Another Look: “The Little Sister”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler (Pocket, 1963); cover art by James Neil Boyle. Right: The Little Sister, by Raymond Chandler (Pocket, 1957); cover illustration by Charles Binger. This fifth novel starring private eye Philip Marlowe was adapted into the 1969 film Marlowe, starring James Garner.

Grisly Adams: Interpreting Chandler

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



I frequently kick myself for not having had the foresight to purchase—long ago, when they were new—certain books that I now wish were part of my personal library, and that are considerably harder to dig up in ideal condition all these years later.

For instance, I was just old enough (though not savvy enough) in the early 1970s to have bought all 10 of the paperback editions of Raymond Chandler works for which Tom Adams painted covers. That particularly handsome line, originally released by U.S. publisher Ballantine Books in 1971 and ’72, is today much prized by paperback collectors, with copies going for considerably more money than their original 95-cent asking price. No wonder: Adams’ Chandler illustrations are striking, dramatically composed and marginally surreal, and they manage to incorporate familiar features from the individual stories—such as “the nasty meaty leaves” of General Sternwood’s tropical orchids, from The Big Sleep, and a fish tank from “Goldfish,” one of the four lengthy yarns collected in Trouble Is My Business. It seems likely that Adams actually read Chandler’s work, rather than merely taking suggestions from an art director as to what elements his imagery might incorporate.

Naturally, I have all of Chandler’s books in my collection, in various editions—but not a single example from Adams’ Ballantine series. If I could travel back in time to tell my younger self to pick up all of those paperbacks and save them, you can rest assured I would.

Although I previously posted the front from The Simple Art of Murder as part of Killer Cover’s Tom Adams tribute, I am including it again below for the sake of comprehensiveness.

Grisly Adams: “The Simple Art of Murder”

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



The Simple Art of Murder, by Raymond Chandler
(Ballantine, 1971).

Another Look: “Playback”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Playback, by Raymond Chandler (Cardinal, 1960); cover art by William Rose. Right: Playback, by Raymond Chandler (Pyramid, 1968), with a cover illustration by J. (Joseph) Lombardero.

“Sleep” Covers Worth Waking Up For

Today marks the 130th anniversary of author Raymond Chandler’s birth in Chicago. There have been lots of posts written in association with this occasion, including several in The Rap Sheet (see here, here, and here). One of the most interesting tributes, however, at least for those of us who appreciate classic book covers, is CrimeReads’ look back at 25 classic covers from The Big Sleep, Chandler’s 1939 first novel, which includes the premiere of Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. Featured in CrimeReads’ gallery is the retro-style front from Vintage’s 1976 paperback release of that book, shown above. (Artwork by Richard Waldrep.)

Another of the Big Sleep fronts CrimeReads showcases is the 1978 Vintage movie tie-in edition (a better scan of which can be appreciated here). The façade art for that one was created by American Richard Amsel (1947-1985), whose illustrations are familiar from a wide variety of covers he developed for books and TV Guide, as well as from film posters. The Amsel painting that graced the placard advertising Robert Mitchum’s version of The Big Sleep was the source of the artwork found on Vintage’s softcover. Below, I have embedded the final poster—overlaid with performance credits—followed by Amsel’s preliminary design for the notice. Observe that the earlier variant shows Mitchum with a somewhat neater hairstyle, and actress Candy Clark (who played nymphomaniac daughter Carmen Sternwood) with a less-fearful expression on her face.





Curiously, while CrimeReads highlighted more than two dozen Big Sleep covers, it failed to mention the attractive specimen displayed below: a 1973 edition from The Netherlands. Credit for the cover illustration on this one goes to Jos Looman.

Bennett’s Beauties: Hi, Profiles

Part of a month-long celebration of Harry Bennett’s artistic skills.



The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler (Pocket, 1964); and
The Last Love, by Thomas B. Costain (Pocket, 1964).

