Neck and Neck

Two vintage paperback yarns that really go for the jugular.



There Is a Tide, by Agatha Christie (Dell, 1955), with cover art by William Rose. An earlier front for this novel is here.

Strangler’s Holiday, by “Kurt Steel,” aka Rudolf Hornaday Kagey (Crime Novel Selection, 1942), with a cover illustration by Norman Saunders. This book was originally titled Murder in G Sharp (1937). Under the Kurt Steel pseudonym, Hornaday (1904-1946) created “tough and well-muscled private investigator” Hank Hyer, who premiered in Murder of a Dead Man (1935).

Two-fer Tuesdays: Rub-a-Dub-Dead

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



This is what can happen when you sit on a good idea for too long.

For months now, I’ve been slowly but surely collecting vintage paperback covers that show a person being either threatened or killed in a bathtub, or having already died in one. I figured this would be a logical accompaniment to an earlier “two-fer” post about people being found to have expired on their beds. In both cases--bed and bath--the usual notion is that there’s safety and comfort to be found in such spots. But that isn’t necessarily the case when you’re dealing with tales rooted in criminal misconduct.

So anyway, I had this plan. This great plan. You know, though, what they say about the best-laid plans ... And sure enough, yesterday I happened across this new post in Pulp International focusing on book fronts “featuring various unfortunates who chose the wrong time to be naked and defenseless” in tubs. Most of the paperback façades I had found over the last few months are included in Pulp International’s gallery. Two excellent examples of the breed, however, missed that blog’s notice, so let me highlight them here.

The first, shown above and on the left, comes from Murder Takes a Wife, by James A. Howard (Pocket, 1955). Here’s how Kirkus Reviews synopsized that novel’s plot:

The mark of Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice) may bar this from polite circles but the tricks here have news value. Jeff Allen, operating as a one-man murder incorporated, cleans up on unwanted wives and mothers, covers himself with respectability as a salesman for pharmaceutical companies, and, gambling on new business in Fort Worth, [Texas] runs into obstacles for perfect executions. Involved in killing two women, he is also given a straight big business chance and, diddled by fate, he loses out on everything--even living with himself. A sharp shocker.

My efforts today to locate information on the Web about author Howard have been mostly frustrating. One source says he was born James Arch Howard in 1922, another that he also wrote some novels--such as 1959’s Fare Prey--under the pseudonym Laine Fisher. I have dug up listings of several more Howard works published during the mid-20th century, among them Murder in Mind (1960), Blow Out My Torch (1956), and I’ll Get You Yet (1954)--the latter two of which star a protagonist named Steve Ashe--and a 1962 work with the terrific title The Bullet-Proof Martyr, described as “a fine murder story and a blood-chilling portrait of a demagogue” (the “flag-waving head of a clan of ‘kinsmen’” named Paul Kenneth Kane).

Credit for the cover of Murder Takes a Wife belongs to Wayne Blickenstaff. Born in Pomona, California, in 1920, Blickenstaff went on to attend Woodbury Business College in Los Angeles and then join the U.S. Air Corps in 1942, not long after the United States entered World War II. “Although many artists who served in WWII went on to careers in the illustration field,” explains this Web site, “few can claim such colorful wartime adventures as Lt. Col. Wayne K. Blickenstaff, Ace pilot of the 353rd Fighter Group. What does it mean to be an ace? A pilot who successfully shoots down several enemy aircraft in combat is considered an ace. But Blickenstaff not only qualified as Ace, but also as ‘Ace in a day,’ a pilot who brought down more than five enemy craft in a single day!” After the war, Blickenstaff used his G.I. Bill benefits to study at L.A.’s Chouinard Art Institute, and then moved to New York City to work as an editorial and advertising artist. In addition to illustrating children’s books and creating artwork for magazines, Blickenstaff painted a number of fronts for crime and mystery novels--Murder Takes a Wife as well as others that can be relished here. His obituary says he died in Charlotte, North Carolina, in December 2011 at age 91.

Now let’s turn our avid attention to today’s other attraction, The Deadly Combo, by John Farr (Ace, 1958). “Farr” is a nom de plume used by Jack Webb (1916-2008), an L.A.-born author--not to be confused with Dragnet actor Jack Webb--whose mysteries often built around the sleuthing pair of Father Joseph Shanley and police homicide cop Sammy “Elijah” Golden (The Deadly Sex).

