive collection, bringing the total to a whopping 108!

Included among those supplementary selections are the two covers posted here: Eve’s Apple, by Ronald Simpson (Monarch, 1961), with art by Harry Barton; and Campus Queen, by Ursula Grant (Midwood, 1966), featuring an illustration by the great Paul Rader.

Click here for an education in the entire, expanded set.

All Alone, with Trouble in Mind

Book titles containing the word “widow” suddenly seem to be everywhere on my radar. March brought the publication of Alma Katsu’s “gripping, authentic spy procedural,” Red Widow (Putnam), and earlier this month saw the re-release (by Cutting Edge Books) of Louis Lorraine’s 1961 sleaze classic, Commuter Widow. Soon after I downloaded the inarguably not-safe-for-work front cover of that new Commuter Widow edition, I had cause to search for it again in my computer files … and came up with a slew of attractive vintage novels also featuring “widow” in their names.

I’m sorry to say that I don’t know the name of the artist whose remarkable work fronts the 1958 Crest printing of Richard Wormser’s The Widow Wore Red, shown above. But I can identify the painters of most of the paperback covers below, from Bill George (Black Widow, 1954) and Harry Barton (both the undated Exciting Widow and the yarn from which it swiped its art, 1963’s That Kind of Widow) to Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka (Self-Made Widow, 1958, and 1963’s The Torrid Widow), Bob Hilbert (1953’s Night at the Mocking Widow), and Robert McGinnis (the undated Suddenly a Widow, by George Harmon Coxe, and 1966’s No Tears from the Widow, by Carter Brown).

Charles Copeland gave us the cover for Rick Holmes’ New Widow (1963), while Weekend Widows (1966) boasts a front painted by Al Rossi, and Paul Rader is credited with creating the image for Wayward Widow (1962). You’re looking at Clark Hulings’ work on 1957’s The Golden Widow, James Meese’s artistry decorating 1957 Pocket release of Ursula Curtiss’ The Widow’s Web, and the talents of Mort Engel showcased on the 1965 Ace version of that same Curtiss tale. Finally, Griffith Foxley was responsible for the painting that introduces the 1954 Dell release of Dolores Hitchens’ Widows Won’t Wait (a singularly Erle Stanley Gardner-ish title); Mitchell Hooks was behind the 1955 Bantam cover of The Widow and the Web, by Robert Martin; and the great Walter Popp imagined the candelabra-wielding redhead on Evelyn Bond’s Widow in White (1973).

Click on any of the images here for an enlargement.

READ MORE: “Review: The Widow,” by Steven J. McDermott (Mostly Old Books and Rust).

Two-fer Tuesdays: Rebels Without a Pause

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



The Revolt of Abbe Lee, by James MacBrain (Monarch, 1964), featuring a cover painting by Tom Miller (click here to see the back jacket); The Revolt of Jill Braddock, by Stuart Friedman (Monarch, 1960), with artwork by Harry Barton.

A Father’s Day Links Round-up

• The fine Web site Atlas Obscura showcases a variety of pulp-era crime-fiction works featured at the Wolfsonian-FIU museum in Miami Beach, Florida, as part of an exhibition titled In the Shadows: American Pulp Cover Art. The display is scheduled to remain on view at the museum through Sunday, July 9.

• Editors at Literary Hub have gathered together some of their favorite risqué book covers from literary fiction. “[W]hile racy covers are expected for works of erotica,” they explain in an introduction, “literary covers like to create a little shock and awe sometimes too—and when they do, they also tend to be sneakily suggestive, in ways that compel us to keep looking, whether with their titles or their—ahem—representative iconography.”

• Which brings us to this eye-catching collection, in Pulp International, of artist Harry Barton’s numerous paperback book fronts showing men kissing women’s necks.

• You’re likely familiar with the dramatic final scene, from Planet of the Apes (1968), in which an astronaut played by Charlton Heston, having landed on earth in the distant future, discovers the destroyed Statue of Liberty. But did you know that hasn’t been the only time writers and artists have imagined Lady Liberty’s ruin?

• Backchannel examines the power of typography, which it says “can signify dangerous ideas, normalize dictatorships, and sever broken nations. In some cases it may be a matter of life and death. And it can do this as powerfully as the words it depicts.”

• And The Guardian observes that while “the digital revolution was expected to kill traditional publishing,” things haven’t quite turned out that way. Print books, it declares, are now “more beautifully designed and lovingly cherished” than ever.

Better Red

Redheaded Sinners, by Jonathan Craig (Lancer, 1952). Sadly, the artist responsible for this work is not identified.

The recent release of Max Allan Collins’ Better Dead—the 16th novel in his award-winning series starring private eye Nathan “Nate” Heller, set primarily in 1953—reminds us of a popular Cold War slogan. “Better dead than red” and its philosophical opposite, “better red than dead,” were once frequently heard and published, back in the days when the United States’ World War II alliance of necessity with the Soviet Union (the “reds”) had collapsed, and Western fears of Communism were rampant. Although “better dead than red” apparently persists as “a schoolyard taunt aimed at redhaired children,” it has otherwise fallen out of currency. Except in stories, such as Better Dead, that take place during the Eisenhower era.

But let us resurrect the phrase, if only for a moment, in order to exhibit a gallery of vintage paperback fronts that reference redheaded figures. There have been, of course, myriad covers released over the years featuring beautiful scarlet-tressed women (including this one and this one, as well as this one and this beauty). In putting together the collection below, though, I have restricted my choices to works on which the word “redhead” (or some version of that) appears either in the title or the main teaser line. Represented among these selections are such artists as Robert McGinnis (A Redhead for Mike Shayne, Operation Fireball, Killer Mine, Wanted: Danny Fontaine), Ron Lesser (Fatal Undertaking), Harry Schaare (5 Who Vanished, How Sharp the Point), Robert Maguire (The Case of the Radioactive Redhead, To Keep or Kill), Clark Hulings (Never Victorious, Never Defeated), William George (The Frightened Fingers), Barye Phillips (Until You Are Dead), and Harry Barton (The Squeeze and 1961’s Squeeze Play—with an image that latter appeared on 1964’s The Swimming Pool Set). I venture to say that no sane individual would rather be dead than have the opportunity to appreciate these tributes to redheads.

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

READ MORE: “The Case of the Restless Redhead (1954), by Erle Stanley Gardner,” by Kate Jackson (Cross-Examining Crime).