Briefly Mentioned

• U.S.-born Illustrator Tom Adams “seems to be everyone’s favorite Agatha Christie paperback cover artist. Certainly he is mine …,” writes Curtis Evans in his blog, The Passing Tramp. “Adams is best known for [the book fronts] he did over many years for English paperback publisher Fontana (often intriguingly surrealistic), yet his beautiful American Pocket editions from the early Seventies are most familiar to me personally.” Evans presents a handsome gallery of Adams’ Christie covers for Pocket at the link. You will find multiple examples of his Fontana paperbacks here.

• Meanwhile, blogger-author Evan Lewis has begun showcasing various British dust jackets designed for Raymond Chandler’s novels. Click here to enjoy the first such set. Previously, Lewis created a three-part gallery of Chandler’s vintage American dust jackets in his blog, Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure, and the Wild West. Part I was here, Part II here, and Part III here.

• Sadly, these covers for familiar novels by Chandler, Jim Thompson, and Dashiell Hammett don’t appear to have decorated any print books—as yet. But they really should. They’re the creations of Austin, Texas-based graphic designer David Johnson.

• A Web site called It’s Nice That recently posted a collection of what it labeled “Fantastically Kitsch Mexican Pulp Paperback Covers.” Explained contributor Rebecca Fullylove: “Ballsy, bizarre, and a little bit racy, these Mexican pulp fiction book covers are fantastic fun and epitomize our need for a bit of weird naughtiness. The kitsch-factor is overwhelming as scantily clad women run away in terror, a man in purple spandex is surrounded by adoring cats, and giant robots menacingly pick up shiny red cars.”

• Speaking of cringe-worthy covers …

• As Electric Lit noted last month, “Saturday, October 14 marks the 125th anniversary of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: the first collection of his short stories previously printed in The Strand Magazine. Despite the fact that they are amongst Sherlock’s most famous cases, few stories in this collection have ever received their own cover designs—an oversight that has now been corrected. To celebrate this major milestone, 12 professional book designers from Reedsy have created exclusive new covers for each of these fantastic stories.”

• And Yvette Banek has put together a variety of hand-focused fronts from vintage paperbacks by Erle Stanley Gardner, Ngaio Marsh, Helen McCloy, and others.

Because I Needed a Chandler Fix …

The Simple Art of Murder, by Raymond Chandler (Pocket, 1964).
Illustration by Jack Thurston.

Marlowe Makes an Entrance

One in a series of Raymond Chandler novel covers, created by artist Tom Adams and published by Ballantine Books in 1971.

John Dugdale of The Guardian was good enough to point out that it was 75 years ago today—on February 6, 1939—that Raymond Chandler’s first private-eye novel, The Big Sleep, was released by U.S. publisher Alfred A. Knopf. “Reviews in 1939,” he notes, “were wary and unenthusiastic, however, and only gradually was it recognised that Chandler had pulled off a bold fusion of highbrow and lowbrow—much-applauded by authors such as W.H. Auden, Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, but also much-imitated by fellow chroniclers of murder.”

Other shamuses had trod the fictional mean streets of America, among them Dashiell Hammett’s The Continental Op and Sam Spade, Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams, and more birthed in the rough-paper pages of Black Mask magazine. But the P.I. genre was new to Great Britain in those World War II years, and Dugdale argues that The Big Sleep offered even readers in the States “a very different kind of detective” in Los Angeles’ Philip Marlowe.

What was so new? Almost everything in the first chapter, which introduces Philip Marlowe as he visits the Sternwood family mansion. Marlowe speaks to us. Whereas Holmes, Poirot, Maigret, Sam Spade are observed externally, Marlowe is the detective as autobiographer, starting three consecutive sentences in the first paragraph with “I” (ending with “I was calling on four million dollars”).

