“Army Girl,” by Whit Harrison

Army Girl, by “Whit Harrison,” aka Harry Whittington (Paperback Library, 1962). The Florida-born Whittington (1915-1989) was a prolific author of both crime fiction and western fiction, who wrote under a variety of pseudonyms. A few of his books have been brought back into print by Stark House Press, but not yet Army Girl.

Cover artwork by Harry Schaare. His original artwork for this softcover novel can be enjoyed below. An earlier edition of Army Girl, published by Venus Books (and with a front illustration by Rudolph Belarki) can be seen here.

Hooks Hits: “Brute in Brass”

Part of a series saluting artist-illustrator Mitchell Hooks.



Brute in Brass, by Harry Whittington (Gold Medal, 1956).

Two-fer Tuesdays: Kick Up Those Heels!

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



“If you ever run across a copy of A Night for Screaming, don’t pass it up,” Texas novelist Bill Crider wrote in his blog several years back. “You’ll be sorry if you do. It’s a dandy story, and it has a great cover, besides.” Having not yet read this book by the prolific Harry Whittington, the oft-heralded “King of the Paperbacks,” I can’t attest to its exceptionalness as a work of fiction, but I certainly agree that the 1960 Ace Books edition boasts an exquisite front. It shows a blonde in red, fleeing across an open field at night with a gun in one hand, pursued by a speeding car, its headlights separating her from the darkness. Any moment, it seems likely that the vehicle will overtake her--with predictably messy results.

The blog Battered, Tattered, Yellowed & Creased describes the plot of this book (which can be purchased in a newer edition from Stark House Press) as follows:

Mitch Walker is on the run for a crime he didn’t commit. As a rookie cop, the last thing he wants is for his partner to beat a confession out of him, so he’s fled to the farmlands of Kansas in hopes of escape. Broke, down on his luck, and with the local police after him for panhandling, Mitch takes a chance and signs on to a local farm as a laborer--a sprawling farmstead that’s half volunteer, half county prison. The farm owner is a rather intense nutjob, his wife is a loose woman, the foreman is oblivious to the racketeering run by the abusive straw-bosses. And stuck right in the middle is Mitch, with his old partner still on his trail …

Responsibility for the Ace cover art has been left ambiguous by online sources, most of which say it is simply “uncredited.” I dropped an e-mail note to Crider, asking him whether the illustrator is identified on the outside or inside of the copy in his possession, and he sent this reply: “I’ve looked at the cover with a magnifying glass, and unless the artist’s name is well-concealed in the grass, it’s just not there. There’s no credit given anywhere in the book, either.”

However, a subsequent bit of detective work by Crider turned up this Web page naming Robert Maguire as the person behind A Night for Screaming’s façade. Furthermore, the official R.A. Maguire Cover Art gallery maintained online by his daughter, Lynn, includes that paperback front among its offerings. It’s odd that this cover doesn’t also appear in Jim Silke’s fine 2009 work, Dames, Dolls, and Gun Molls: The Art of Robert A. Maguire. But at least until further evidence is brought forward, we can defend our presumption that Maguire was the painter. It does seem to display his talent.

Significantly less in question is Harry Bennett’s credit for having created the front for the 1963 Gold Medal paperback edition of Alone at Night, by Vin Packer (aka Marijane Meaker). Again, I’ve not read this book, but U.S. publisher Prologue--which reissued the novel in paperback last year--characterizes its storyline this way:

On their first night Carrie had been nervous, and Slater had tried to think of some way to make it easier for her, to show her how fine and free it could be. But the moment they'd stepped into the cabin, she had undressed, matter-of-factly, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Her body was white and incredibly lovely, and Slater had felt desire engulf him. He had held her, hungrily, and hardly listed to the one thing she’d said. “I don't think I’ll be much good at this.” She had been so cruelly right. And that, in a way, was what had killed her. That, and a beautiful woman named Jenny.

From that description, there’s no telling how the scene of a dark-haired lovely fleeing anxiously into the night, only steps ahead of two more automobile headlights--the episode depicted so powerfully on this novel’s front--fits in. But maybe there’s a clue in Alone’s cover teaser line: “Slate and Jenny, who broke all the commandments, learned the last one the hard way: Thou shalt not look behind thee.” Certainly when running for your life, you do not want to waste time glancing back to see how closely death follows on your heels. Just thinking about the imminent violence suggested by both of these book fronts is enough to give one nightmares.

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).