The Deadly Combo was released by Ace in a paperback double-book edition, on the flip side of which was found Murder Isn’t Funny, by J. Harvey Bond. Both covers, I understand, were painted by Bernard Barton, who was born in New York in 1920, attended Cooper Union in Manhattan, and after a stint with the U.S. military during World War II, moved into commercial illustration work. He also, though, contributed to what in the postwar years was a hungry market for paperback art. Other examples of Barton’s work can be found here. He apparently lived much of his life in Westport, Connecticut, finally perishing there in 1993.

Before we leaving the topic of “blood baths,” let me showcase--on the left--two extra specimens. The first is the cover from what I believe is a 1930s edition of Inside Detective magazine, with pleasingly racy artwork by Norman Saunders. (Had I known about this publication front six years ago, I would definitely have shuffled it into my gallery of peeping-tom covers.) Beside it you will find the 1967 Pocket edition of Dead, Upstairs in the Tub, by Michael Brett. This was the sixth novel starring Brett’s tough, Chevy-driving, Scotch-drinking Manhattan private eye, Pete McGrath, and though it offers a photographic cover, rather than a potentially more interesting illustrated one, Dead, Upstairs in the Tub definitely fits into our theme here.

Oops! Lost Your Clothes Again

I generally think of American artist Norman Saunders in relation to his work on covers for mid-20th-century paperbacks or men’s magazine fronts. But this small gallery featured in Evan Lewis’ blog, Davy Crockett’s Almanack, proves he was equally dexterous in producing “girlie art” for publications such as Saucy Movie Tales.

What a Trip

Funny, I don’t think I’d ever heard of The Mysterious Traveler Magazine until earlier today, when I happened across the fabulous fronts from three of that publication’s five issues in the Pulp Covers blog. A Web site called The Three Investigators (which is dedicated to an old juvenile mystery novel series of that same name) says that The Mysterious Traveler debuted in 1951.

Based on their radio program “The Mysterious Traveler,” this digest-sized magazine was published bi-monthly by Grace Publishing Co., Inc. of New York City at 35 cents a copy, annual subscriptions could be had for $2.00. David Kogan was credited as the Publisher and Robert Arthur was credited as the Managing Editor. The cover of each issue featured stunning artwork by Norman B. Saunders. Consisting of five issues, this short-lived magazine ended at about the same time that the radio program finished it’s nine year run in September 1952.

Each issue consists of twelve stories classified into various genres and sub-genres including crime, suspense, detection, mystery, strange stories, science fiction, terror, macabre, short shockers, etc. Some issues contain special features like contests and movie/book suggestions. Each issue features at least one story by the Mysterious Traveler (Robert Arthur) himself plus stories by some of the most well-known writers of the day including Ray Bradbury, Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Craig Rice, Sax Rohmer, Agatha Christie, Cornell Woolrich, August Derleth, Brett Halliday and others. As many as seven stories in each issue were penned by Robert Arthur, most under various pseudonyms.

I’ve written about artist Norman Saunders before on this page, without knowing that he had contributed his talents to that short-lived magazine. Click here for lists of the stories contained in each edition of The Mysterious Traveler. Again, blow-ups of the covers are available here.

And episodes of the Mysterious Traveler radio program can be downloaded here and here.

Up Front About It

Congratulations to Pulp Covers, which after just 10 months of operation today put up its 4,000th posting--the Norman Saunders-painted front from the April 1936 edition of Black Book Detective. The administrator of that excellent blog writes, “I hope someone is actually looking at these.”

Really, I don’t think there should be any doubt that this site deserves, and is receiving, enthusiastic notice.

“Where Utter Sleaze Meets Genuine Artistry”

Women with desire and devilry in their eyes. Detectives with pistols in their paws and not enough luck to fill a matchbox. Damp, deserted roadways. Hot-sheet motels. Women in peril, their faces contorted with terror. Alleyways where young toughs threaten old fools. Bedrooms where the innocent go to sleep forever. Women with legs the length of Panama. Nightclubs where booming gunfire plays a discordant rhythm against the music.

And women. Did I mention women? The more shapely and insufficiently attired the better.

During the mid-20th century, these were essential ingredients of the illustrations decorating American crime, mystery, and thriller novels, especially the paperbacks. Inspired by the dissident, dystopian aesthetic of film noir and the sensationalistic fronts of cheaply produced pulp magazines that had done so much to popularize crime fiction, the artists behind these novel covers offered the browsers of bookstore shelves and drugstore spinner racks a world where anything could go wrong, and usually did. Their vision was fraught with lust and sadism, avarice and paranoia, slow-boiling fear and quick-firing violence. But if the society that artists such as Robert McGinnis, Paul Rader, Ernest Chiriacka, and Mitchell Hooks (who gave us the cover of 1962’s The Kilroy Gambit, shown above) portrayed was often ugly, the art itself could be captivating. Many of them had honed their talents in the employ of slick periodicals and advertising agencies, before an increasing dependence on photography in those fields drove them to seek alternative work painting movie posters and paperback covers. Together they ushered in what Max Allan Collins, a prolific mystery novelist who’s also composed non-fiction works about genre book art and pin-up girls, calls “a wonderful golden age where utter sleaze meets genuine artistry.”

If you’ve been reading Killer Covers for a while, you know what a fan I am of these vintage crime-fiction fronts. So I was delighted recently to be invited to write about some of my favorite such jackets for a national mystery magazine. Unfortunately, after I submitted the piece I had outlined, the editor decided that it really ought to go in an entirely different direction. I was left not only with a suddenly orphaned article, but more importantly, the results of three short interviews that had no new home.

Right: Robert Maguire’s 1957 cover for Wild Town, by Jim Thompson.

Rather than let my work go entirely unpublished, I’ve decided to post on this page the interview responses I collected for the original article. I had addressed several questions about vintage crime-fiction covers to three authorities on that topic: Charles Ardai, the editor of Hard Case Crime; the aforementioned Collins, author of the Nate Heller detective series and the man behind a continuing line of Mike Hammer novels; and David Saunders, the son of renowned illustrator Norman Saunders and creator of the excellent Web site Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists. I’m sorry that their comments about the importance of classic illustrated book covers and why the commercial marketplace has slowly become less welcoming of those “old-timey” jackets won’t appear in the magazine piece for which I had designated them. But at least you can appreciate their wisdom below.

Q: Nowadays, so many of the crime/mystery/thriller novels are similar, featuring shadowy and running figures, desolate roadways, spooky-looking trees, or distressed furniture in shabby rooms. And stock photography not only dominates but is often duplicated on book covers. Earlier and illustrated works, though--especially those published during the mid-20th century--seemed to be significantly more interesting. What do you think has changed about public tastes and publishing demands that’s led to our modern cookie-cutter book fronts?

Charles Ardai: Well, it takes a lot less time and effort--and talent of a less uncommon variety--to grab some clip art, plop down some [type] fonts and backgrounds, apply some effects in Photoshop or Illustrator, and call it a day than it does to commission a painting and work with the artist to get memorable results. To start with, only a handful of painters in the world can paint in the style and at the level of skill that, for instance, we require for Hard Case Crime, and the ones that can are generally in high demand (not necessarily by book publishers, but by Hollywood, by ad agencies, by package designers, and so on). Now, not every book publisher would need our particular style--but they’d all require a comparable level of skill, and that’s not easy to find. Even if you find it, and you can work with the painter’s schedule, and you’re willing to pay an extra several thousand dollars, you also have to wait weeks (if not months) for the painting to be done, and there’s always the risk that it won’t come out quite the way you hoped it would. And who knows if it really will sell more copies in the end? You’d like to think that a truly brilliant cover would help boost sales, and maybe it would--but that’s a very high bar. The average painted cover probably won’t sell better than a generic modern-style cover. So why would a publisher tolerate the extra cost, delays, risk, and work? Unless, of course, the old-style painted look is an integral part of their line’s identity, as it is for Hard Case Crime; then you do it. But if it’s not ... the temptation to go with something simpler, cheaper, quicker, and safer is a powerful one.

Also, there are people who think that covers that look painterly and old-fashioned might actually sell less well--no matter how beautifully painted--than the modern-style generic stuff I think of as “supermarket covers,” simply because the readers who buy best-sellers at supermarkets are looking for something that screams “modern,” not something that looks strange or old-timey. As much as I love it personally, there are a lot of readers who apparently won’t pick up a book that looks old-fashioned.

Max Allan Collins: I’ve been at this since 1971, and until Hard Case Crime, I haven’t had a cover I really loved. I only agreed to write The Last Quarry [2006] when editor Charles Ardai bribed me with the opportunity to have a Robert McGinnis cover.

Things evolved, or rather devolved, throughout the 1950s and ’60s until the disaster that was the ’70s. Dell did wonderful deco covers, like the mapbacks, in the ’40s, but starting in the late ’40s, Signet paved the way and, ironically, so did smaller publishers who viewed themselves (rightly) as an extension of the pulps.

Left: James Avati’s covers for The Big Kill (1959), by Mickey Spillane, and The Case of the Daring Decoy (1960), by Erle Stanley Gardner.

So you had illustrated covers, with the garish sex-and-violence pulp aspect merging with the fine-art sensibility of James Avati, Stanley Meltzoff, James Meese, Lou Kimmel, and others. The talent in magazine illustration and advertising art of the ’30s and ’40s was mind-staggering, everybody from Cole Phllips to Norman Rockwell, from James Montgomery Flagg to Norman Rockwell. As the ’50s progressed, and photography replaced illustration, a lot of incredible talent migrated to paperback covers and movie poster art. Pulp artists like Rader and Saunders made the transition, too--sooner than the slick magazine guys.

And you have a wonderful golden age where utter sleaze meets genuine artistry. This lasts till the early ’60s, when what was perceived as a more modern look came along--a single stark image against a solid color, usually a beautiful woman in the McGinnis or [Robert] Maguire mold. Avati’s [Mickey] Spillane covers were particularly striking, although it’s said he didn’t like them or maybe he just didn’t like Spillane. This more simple, uncluttered design opened the door for photo-art covers, for crime paperbacks, particularly--you had, for example, McGinnis dolls on Perry Mason covers being replaced by photos of beautiful women. Paperback covers had caught up to magazines, in a bad way, substituting photography for illustration. Pin-up calendars suffered the same fate around the same time.

David Saunders: One of the biggest and most influential powers in America today is conservative demagoguery. It wraps itself in the American flag and spouts the plain-spoken common sense of Will Rogers, while inexorably guiding the American public down the path toward a new and improved Fascist Democracy. The illustration art of the mid-20th century still reflected the pre-World War II ideals of the Enlightenment, when every person was supposed to fulfill his or her own creative potential by working to express the “god-like” within us all. This approach to art was best identified with Michaelangelo. After WWII the consolidated power of the military-industrial complex led to the absolute and corrupt power of “mass marketing,” which has redirected the message of all illustration art toward honing the most perfectly effective message that will sell the most. That is why Hollywood produces movies that cost $100 million to make and stay in circulation for two weekends to gross $132,000,000, and then are totally thrown out, because they have no long-term creative value.

Q: It’s said periodically that some of the sexier covers of yore simply wouldn’t be acceptable nowadays. Do you think that’s true? And if so, why?

Charles Ardai: Today, a lot of books are sold in large chain stores that make their money primarily by selling packaged goods--bologna, potting soil, diapers--and these stores take great pains to ensure they won’t offend any of their customers. Not a problem when your product is bologna or potting soil; the packages for those products are unlikely to stir any controversy. But book covers (and magazine covers, for that matter) might. And these retailers won’t stock books whose covers contain elements they feel might be risqué enough to cause some fraction of their customers to write nasty letters or start a boycott or simply start shopping at the next store over. Since these retailers wield a lot of power (by dint of the large fraction of all book sales they control), publishers are loath to cross them. So any cover image that might be “too sexy” or sensitive in some other way is likely to get nixed before it’s even seen by the buyers for these stores--and if it’s not, it’s likely to get nixed by those buyers when they do see it.

Right: Robert McGinnis’ illustration for the 1961 Dell edition of Stranger in Town, by Brett Halliday.