He is a private detective, yet not patrician. By showing him meeting his social betters, Chandler’s opening contrasts him as a man of the people (like a cop in this, but too nonconformist to be one) with the likes of Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey, who don’t need the money. Even calling on a potential client—Holmes waits for them to call on him, Poirot has agreeable invitations to country houses—sets him apart.

He is single, and attracted and attractive to women. The opening’s flirtatious encounter with kittenish Carmen Sternwood differentiates him from his predecessors, who tend to be either sexless or married.

He is a dandy, as fond of fine clothes as he is of fine prose: the book’s second sentence mentions his “powder-blue suit” and even describes his socks (“black wool … with dark blue clocks on them”).

He is very literary. His first sentence—“It was about 11 o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills”—could be Scott Fitzgerald. In The Big Sleep the initial nexus of crime is … a bookshop.

(Right) The original, 1939 Knopf edition of The Big Sleep.

After three quarters of a century, we’re still admiring Chandler’s graceful and evocative prose, if not always his novel’s plots (which, as in The Big Sleep, could be a bit ragged). Although some people among us refuse the opportunity to become Big Sleep fans (case in point here), the novel spawned what the majority of this genre’s critics would certainly acknowledge is one of the most influential—if not one of the longest (comprising only seven entries)—gumshoe series of the 20th century. More than three decades after Chandler’s death in 1959, another important shaper of the American school of detective fiction, Robert B. Parker, was interested enough in The Big Sleep’s story and characters that he penned a not-altogether satisfying sequel, 1991’s Perchance to Dream. And it’s hardly surprising to find that Chandler’s 1939 novel remains in print and also remains an instigator of lively discussion in popular literature classes and at crime-fiction conventions.

There have been numerous editions of The Big Sleep released over the years, some more eye-catching than others. Below are just a few of them. Click on any of the images for an enlargement.










Interestingly, last year, publisher Penguin invited aspiring designers to come up with fresh cover concepts for The Big Sleep. You can see them all here, but below I’ve embedded three of my favorites. The first is by Philippa “Pip” Watkins, the second by Sam Barley. The third cover, which won the contest, is by Hayley Warnham.

READ MORE: “Penguin Book Jacket Design” (Speelio Design); “The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler” (The Blog of Hannah Yapp); “Raymond Chandler Book Covers,” by Eduardo (Illmatic); “The Art of The Big Sleep,” by Evan Lewis (Davy Crockett’s Almanack of Mystery, Adventure and the Wild West).

Two-fer Tuesdays: Take That, Sucker!

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



There were times during 2013 when I felt as if this was the way the year had decided to treat me. One whack to the head after the next! The best-laid plans blowing up in my face, unexpected (and expensive) alterations/repairs to my house, electronic equipment in urgent need of fixing--2013 packed all of that in, plus more. So I can’t say I’m particularly sorry to see the curtain slam down on this last 12-month period. 2014 has to be better, right?

The covers above were both painted by Paul Kresse, an artist whose work I’m familiar with, but about whom I know next to nothing. (If anyone out there can supply information about his life and career, please do.) The image on the left comes from the 1950, first Pocket Books printing of It’s a Crime, by Richard Ellington (1914-1980). During the late 1940s and early ’50s, he penned five mystery novels featuring Manhattan-based actor-turned-private eye Steve Drake. It’s a Crime was the second installment in that series, following Shoot the Works (1948). In his write-up about Steve Drake for The Thrilling Detective Web Site, Kevin Burton Smith said Ellington’s series was “not as hard-boiled as [Mickey] Spillane, perhaps, but generally offering some good local color, an appealing medium-boiled hero and some deftly plotted, satisfyingly complex mysteries.”

More familiar to fans of mid-20th-century paperback detective fiction is the cover on the right, from the June 1943 edition of Raymond Chandler’s second Philip Marlowe novel, Farewell, My Lovely. Pocket reprinted Farewell eight times between 1943 and 1951, but this Kress-created front was easily the most eye-catching of the lot.

Here’s wishing all Killer Covers readers a fine and gentler 2014!