Hooks Hits: “Dr. No”

Part of a series saluting artist-illustrator Mitchell Hooks.



It’s been established that Mitchell Hooks was a prolific painter of paperback covers. However, he’s also well known for having created promotional poster artwork for the first James Bond movie, Dr. No (1962). Explains the blog MI6: “As well as creating … stylized illustrations of Sean Connery as James Bond for the UK quad poster, which would be used again for the later U.S. theatrical campaign, he also drew the line-art illustrations that feature behind the colourful character poses. A lot of his work would be repurposed for the international posters.”



FOLLOW-UP I: Writing on his Today’s Inspiration Facebook page, artist Leif Peng recalls “a fun anecdote about Mitchell doing this poster for the first-ever James Bond film. He’d been painting posters for a movie promotions agency in New York for some time when this project came up. And when he was called in to pick up stills to use as reference, his contact at the agency said, ‘Don't worry about putting too much effort into getting a good likeness on this one, Mike. It’s just some obscure British spy flick. Probably won’t be a hit anyway.’”

FOLLOW-UP II: It should be mentioned, as well, that Hooks painted posters for more movies than just Dr. No. Click here to enjoy additional examples of his work.

A Bit of This, a Bit of That

• Before we venture too deep into 2020, let’s look back for a moment at 2019’s “best” book covers, as judged by the sites Literary Hub, Spine, and The Casual Optimist. What do you think?

• Hah! Just as we thought all along: “Why Do So Many Book Covers Look the Same? Blame Getty Images.”

• “When it comes to book covers,” grouses James Davis Nicoll of the science-fiction site Tor.com, “sales departments have often had more clout than the poor beleaguered author. Covers are designed to catch the eye and spur sales; any resemblance to what is actually in the book may be coincidental. … It would be easy (like shooting fish in a barrel) to offer examples of hilariously inappropriate cover art from the days of my youth. I could eke a compelling essay out of the covers that forced me to explain (yet again) to my teachers that no, I had not brought pornography to school. I’ve decided to take the high road: Here are five covers that delivered exactly what they promised (even if that might seem unlikely …).”

• The fine James Bond-oriented blog Artistic License Renewed conducts an interview Michael Gillette, the San Francisco-based artist “who created a beautiful set of officially licensed James Bond book covers for the Ian Fleming Centenary in 2008.”

• That same page recalls the typography on early editions of Ian Fleming’s Bond tales, published in the UK by Jonathan Cape.

• Since its inception back in December 2018, The Stiletto Gumshoe blog has become a favorite of mine. Partly because its anonymous author seems to share my fascination with book-cover illustrations. Recently, he (or she) introduced me to Bertil Hegland (1925-2002), “a Swedish illustrator known in the Scandinavian market for popular children and teen book series covers—including the Nancy Drew series (apparently called ‘Kitty’)—as well as hard-boiled mystery and crime fiction covers.” The blog has so far posted two compilations of Hegland’s arresting work, which you’ll find here and here.

• By the way, if you’d like to enjoy more Hegland fronts, check out this small gallery in Pulp International and these pages showing his efforts on behalf of John D. MacDonald.

• Finally, let me say a slightly tardy good-bye to Minnesota-born industrial designer and visionary artist Syd Mead, who passed away on December 30. As The Architect’s Newspaper explains, “Mead began his career in the late 1950s and early ’60s at Ford Motor Company before going on to create designs and illustrations for brands like U.S. Steel, Phillips, Sony, and others, including architecture firms. He is perhaps best known, however, for his enduring, iconic designs on sci-fi films like Tron, Star Trek, Alien, and most famously, Blade Runner. His elaborate cars, spaceships, robotic suits, and cities—all hand-drawn and colored—presented futures that were utopian and dystopian at the same time, sleek and gritty, fantastical and real. As he told Curbed in a 2015 interview: ‘I painted architecture as a visual romance.’” Mead died at 86 years of age, reportedly from complications from lymphoma cancer.

Grisly Adams: “Colonel Sun”

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



Colonel Sun, by “Robert Markham,” aka Kingsley Amis (Jonathan Cape, 1968). This was the very first James Bond continuation novel, published four years after the death of that British superspy’s creator, Ian Fleming. The front cover, above, shows only part of Adams’ full, wraparound jacket painting; the rest can be enjoyed by clicking here.

This same art was subsequently appropriated for use on a completely different book, the 1970 Ballantine paperback edition of Brian N. Ball’s science-fiction novel Timepivot.

READ MORE: “Double 007 Design II,” by Jason Whiton (Spy Vibe).

Legacy of a Spy

Lest we forget: “Friday is Global James Bond Day,” mentions Bill Koenig in The Spy Command, “the event that was invented six years ago for the 50th anniversary of the premiere of Dr. No.” One obvious way to celebrate this occasion is with a rewatching of the 1962 Sean Connery film based on Ian Fleming’s original novel. But Koenig suggests, instead, taking in a handful of episodes of Hawaii Five-O and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that boast “significant 007 connections.” Not a bad alternative.



Dr. No, by Ian Fleming (Great Pan, 1961).
Cover illustration by Sam “Peff” Peffer.

Quick Takes

• This is a weird French paperback front. According to the Seattle Mystery Bookshop’s Hardboiled blog, it’s from the 1955 Presses de la Cité edition of Marée fraiche (Fresh Tide in English), by J.R. MacDonald—otherwise known as John Ross Macdonald, who eventually became known simply as Ross Macdonald. In the States, this book appeared under the title Dead Low Tide (1953) and was credited not to the creator of the Lew Archer private eye series, but instead to its actual author, John D. MacDonald. Stories have it that John D. MacDonald, who gave the world the Travis McGee series (which did not include Dead Low Tide), was upset when Canada-born California wordsmith Kenneth Millar adopted the nom de plume John Macdonald, later John Ross Macdonald, for his early non-Archer yarns. His attitude toward the competition could hardly have been improved by seeing Dead Low Tide—said to be John D.’s “first great novel”—misidentified in France as another writer’s work.

• Speaking of Travis McGee, Ben Boulden features a handsome gallery of covers from MacDonald’s series in Gravetapping.

• Two more wonderful collections, both from Pulp International: This one focuses on book fronts featuring nuclear explosions; while this other one showcases paperbacks showing men trying to kiss the skin off women’s necks. I wish I’d thought of both themes first!

• The Book Bond brings word that publisher Vintage Classics is preparing yet another fresh array of covers for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, to debut in Great Britain this coming November. Learn more about those editions on the Fleming Web site.

• Euro Crime highlights a recent design trend likely to spread further than just three book fronts: black and yellow color combos.

• And though its release isn’t due till 2018, you can already enjoy Laurel Blechman’s sexy cover illustration for The Last Stand, described as the final novel Mickey Spillane completed before his death in 2006. (Actually, this Hard Case Crime edition will contain both that standalone story and a previously unpublished novella, A Bullet for Satisfaction.) Click here to read an excerpt from The Last Stand, and for an enlargement of the cover, look here.

A Bond by Any Other Name …

Here’s a story that’s almost too good to be true, coming from a blog I had never heard of until today, Birth. Movies. Death. It seems that in the 1990s, Donald E. Westlake—the prolific author perhaps best known from his series about a professional thief known as Parker (The Hunter), who had also scripted the 1999 film The Grifters (based on Jim Thompson’s 1963 novel of the same name)—sought to make a contribution to the film series based on Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. According to Birth. Movies. Death.,

In 1995, before [the 17th Bond film] GoldenEye was even released, Westlake turned in to Eon [Productions] two treatments for “Bond 18.” Both his treatments apparently used as their backdrop Hong Kong’s transfer of sovereignty to China. In one of the treatments, Westlake had 007 facing off against Gideon Goodbread, an American businessman who planned to level Hong Kong after robbing its banks—a revenge scheme for the death of his missionary parents at the hands of the Red Chinese. Westlake described his Bond villain as “John Goodman with a Southern accent,” and likened him to the lead character in Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me. Goodbread commanded an army of Amerasian orphans he called “the Children.” (For more details about Westlake's take on the Bond franchise, pick up Issue 32 of MI6 Confidential.)

Westlake floated the following titles for his Bond adventure: Dragonsteeth; Nobody Dies; Forever and a Death; Never Look Back; On Borrowed Time. That last title was prophetic; the time-sensitive nature of the Hong Kong changeover backdrop was deemed unsuitable, we got Tomorrow Never Dies [1997] instead, and Westlake’s script was shelved.

Now Hard Case Crime has resurrected this lost story, which at some point Westlake rewrote as a novel—Forever and a Death. It’s no longer a James Bond story of course, and we’re not sure how many (or indeed, if any) of the details described above will be included, but the vestigial elements of the story seem to be in place, and at any rate a new novel by the late Donald Westlake is nothing to sneeze at. As a bonus, the novel will contain an afterword by one of the Bond producers, describing the history of the project.

This book is due out next June, with stunning cover art by Paul Mann. Click here to read an excerpt from Forever and a Death.

(Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

READ MORE: “Donald E. Westlake’s Sort-of James Bond Book Coming Out Next Year,” by Matthew Bradford, aka Tanner (Double O Section).

Of Yellow Flair and Facial Hair

Between my efforts to assemble a rather long feature for Kirkus Reviews about summer crime-fiction releases and my work on an even more extensive list of summer books for The Rap Sheet, plus my recent eight-day vacation in Minneapolis, the month of June seems to have gone by with extraordinary swiftness. As a result, I’ve fallen behind in producing new posts for Killer Covers. But I hope to get back into my usual prolific groove as we roll into July. Below are a few interesting links to keep us all going in the meantime.

• The “pulp-inspired” U.S. paperback cover of Anthony Horowitz’s James Bond novel, Trigger Mortis (2015), is quite a bit more eye-catching than its earlier hardcover counterpart, don’t you think?

• Speaking of Ian Fleming’s famous yarns, here’s a batch of lovely tribute fronts for the Bond series, “inspired by the iconic Pan and Signet jackets published in the UK and U.S. during the late 1950s and 1960s” and “using images from vintage magazines.”

• According to The Wall Street Journal, yellow has become the preferred color on book covers, thanks in large part to the fact that it shows up well even in the thumbnail images so popular on Web sales sites. “Color contrast makes a cover pop,” writes Lucy Feldman, “but the highest-contrast combination—black and white—can be a turnoff for publishers, who worry that without color, the book won’t stand out. White covers in particular recede against the white backgrounds of Amazon and other online retailers. But yellow jumps off online pages and it can support both dark and bright type and graphics. Also, it carries no gender association and can signify anything from sunshine and optimism to a danger warning, making it a strong choice for a variety of genres and topics.”

• Flavorwire jumped the gun a bit recently in making note of author Ray Bradbury’s 96th birthday; he wouldn’t actually have hit that mark until August 2. (It seems contributor Alison Nastasi confused the anniversary of his death in 2012 with his natal day). Regardless, Flavorwire’s gallery of 30 classic Bradbury book fronts is wonderful. I’m proud to say I own two or three of those editions.

• Bearded men represent a growing trend on romance novels!

• The Helvetica typeface has always been a favorite of mine, probably because my architect father used it so prolifically in his plans and illustrations. As Simon Garfield opined a few years ago in his book Just My Type, “Helvetica is a font of such practicality—and, its adherents would suggest, such beauty—that it is both ubiquitous and something of a cult. The typeface even inspired a compelling and successful movie (Gary Hustwit’s Helvetica), whose premise is that on the streets of the world, the font is like oxygen. You have little choice but to breathe it in.”

• A rare and captivating 1963 fold-out cover.

• I only signed up for Facebook in order to promote my postings in The Rap Sheet and Killer Covers. However, I’ve found it a useful resource for gathering images of classic paperback fronts. Two group pages, in particular, have proved useful, and you might consider joining them yourself. The first is the Today’s Inspiration Group, a companion to Leif Peng’s older blog of the same name. The other is a page representing the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, which promotes the work of authors who pen “novelizations … based on screenplays for movies and TV shows,” and others who concoct original novels employing “existing characters from movie[s], TV series, books, games, and cartoons.” Oh, and if you want to “like” The Rap Sheet’s Facebook page, you can do that here.

Bonds Away!

With the 24th and latest James Bond film, Spectre, scheduled to premiere this weekend in U.S. theaters, it’s no wonder my mind has been active with all things 007. Just this afternoon, I remembered that I had in my files the cover from the November 9, 1999, edition of The Sunday Times Magazine, a supplement to The Times of London. Illustrated by Robert McGinnis--who over the years had done the artwork for posters promoting a variety of Bond films, including the 1967 spoof version of Casino Royale, 1965’s Thunderball, 1967’s You Only Live Twice, and 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever--it was published to coincide with the release of The World Is Not Enough, the 19th Bond flick and the third to star Pierce Brosnan.

Click on the image below for an easier-to-study enlargement.



Edward Biddulph explains in his blog, James Bond Memes, that McGinnis’ complex picture for the Times Magazine was

Conceived to resemble an ornately framed painting, though also alluding to a certain extent [to] the heraldic-style artwork used alongside the main poster campaign for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, the artwork is topped by a crown (representing Bond’s service to Queen and Country) flanked by near-naked and suggestively positioned women. The faces of the Bond actors are placed below the crown--naturally Sean Connery is at the centre--and below them is the main body of the artwork, which celebrates the best of Bond with representations of iconic moments from the film series, which are divided into themes of space, land, and sea. The panel is bordered by the faces of the most memorable villains of the series, and the whole artwork is framed by more scantily clad women.

Biddulph goes on to provide a more detailed examination of this magazine front here, noting that “Thunderball, Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker are Robert McGinnis’ principal reference points. Perhaps these are his personal favourites, but undoubtedly each have contributed more than their fair share of classic scenes and images.”

Two-fer Tuesdays: Make Up Your Mind, Already!

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



Ian Fleming’s Live and Let Die, his second novel starring British secret agent James Bond (after Casino Royale), was originally published in a UK hardcover edition in June 1954. The cover shown above and on left comes from the Permabooks paperback version of that Jamaica-set tale, and was released to bookstores two years later, in 1956. The blog Absolutely James Bond suggests that its illustration--by the prolific James Meese--“may have created controversy at that time as it depicts a white man (Bond) and a white woman ([fortune teller] Solitaire) in chains at the hands of a Black man (Mr. Big).” If so, times certainly have changed, because it seems remarkable nowadays only for the fact that we don’t usually see Fleming’s Agent 007 depicted in such a compromised state.

On the right, meanwhile, we find the front from Live and Let Live, the retitled, 1955 Pocket Books edition of Chesley Wilson’s 1954 novel, Swing Full Circle. There’s apparently no identification of who painted the cover of this paperback (I don’t own this work myself), but the plot description on the book’s rear reads:

From the strong-arm propositions of trigger-happy Commies to the shameless offers of escape-crazy young girls--Tully Sheldon was ready for anything when he took over a World Relief ship on the corrupt China Coast.

Sheldon resisted every bribe--till Alia, the seductive White Russian, led him through Shanghai’s labyrinth of Oriental pleasures.

Or, as the top-front teaser maintains, “She was his--if he could hold her.” If anybody out there has read this novel and knows whether its story lives up to such hype, I’d love to hear about it.

Heades We Do

OK, so I admit I’ve been a bit lax about updating this blog of late. I have been concentrating my energies on The Rap Sheet instead, but that’s only because so much has been happening in the crime-fiction field of late. Despite what rumors you may have heard, I am only one person, with so few hours in each day to work. Fortunately, my delinquency in contributing to this page does not mean I haven’t been paying attention to the book-art world, and especially to recent postings about older, interesting imagery.

• One thing well worth checking out is this collection, in the French blog Les Rétro-Galeries de Mr. Gutsy, of classic illustrations by “girlie” paperback cover artist Reginald Heade. I’ve written about Heade in The Rap Sheet before, but several of his pieces that “Mr. Gutsy” offers up are new to me, including the one topping this post, taken from the 1950 Archer Press edition of Dames Are No Dice, by an author named Slim Vincent (who also penned the deliciously titled but long-forgotten Floosie on the Run).

• Meanwhile, Retrospace has assembled another in its popular series of “paperback sleaze” posts, this one featuring the fronts from such justly lost literary “gems” as Sexual Strike Force, Sinful Cowboy, and Lustin’ and Teasin’, She Needs Some Pleasin’.

• Portland, Oregon, blogger and author Evan Lewis introduces me to a new pulp artist, H.J. (Henry Joseph) Ward, in his selection of Private Detective Stories covers from 1937.

• The blog Kinoimages highlights the most beautiful poster I’ve ever seen promoting actor Steve McQueen’s 1968 detective thriller, Bullitt. The artist is identified only in a small signature as “Rey,” but we know the piece comes from Belgium.

• And I’ve unfortunately never read the 1968 James Bond novel Colonel Sun, written by Kingsley Amis under the pseudonym “Robert Markham.” However, Robert K. Abbett’s super-sexy illustration--embedded below--created to accompany an excerpt from that book in the May 1960 edition of Cavalier magazine, certainly makes me think there are elements of the tale that would appeal to me. The artwork suggests such a brutal scene--poor 007!--yet the almost topless torturer classes it up nicely with her string of pearls.



READ MORE: “The Curious Case of Colonel Sun: Kingsley Amis’s Missing Bond Novel,” by Aug Stone (The Quietus).

Just Say Yes to “No”

A 1964 Spanish edition of Dr. No

Like millions of other people, you probably missed the memo, but today happens to be Global James Bond Day. It was 50 years ago, on October 5, 1962, that the film Dr. No--the first big-screen Bond movie, and the earliest of Sean Connery’s seven Agent 007 pictures--commenced showing at the London Pavilion. That thriller went on to debut in a number of other theaters around England over the next several days. Not until May 1963 did it finally reached U.S. movie houses.

(Left) British first-edition cover, Jonathan Cape, 1958

According to Wikipedia, Dr. No--which was of course based on Ian Fleming’s 1958 novel of the same name--initially “received a mixed critical reception”:

Time called Bond a “blithering bounder” and “a great big hairy marshmallow” who “almost always manages to seem slightly silly.” Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic said that he felt the film “never decides whether it is suspense or suspense-spoof.” He also did not like Connery, or the Fleming novels. The Vatican condemned Dr. No because of Bond’s cruelty and the sexual content, whilst the Kremlin said that Bond was the personification of capitalist evil--both controversies helped increase public awareness of the film and greater cinema attendance. However, Leonard Mosely in The Daily Express said that “Dr. No is fun all the way, and even the sex is harmless,” whilst Penelope Gilliatt in The Observer said it was “full of submerged self-parody.” The Guardian’s critic called Dr. No “crisp and well-tailored” and “a neat and gripping thriller.”

Other bloggers and critics may enthuse today over Connery’s interpretation, in Dr. No, of Fleming’s accomplished but demonstrably sexist secret agent. Perhaps they’ll extol the supple curves of co-star Ursula Andress’ bikinied Honey Rider. (One syndicated American entertainment columnist, Erskine Johnson, suggested back in 1963 that “tawny 26-year-old Ursula Andress should have been billed not by her last name, but as ‘Undress.’”) Let them have their fun. I wish, by contrast, to applaud the original book rather than the film, and showcase some of the covers featured on versions of that novel--as well as its comic book adaptations--over the last five decades.

Click on any of these images for an enlargement.

READ MORE: “007 Reloaded: Dr. No,” by Patrick Ohl (At the Scene of the Crime); “Dr. No in Comics” (Mister 8); “The Birth of Bond,” by David Kamp (Vanity Fair); “James Bond and the Modern Gadget Economy,” by Dominic Basulto (The Washington Post); “How Cary Grant Nearly Made Global James Bond Day an American Affair,” by Amanda Holpuch (The Guardian); “50 Classic James Bond Moments,” by Natalie Bochenski (Stuff.co.nz); “Best James Bond Opening Sequences,” by Kevin Fallon (The Daily Beast); and don’t miss The HMSS Weblog’s six-part series about this Dr. No anniversary; “The Beatles & James Bond: 5 October 1962,” by Terence Towles Canote (A Shroud of Thoughts).

Back to Bond

Earlier in the year, I gushed on this page about Michael Gillette’s brilliant, sexy covers for Penguin UK’s 2008 re-releases of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Now it seems the artist has created a quite striking new cover for Penguin’s German edition of Thunderball (aka Feuerball). Gillette explains here.

No Bond with New Bonds?

After gushing over Michael Gillette’s James Bond novel covers for Penguin I have to admit I’m rather disappointed in Random House/Vintage’s “classic” array of Ian Fleming’s 14 spy works, which are due for paperback publication in the UK on September 6.

The typographical treatments for Casino Royale, Moonraker, Diamonds Are Forever, From Russia with Love, and Thunderball is fairly interesting, though hardly dramatic. And the rest of those fronts ... well, they’re not the worst I have seen. But why doesn’t Fleming’s name even appear on these covers? Are the titles so familiar that they can now stand on their own, without the author or his protagonist being mentioned?

Perhaps the most interesting thing about these reissues is that, as The Book Bond notes, “a ‘dazzling array of authors’ will write introductions to the Vintage Classics, including Giles Foden, Sam Bourne, Andrew Taylor, Tom Rob Smith, Kate Mosse, and Len Deighton.” Let’s hope those contributors receive prominent credit for their work, even if Fleming doesn’t.

READ MORE: “Full Set of Ian Fleming Vintage Classic Covers Revealed,” by John Cox (The Book Bond).

Up Against the Wall, Mr. Bond!

Believe it or not, this coming October will mark 50 years since the debut, in Great Britain, of the first James Bond film, Doctor No, starring Sean Connery. As part of the celebration, publisher Dorling Kindersley (DK) is scheduled to put out a handsome, oversize new volume called James Bond: 50 Years of Movie Posters.

I first heard about the book here, and don’t see much more information about it yet. The DK site offers only this brief write-up:

The ultimate celebration of Bond movie poster art.

From 1962’s Dr. No to 2012’s Skyfall, James Bond: 50 Years of Movie Posters is an unforgettable gallery of Bond posters, teasers and lobby cards from virtually every country where Bond movies have been screened.

Featuring many rare and never-seen-before artworks that capture the appeal of cinema’s most compelling superspy, the book also includes fascinating insights on each poster campaign from a leading Bond insider. Packaged in a beautiful slipcase with two art prints, James Bond: 50 Years of Movie Posters will have Bond fans shaken and stirred.

I assume that some of American artist Robert McGinnis’ James Bond poster art will make it into the book, but beyond that? Well, I guess we’ll have to wait until the fall to see the finished product.

READ MORE: “Classic James Bond Book Art,” by Katie Notopoulos (BuzzFeed); “Sharp Card” (Pulp International).

Fetching Flemings

I spent this last weekend on a mini-vacation to Victoria, British Columbia, a quite beautiful and historic small Canadian city located just a few hours north of Seattle, on Vancouver Island. During my time there, I was introduced to Chronicles of Crime, a mystery-fiction bookstore on Fort Street that’s a treasure trove of used and vintage paperback novels--some with covers that are destined to show up on this page in the future. And of course I made a pilgrimage to Russell Books, a double-level, warehouse-like joint (also on Fort) that’s packed, floor to ceiling, with new and previously owned titles. (Amazingly, I walked out of Russell’s with only one book--and that one non-fiction, not even a crime novel.)

However, I also visited the local Chapters chain outlet and Munro’s Books, on Government Street, one of my favorite independent bookshops. It was at those latter two stores that I came across paperback copies of Penguin UK’s 2008 re-releases of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. These are the editions sporting Michael Gillette’s amazing cover illustrations, all built around curvaceous young women. Although it was never released in the States, I have been collecting this set of 14 books over the last few years in trade paperback format. Yes, I already own another full set of Fleming’s 007 novels, but it doesn’t compare with these eye-catching Gillette editions.

I wrote about Penguin’s Fleming re-releases in The Rap Sheet four years ago. Yet I haven’t ever featured all of Gillette’s covers in one of my blogs. So I am going to do so here, if only to remind myself that I need to pick up the works still missing from my collection.

Click on any of the covers in this post for an enlargement.













READ MORE: “Bond Babes Invade Berlin,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(The Rap Sheet).

Bonding Experience

Of all the James Bond novel editions published, the early 1960s versions from Britain’s Pan Books rank among the finest.

Designs on Bond

Somehow I missed hearing about the contest, launched last September by the James Bond fan site MI6, to design a new cover for Ian Fleming’s 13th Agent 007 novel, The Man with the Golden Gun (1965). “The requirements,” recalls a new post at MI6, “were that it included the title and author, the images used were original or copyright-free, and the cover did not incorporate elements from the EON Productions’ films. For the past month, readers have been voting on the finalists’ artwork, and the results are in ...”

Of the dozen entries--available for viewing here--the image embedded above, created by an artist who signs himself only as “hASEROT,” ultimately received the greatest number of votes from MI6 readers. However, I found the most remarkable submission to be another cover altogether.