Why were things different in the old days? For one, a lot more books were sold in venues that only sold printed material--newsstands, in particular. For another, a larger fraction of the people buying books in the old days were men, who might be expected to be more tolerant of “naughty” artwork; today, the book-buying audience is much more heavily female. There was probably also more tolerance in the culture for material that some people today would consider offensive. I’m of two minds about this: on one hand, I’m glad people are more sensitive today and that we don’t see magazine covers featuring grotesque racist caricatures; on the other hand, I think the fear of giving offense has led to some absurd acts of timidity, such as covering up a female model’s bellybutton or her bare feet. I’d like to think there could be a middle ground, where we’d have the freedom to show images you might not want your kids to see, while still avoiding the worst and ugliest imagery of our benighted past. But of course that position, enlightened and Aristotelian as it might sound, basically boils down to, “I’m glad not to see covers that would offend me, but I’d like to see more than don’t offend me even if they might offend you.”

Max Allan Collins: They are accepted only in the retro sense--when they can be perceived with irony. It’s one of the worst byproducts of feminism. The sense of fun, danger, sexuality and sensuality is somehow offensive. I say lighten up and enjoy the ride.

David Saunders: I am always mystified by why certain things have no popularity nowadays. Many of the finest works of art are “unpopular.” I am so mystified by this that I can only ascribe it to some profound unknown deity, which I call by the mystical name Mass-Mar-Kating! Everything about this all-powerful god, Mass-Mar-Kating!, is unknowable, but for some reason it is consistently drawn towards “pre-existing franchises” and “optimal purchasing groups.” Why do three movies on earthquakes come out in the same year? Why do three movies on asteroids come in the same year? Why do three movies on vampires all come out in the same year? Why do three animated CGI (computer-generated imagery) movies on ants come out in the same year? Why are reality TV shows popular? Who the fuck is Lindsey Lohan?

Q: Do you think changes in readership have affected the style of crime-novel covers? Because there are so many more women reading in the genre today than there were half a century ago, are covers featuring half-naked lovelies and curvaceous femmes fatales a thing of the past?

Charles Ardai: Yes. More female readers means fewer covers aimed squarely at the male gaze, and that’s not entirely a bad thing. But it’s a mistake to think that women don’t like gorgeous, sexy painted cover art. We hear from plenty of female readers who love our covers, the sexier the better. Part of the reason is that the women on our covers may be half naked in some cases, but they’re not weak or subservient or cowering before a buzz saw. The women on our covers are much more likely to be an aggressor than a victim.

Max Allan Collins: That’s the conventional wisdom. You’d have to ask Charles Ardai how much of the Hard Case audience is female--I do think plenty of women enjoy the retro look, with or without the irony. Keep in mind that both men’s magazines and women’s magazines use beautiful females on their covers. It’s a more attractive sex.

Things have turned weird. We were told, flatly, that there couldn’t be a gun on a Mike Hammer cover. No gun. And my pleas for a beautiful woman on the covers have fallen on deaf ears, except for the wonderful (if retro) covers of the Hammer collections at Penguin.

Really, this isn’t about women. It’s about men and women. Sex and violence are the heart of the crime genre, at least the noir variety--sex is life and violence is death, and those are the big topics, the key interests. But a handsome man somehow doesn’t imply a beautiful woman in the wings. A beautiful woman, however, does imply an off-camera male interest. Steamy is good--The Postman Always Rings Twice, Lana Turner in white, Body Heat, Kathleen Turner in not much of anything, that is noir. Love, passion, strong enough to kill over. It’s a missed opportunity when covers are cold and cookie-cutter, and can’t convey that heat.

David Saunders: I am not an expert on the sociology of American readership or the development of feminist tendencies in the U.S.A., so I am not qualified to give an authoritative answer to this question. I happen to only read classic literature and vintage paperbacks. I turned off the TV in 1968. I hate all mass-media advertising. I am mystified by various developments in modern fiction, such as semiotics, fractured chronologies, and parallel universes. Today I am happily reading The Roar Devil [1935], by Kenneth Robeson, a Doc Savage Bantam paperback novel with a cover painted by “Boris” in 1977. In my unqualified opinion, sexual fantasy will always be a personal matter of choice, which is as varied as the flavors of ice-cream ... [and which can] differ from day to day. Many people are not aware of how influential the illustrations are. I like Duke Ellington’s comment, when asked about BeBop Music: “There are only two kinds of music in my opinion. Good music and bad music.” Likewise, it is not the degree of “curvaceousness” so much as the quality of the illustration. Most of the terrible illustration I see nowadays is bad because it is based on rotten drawing skills.