Strange Bargain, by Harry Whittington

I’ve been sitting on this fantastic 1959 cover from Harry Whittington’s Strange Bargain for several months now, trying to figure out who was responsible for the jacket illustration. But I’ve had no luck thus far. If it was necessary to hazard a guess, I’d say it was the dramatically executed work of prolific paperback artist Robert Maguire (some of whose work can be seen here). But it might instead have been executed by artist Barye Phillips, who was much in demand by soft-cover publishers back in the 1950s and ’60s, and who created fronts for several other Whittington works (including Saturday Night Town and Desire in the Dust). Then again, the Strange Bargain jacket could have been created by James Meese, whose front for M.E. Chaber’s A Hearse of Another Color was featured on this page just a few weeks ago. The problem, of course, is that there’s no credit given in the book for this cover art. Paperback publishers of that era didn’t necessarily foresee a day when their products would be collector’s items, so they weren’t conscientious about making sure that credit was given where it was due.

That’s certainly too bad in this instance.

For readers unfamiliar with Harry Whittington’s work, you should know, first, that this is not the same Whittington who Dick Cheney filled full of birdshot during a hunting incident three years ago. No, author Harry Benjamin Whittington was born in the north Florida town of Ocala in 1915, served with the U.S. Navy during the Second World War, married in 1936, and put in stints as a copywriter and editor before “retiring to write full-time in 1975.” According to a biographical note at the Web site of publisher Stark House Press, which has brought several of Whittington’s novels back into print over the last several years, as a boy the author “survived his family’s rural poverty by reading books and sneaking into the local movie theater. Another escape was his writing. Ultimately, the versatile Whittington would become known as ‘King of the Paperbacks,’ publishing over 170 original paperback novels, using nearly 20 different names.” Under those noms de plume, he published hard-boiled crime novels, more formulaic mysteries, westerns, and soft-core porn novels. “Before his death in 1989,” Stark House adds, “Whittington also carved out a second career writing Southern historical novels as Ashley Carter. Today he is best known for the lurid and brisk noir novels he wrote between 1950 and 1960.”

Novelist Ed Gorman wrote in Mystery*File a few years ago that

Back in the 1950s you could run but you couldn’t hide from Harry Whittington. Those were the days when many if not most paperbacks were sold in wire racks found in drug stores, grocery stores and what were then called dime stores.

Harry told me that he’d once seen five books of his displayed on the same rack, all published that month. He worked for everybody, from Gold Medal all the way down to Carnival. He did westerns, nurse romances, tie-ins, war stories and of course crime novels. The last was his true calling. There ... was no sub-genre of suspense/mystery he didn’t like. Or apply
himself to.

Today, Whittington’s work is largely forgotten, and mostly long out of print. But Texas author Bill Crider, who includes Whittington among his favorite paperback novelists (and has assembled a remarkable collection of that author’s book covers at Flickr), cites 1960’s A Night for Screaming as a work well worth discovering. “One thing Whittington can do about as well as anybody ever could,” Crider opined in a blog post about Screaming, “is begin the book with a tense situation and then dial up the tension on every succeeding page. He can put his protagonist into a situation that seems as bad as it can get, and then he can make it worse. And after that, he can make it worse still. In this book he takes a seemingly simple situation and complicates it more with every chapter, throwing in a few reversals and surprises along the way. If you ever run across a copy of A Night for Screaming, don’t pass it up. You’ll be sorry if you do.” (Fortunately, Stark House Press reissued A Night for Screaming--along with another of Whittington’s 1960 works, Any Woman He Wanted--in a combined trade paperback edition three years ago.)

When asked about Strange Bargain, Crider admits he “read the book so long ago that I can’t remember much about it.” However, the Avon Books cover--with its image of a man and a trenchcoated blonde caught in seemingly intimate contact, and not pleased at all by the interruption (that’s my surmise, anyway, judging by the fact that the man is reaching for a gun on the floor)--supplies the tale’s gist: “The suspenseful story of a woman’s terrible choice between the two men who claimed her!” And the back jacket copy offers more:

TWO MEN AND ONE WOMAN--in a stark tale of love and hate:

THE HUSBAND, who faced death, yet thought only of a plan to destroy his rival.

THE WIFE, who could save her husband only by bargaining with a man who had but one desire--a woman.

THE LOVER, who knew love only as a wild, fierce hunger too long denied him.

On a barren, windswept mountain, these three are caught in a timeless drama that must end in shattering violence.

That’s the sort of teaser that would get you to read Strange Bargain, no matter who illustrated its jacket.

THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY: Apparently, British publisher Panther thought enough of the Strange Bargain cover, that in 1962 it “borrowed” its artwork for the front of Peter Rabe’s Anatomy of a Killer, an entry in its Crime Circle paperback line. You will find the front and back of Rabe’s novel here.

READ MORE: “The Paperback Covers of Harry Whittington,” by Bill Crider (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine).