Another Look: “Dead Men’s Plans”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Dead Men’s Plans, by Mignon G. Eberhart (Dell, 1954); cover illustration by Richard M. Powers. Right: Dead Men’s Plans, by Mignon G. Eberhart (Popular Library, 1963); with a truly disconcerting cover painting by William Teason.

Nebraska-born author Eberhart (1899-1996) is said to have had one of the longest—and most profitable—careers of any American crime-fictionist. Her debut novel, The Patient in Room 18 (1929), was selected last year as one of Time magazine’s “100 Best Mystery and Thriller Books of All Time.” It was also the first of seven medical mystery novels starring nurse Sarah Keate. Eberhart wrote many more standout standalones, among them The House on the Roof (1935), Danger in the Dark (1937), With This Ring (1941), and Five Passengers from Lisbon (1946). Dead Men’s Plans, about the inheritance of a shipping empire gone dangerously awry, saw print originally in 1952. Eberhart received the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award in 1971. Her final book, Three Days for Emeralds, appeared in 1988.

I am embarrassed to say I’ve never read Eberhart’s work, but intend to remedy that situation soon by picking up her fifth Keate tale, Murder of an Aristocrat, which was reissued in 2019 as part of Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics series. The write-up on Aristocrat calls it “a thrilling mystery set in the rarified world of a wealthy Midwestern family … [that] renders its pulse-pounding suspense and puzzling crimes with eloquent prose, exemplifying why Eberhart was widely known, in her day, as ‘the atmosphere queen.”

READ MORE: “Your Guide to Mignon Eberhart: America's Agatha Christie,” by Harry Pearson (Murder & Mayhem).

Front to Back: Just a Matter of Crime

Part III of a series spotlighting wraparound paperback art.


The Red Lamp, by Mary Roberts Rinehart (Dell, 1961).
Cover illustration by Victor Kalin.

What’s that saying about there being no accounting for taste? While this series has already brought you abundant examples of knockout painted artwork for the wraparound covers of science-fiction and historical novels, many of the specimens I find in the crime and thriller genre feature photographs, instead. Most of them are pretty cheesy, such as those fronting the 1970s James Hadley Chase releases displayed below. Only rarely does a mystery or detective yarn boasting a front-to-back camera shot rise to the level of being memorable—an example being the Signet softcover edition of Mickey Spillane’s 1972 standalone novel, The Erection Set, which captured the author’s second wife, actress Sherri Malinou, in the buff.

Nonetheless, this literary field is not without its handsome wraparound covers. Two of the best actually appeared on hardcover editions of James Bond espionage adventures, brought to market by British publisher Jonathan Cape: the 1965 version of Ian Fleming’s The Man with the Golden Gun, with an illustration by Richard Chopping; and the first 007 continuation novel, 1968’s Colonel Sun, by “Robert Markham” (aka Kingsley Amis), which features a painting by Tom Adams. American artist Robert McGinnis took multiple opportunities to create elongated cover art. Of the paperbacks you’ll see by scrolling down this post, he was behind the fronts of The Girl Who Was Possessed, The Bump and Grind Murders, and A Corpse for Christmas (all entries in Alan Geoffrey Yates’ long-running Carter Brown series), as well as Brooks Wilson, Ltd. and Virgin Cay.

I’m sorry to say that my collection contains none of the crime, mystery, and thriller books with painted fronts that are showcased below. I can only share scans of them borrowed from other sources. Among the artists whose work is to be found here are Arthur Sarnoff (Driven), Richard M. Powers (Blood on the Desert), Tom Adams again (Hickory Dickory Death and Mrs. McGinty’s Dead), Barye Phillips (Death Is a Lovely Dame), Victor Kalin (The Red Lamp, Episode of the Wandering Knife, The Confession and Sight Unseen, The Dry and Lawless Years, and Hillside Strangler), Michael Codd (First Blood), Charles Moll (Cocaine Blues), Mitchell Hooks (The Ranch Cat), Gordon Johnson (Devil’s Gamble), and Tom Simmonds (Jaws).

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

Should things work out as planned, I shall produce one final post about wraparound book fronts before wrapping up this latest series. It’s likely to show up in Killer Covers sometime in November.

Front to Back: Future Tense

Part II of a series spotlighting wraparound paperback art.


Beyond Tomorrow, edited by Damon Knight (Pan UK, 1973). Cover illustration by Ian Miller, with an unusual title typeface dating back to the early 20th century.

OK, so it’s now been a couple of weeks since I began posting my multipart look at wraparound paperback fronts. We finally turn to the science fiction and fantasy genres, which have left us with more examples of this extended artwork than any other category of book. Many more examples. And some beauts, to boot.

I was a big reader of SF during my teenage years, and I own some of the specimens displayed below (most of which are softcovers, with a couple of hardbacks thrown in). Others I can only wish to have found and collected when they we still available for their modest cover prices. Among the artists represented below are Dean Ellis (Protector, The Lost Continent), Peter Andrew Jones (A World Out of Time, The Patchwork Girl), Michael Whelan (The Smoke Ring), Brad Holland (Cities in Flight), Ken Laidlaw (Doctor Rat), Gervasio Gallardo (Fungi from Yuggoth & Other Poems), the remarkably prolific Bruce Pennington (Satan’s World, Dune Messiah, Lost Worlds), Ian Miller (Guardians of Time, Long After Midnight, I Sing the Body Electric!, S Is for Space, R Is for Rocket, The Golden Apples of the Sun, The Time Machine), Richard Powers (Brain Wave, Expedition to Earth, Indoctrinaire), Bob Pepper (A Voyage to Arcturus, The Mask of Circe, The Omega Point), Louis Glanzman (Tales of Neverÿon), Chris Moore (The Fountains of Paradise), David McCall Johnston (Orlando Furioso, The Tsaddik of the Seven Wonders), Leo and Diane Dillon (Strange Wine), Paul Slater (The Space Machine), Jeff Jones (The Dying Wizard, The Vultures of Whapeton), Tony Roberts (Double Star), Patrick Woodroffe (Waldo & Magic, Inc., Seven Footprints to Satan), Alan Lee (The Lost World), Ian Pollock (Profundis), Chris Foss (Orbit 4), Ray Cruz (The Shaving of Shagpat), Chris Yates (Rogue Moon), Josh Kirby (Wooden Centauri), Don Maitz (The Virgin & the Wheels), and Robert LoGrippo (The Boats of the Glen Carrig).

Also well-remembered for his wraparounds is Tim Gill, who created beautiful fronts for Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia trilogy in the 1980s.

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

FOLLOW-UP: Two more examples of sci-fi wraparounds came to my attention after this piece was posted. Tom Stimpson created the artwork for The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (1980), while credit goes to Jim Burns for the front of The Stochastic Man (1978).