Q: Despite the fact that most covers these days are photographic, there’s often excitement heard when new illustrated fronts (by Glen Orbik, Richie Fahey, or others) do actually reach the marketplace. What advantages do you think illustrated covers have over photographic ones?

Charles Ardai: It’s funny that you include Richie Fahey in that list, since I believe his work starts out photographic--I think he takes photos and then paints over them.

But you’re right that his work and Glen’s and some of [what] our other painters [do] get a lot of people excited when they see it. I think this is just a matter of their exceptional talent commanding the attention it deserves. It’s not that photo covers can’t command similar attention--look at the stunning work Thomas Allen did for the reissues of James Ellroy’s work, for example. It’s just that you need exceptional talent. Most photo covers are generic and
uninteresting. Painted covers are rare enough at this point that when you finally see one, it’s likely to be something pretty special.

Left: Thomas Allen’s covers for the Vintage editions of Suicide Hill (2006) and Blood on the Moon (2005), both by James Ellroy.

Max Allan Collins: Illustration, if it’s any good, speaks to the imagination. It’s not literal, it’s expressive, emotional, evocative. I hate most of the covers I’ve had. Nate Heller has never been packaged right. There is nothing sadder than the author who looks at the cover of his book and knows he wouldn’t buy it.

David Saunders: My father once told me that photography had culturally triumphed as “the medium of visual proof.” Photos can be entered as legal evidence in courts, and everyone is content to use the expression, “seeing is believing.” Dad felt that photography’s cultural role as the medium of visual proof had taken over one of the painter’s traditional roles as a provider of “visual proof.” One of the clearest examples of this traditional role of the painter as a provider of visual proof is the long relationship with one of the oldest and steadiest clients, the Catholic Church, which always needed “realistic” paintings to act as substantiated proof of each saint’s martyrdom and miracle. So Dad was sorry to see photography take over the role of the artist as a provider of visual proof, but he was encouraged by the fact that artists also had a second role, which was to provide visual proof of fantasy, and that skill was totally unchallenged by photography. Dad felt that from 1950 onwards, photography was the best way to create a document of a historic event, but painting was inadvertently elevated to the medium of substantiating visual fantasy. He felt artistically liberated by the new cultural prominence of paintings as the major medium to substantiate visual fantasy. He believed painters were just wasting their time, when they complained about the dominance of photography in the illustration industry. [He said:] “If all they ever did was trace photographs, then its no wonder they feel threatened by the popularity of photography; but if they were happy to use their imaginations before, then they should feel even more liberated to dream up their wildest fantasies!”

I suppose those ideas were really a product of the 1950s and 1960s, when all that existed were black-and-white or color photos. Nowadays we have some of the most fantastic images in the world generated from digital photography, and computer-generated images. Dad might have made great work with these cool new art tools, but he would probably never give up the mainstay of his creative energy, which was a love of stylistic drawing from observation. So no matter what “tool” he used it was always an outgrowth of his personalized drawing style. [He] used to say, “If you draw every minute of every day for your entire life, you will eventually develop an all-important ‘style’ that’s all your own, and that is the most important skill of the artist. Everything else is just mindless tools that you can use to draw with.”

Murder Is Dangerous, by Saul Levinson

I spotted this dramatically illustrated paperback cover last fall in the blog Pulp International, and promised myself I would also make use of it someday on this page. But my efforts since to learn anything remotely substantive about Saul Levinson, credited as the author of Murder Is Dangerous, have been more than a bit frustrating. He appears to have penned only one other novel, Red-Hot Murder (supposedly containing “All the Thrills of a Wildcat Gusher”), which like Murder Is Dangerous, was originally published in hardcover in 1949 by New York-based Phoenix Press. And his short tale “Stay on the Sidewalks, Kid” appeared in the August 1955 edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Other than that, however ... nada. In his amusing 1982 book, Gun in Cheek: A Study of “Alternative” Crime Fiction, Bill Pronzini casts Saul Levinson in the “unknowns” category, together with such other Phoenix Press scribblers as Helen Joan Hultman, H.W. Sandberg, Arville Nonweiler, Oliver Keystone, Gilbert Eldredge, Stewart Vanderveer, Amelia Reynolds Long, and Robert Portner Koehler.