In the pair of fronts displayed below, the one on the left was among the three runners-up in MI6’s Man with the Golden Gun contest, submitted by artist “Gaz1961.” However, the cover on the right, from which Gaz1961 obviously took his Golden Gun illustration, comes from a 1960 novel called North Beach Girl, credited to “John Trinian,” a pseudonym used by TV and film writer Zekial Marko, who died in the spring of 2008 and was the brother of novelist Kenn Davis (1932-2010). Credit for the North Beach Girl illustration has been given to renowned paperback artist Robert McGinnis, but there’s no signature that I see on either the novel’s front or back.



(Click on either of these images for an enlargement.)

The fact that Gaz1961, well, “borrowed” such familiar artwork for his Bond front doesn’t diminish his efforts. It’s just interesting to recognize the source.

MI6 is now challenging artists and designers to come up a fresh cover for Fleming’s 1954 Bond novel, Live and Let Die. You’ll find entry details, along with some early submissions, here.

You Asked for It, by Ian Fleming

Be careful now, don’t start hyperventilating at the thought that you’ve somehow missed reading one of Ian Fleming’s small number of novels. You Asked for It was simply the title given to the very first U.S. paperback version of Casino Royale, the book that introduced British super-spy James Bond, Agent 007, to the world.

The original hardcover edition was brought out in Great Britain back in 1953 by publisher Jonathan Cape. Two years later, though, when New York-based American Popular Library arranged to release a cheaper, softcover version in the States, the company’s marketing geniuses griped that the name Casino Royale wasn’t sufficiently saleable. (“Apparently, it was feared that American readers would not be able to pronounce ‘Royale,’” quips a piece at CommanderBond.net). They wanted something different, a replacement that was more in keeping with the tough-guy stories then flooding U.S. bookstores. “Fleming’s suggestions for a new title, The Double-O Agent and The Deadly Gamble, were disregarded,” Wikipedia recalls, “in favor of You Asked for It. The novel was subtitled ‘Casino Royale’ and made reference to secret agent 007 as ‘Jimmy Bond’ on the back cover” (left). Did the Popular Library honchos really believe 007 needed such a nickname to appeal to often folksier Yankee readers?*

CommanderBond.net calls the You Asked for It front “a wonderful piece of Bondamania. ... [I]ts illustrated cover features an alluring Vesper Lynd with a leering ‘Jimmy’ pouring a drink. The spine of the book reads, ‘She played a man’s game with a woman’s weapon.’ One would hardly recognize this book as an adventure of the suave sophisticated 007 of today. This remains a very scarce book, and one that is passionately sought after by Bond fans. On the open market, it tends to be priced at $250 to $300.”

So who painted You Asked for It’s pulpish jacket? Well, there’s a mystery for you. According to novelist Bill Crider, who owns a copy of the paperback, “There’s absolutely no signature on that cover, nor is there any credit given to the artist on the inside.” Hoping for a more definitive answer, and because he’s been helpful to me before in solving this sort of puzzle, I dashed off an e-mail inquiry to Art Scott, the co-author of a comprehensive illustrated bibliography, The Paperback Covers of Robert McGinnis (2001), and a contributor to a forthcoming book from Donald M. Grant about McGinnis’ portraits of women. Alas, he couldn’t identify the artist here either. “[B]ut my best guess,” Scott wrote, “would be Ray Johnson, who did a lot of Pop [Library] covers in that era, and it looks like his style.” Johnson’s other works include the fronts of The World in the Evening, by Christopher Isherwood (1955); Mr. Trouble, by William Ard (1956); Love in Suburbia, by John Conway (1960); This Is My Night, by Richard Deming (1961); and Some Die Hard, by Nick Quarry (1961).

Fortunately, the rebranding of Fleming’s debut thriller was short-lived. Popular Library’s You Asked for It (released in April 1955) was the only edition to carry that title. Signet Books picked up the U.S. rights to the James Bond novels after 1960 and restored the Casino Royale name.

* A one-hour U.S. TV adaptation of Casino Royale, shown in 1954 as an episode of the suspense/mystery anthology series Climax, also referred to its able protagonist (transferred to the CIA and portrayed by Barry Nelson) as “Jimmy Bond.”