Like Raymond Chandler, though, Levinson may at one time have had some involvement with the oil-drilling business, because there’s a definite air of authority in the industry details that pepper Murder Is Dangerous. All sorts of stuff about boiler flues and seismography and the distinctions between shot hole casing and regular pipe. This book’s basic plot is less remarkable. Set in the East Texas oil country, it follows Harry Witstow, the young and ambitious (and randy) boss of an oil-sounding crew, who is facing a conspiracy against his drilling for crude on land previously leased for that specific purpose. As the back-jacket copy on my 1951 Handi-Book Mystery edition explains:

From the minute he struck the oil fields Harry Witstow was warned to move on but he stubbornly refused. He had a contract, this was his big chance to make good--and there was a certain girl. Then his friend Pete met a violent death, his crew rebelled, a powerful competitor started freezing him out ... and then those sinister notes started arriving, first warning him, then threatening his with death.

But it was too late to leave ...

And in the dark shadows of the shacks and derricks stalked a crazed killer bent on making good his promise.

Handi-Book summed up Murder Is Dangerous as “a thrilling, tense mystery of murder in the roaring oil fields.” The story certainly has its dramatic moments, as equipment is sabotaged, Witstow is undermined by his associates, and the local sheriff pins responsibility for all of these troubles on geologist Witstow himself. If Levinson’s protagonist doesn’t catch on right away to who really is to blame, he at least figures it out eventually, thanks to some help from a crusty and intriguing mentor called Driller, and Norma Morris, the witty young daughter of his pipe dealer.

Still, what remains most interesting about Murder Is Dangerous is the Handi-Books cover shown atop this post. It’s the work of artist Norman Saunders (1907-1989). Born on a Minnesota homestead, the elder son of a Presbyterian minister, he took correspondence courses in art, before training for an abbreviated spell at the Chicago Art Institute. From there, he moved on to New York City’s Grand Central School of Art, where he benefited from instruction by painter and pulp illustrator Harvey Dunn. Saunders fielded assignments from Fawcett Publications as well a variety of pulp mags, signing his images with either his own moniker or, less often, his middle name, Blaine. He earned a reputation for doing fast, high-quality work, and as a result was much in demand. On a Web site devoted to his father, Saunders’ youngest child, David (who several years ago published a book heralding Norman Saunders’ life and talent), recalls that

Norm became a top cover artist for dozens of magazines like Eerie Mysteries, Ten Detective Aces, Wild West Weekly and Saucy Movie Tales. “Before [World War II], I sold a hundred paintings a year for 25 to 75 bucks apiece, which was quite a chunk of change in those days! I was riding in style, right smack through the Great Depression!” His studio cost only $35 a month. He had a shave, shine and manicure every morning and he went ... for dinner and dancing at the [New York] Biltmore Hotel. Norm was such a snappy dresser that one night as he entered the Hotel Astor, a mob of fans shouted, “It’s Harry James!!” He literally ran for his life as they tore his tux to pieces! Norm had two cars--a Buick open-car and a Pontiac convertible, which both sat undriven in a parking garage that cost more than the average rent. He hired his favorite models every day from a local agency, but often desperate young women would find there [sic] way up to his studio, ring the bell and drop open their robes when he opened the door. If he was all booked up, they might suggest other more intimate services. As Dad reported it, he had pity on them--dressed them and sent them on their way with a hand-out, and with a tear in his eye.

World War II interrupted Saunders’ career. He was drafted into the U.S. Army and spent a year with the military police “before being trained in camouflage and sent to paint gasoline storage tanks along the Burma Road in China for the duration.” Later, he returned to New York, married his fetching young Greek studio model, Ellene Politis (with whom he would eventually rear four children), and resumed his efforts on behalf of pulp magazines. Until that industry finally burned out in the late 1950s or early ’60s, Saunders “was in constant demand ...,” according to one online biography. “During this period he added another 421 pulp covers to his lifetime total of 867, which is the highest number of covers painted by any pulp artist.” His artistic depictions--many of them demonstrating a particular fondness for the curves and crevasses of the female form--graced the fronts of Black Mask, Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Dime Detective, Marvel Science Stories, and many other periodicals.




Saunders’ book and magazine covers were distinguished by their rich color palettes, sense of action, and eye-catching depictions of women. In an interview, his son David said, “Dad surprised me once when I asked him why he wanted to be an artist. He said, ‘So I could paint naked ladies.’ It was so frank an answer that it made me laugh.” (Click on the images for enlargements.)

Saunders also did a great deal of work for comic books (westerns, crime fiction, and science fiction) after the war’s end--which got him into trouble, according to his son:

Comics were still evolving in these early years and they often had full-color covers painted by pulp artists, and their stories were filled with the same shocking pulp-fiction thrills. However, these products were being distributed along with innocent kiddie comics and this shared marketing raised many censorial eyebrows! The fact that Dad’s covers looked realistic, made their horror all the more gruesome. Letters of parental complaint led to a public campaign for the government to regulate “the trash we expose our children to!” This is a whipping-horse that still appeals to today’s political opportunists. My father’s painted covers were so nightmarish that the United States Congress actually passed a Comic Book Code of Decency Act to protect American youth from his kinds of images. How many kids can say that! The legislation was swept along with the general drive to crack down on “un-American activities” and by 1954 my Dad’s controversial style of work was black-listed from the comics.

Fortunately, he could fall back on freelance projects for paperback book publishers, men’s adventure magazines, and even children’s trading-card manufacturers. For release in 1961, and to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of America’s dreadful Civil War, Saunders developed a line of cards for the Topps bubblegum company that, his son says, “depicted battle scenes of such bloody realism that Topps was flooded with letters of complaint.” The painter subsequently created the Mars Attacks series, which imagined an invasion of Earth by ugly, remorseless Martians (and more than three decades later inspired a science-fiction film).

Although I didn’t know it until recently, my own introduction to Norman Saunders’ artwork came in the mid-1960s, when he (along with Bob Powell and Maurice Blumenfeld) produced a line of Batman trading cards. My recollection from those boyhood days is that there were several sets of these cards, with illustrations on one side and little adventure scenarios on the reverse, and they came inside 5-cent bubblegum packets, a few random cards at a time. I must have chewed a whole lot of bubblegum back then, and swapped wisely with my friends, because I wound up with--and in fact still own--130 of those vintage Batman cards. I have thought ever since that I held a complete collection of the first three sets (before the painted scenes gave way to photographs), but apparently there ought to be 143 cards in my possession. Oh, well. I’ll be happy with what I have.

At the height of the hoopla over ABC-TV’s campy Batman series, Saunders was hired by Topps to produce a line of bubblegum trading cards that depicted the Caped Crusader and Robin, the Boy Wonder, in dozens of precarious situations facing such familiar villains as the Joker and Catwoman.

Building on the success of those earlier sets, Saunders was hired by Topps in the late ’60s (along with other comic-book artists) to create the Wacky Packages trading cards, which parodied all sorts of American consumer products. Those cards, Wikipedia says, “spoofed well-known brands and packaging, such as ‘Crust’ (instead of Crest) toothpaste, ‘Blisterine’ (instead of Listerine), and ‘Neveready’ batteries (for Eveready Industries batteries).” David Saunders remembers that his father had always liked to skewer braggarts, “especially when they were advertisers, puffed up with boastful hot air.” So the popularity of Wacky Packages “was very satisfying to him, especially after storing up so many years of contempt for dishonest media men. He finally got paid to paint and to complain at the same time. It was the perfect job!”

Norman Saunders accepted his last freelance commission (for the front of Geoffrey O’Brien’s Hardboiled America: The Lurid Years of Paperbacks) in 1981. Six years later, he retired to live with his wife in her eastern Nebraska hometown of Columbus. There he died of emphysema on March 7, 1989, at age 82, leaving behind a wealth of recognizable and justly honored work that lives on in collectible paperbacks such as Murder Is Dangerous, as well as in the memories of children of the 1960s, like me, who were big fans of Saunders’ material even before we knew his name.

READ MORE: “Picturing the Pulps: An Interview with David Saunders,” by Steven Heller (Voice: AIGA Journal of Design); “Masters of Illustration Art: Norman Saunders,” Part 1 and Part II, by William Horberg; “Scott’s Classic Comics Corner: My 12 Favorite Covers of All-Time” (Comic Book Resources); “A Tribute to Norman Saunders,” by Evan Lewis (Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West); “Life with a Pulp Icon: An Interview with David Saunders,” by Laurie Powers (Laurie’s Wild West).