Because I Needed a Fischer Fix …

The Silent Dust, by Bruno Fischer (Signet, 1951). This was the fourth of five Fischer novels to feature Ben Helm, an ex-cop turned private investigator in New York City.

Cover illustration by Warren King.

“Goin’,” by Jack M. Bickham

Goin’, by Jack M. Bickham (Popular Library, 1971). Cover illustration by Lew McCance.

(Hat tip to Tim Hewitt for the artwork.)

Another Look: “Walk with Evil”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Walk with Evil, by Robert Wilder (Crest, 1957); cover illustration by Charles Binger. Right: Walk with Evil, by Robert Wilder (Crest, 1960); with a cover by Barye Phillips.

“The Mutilators,” by Basil Heatter

The Mutilators, by Basil Heatter (Gold Medal, 1962), featuring cover artwork by John McDermott.

According to a write-up on the Web site of Stark House Press (which has so far republished two of his novels), “Basil Heatter, the son of radio commentator Gabriel Heatter, was born on Long Island on March 26, 1918. He attended schools in Connecticut, then went abroad when was 16 for a two-year travel stint through Europe. Returning to America, he went to work for a New York advertising agency. He enlisted in the Navy in 1940 and during WWII served as a skipper on a PT (patrol torpedo) boat in the Southwest Pacific.

“Besides being a news commentator himself, Heatter wrote twenty novels of intrigue and adventure—beginning with The Dim View in 1946, the story of a young PT boat skipper—as well as several non-fiction works revolving around his love of the sea. In fact, he lived for years off Key West on his own self-built sailboat, The Blue Duck. He passed away June 12, 2009, in Miami, Florida.”

READ MORE: “Basil Heatter and the Great Comma Awakening,” by Robert Fromberg (Los Angeles Review of Books).

“Do Not Murder Before Christmas,” by Jack Iams

Do Not Murder Before Christmas, by Jack Iams (Dell, 1951). Although this novel was published in hardcover in 1949, by William Morrow, it is the above paperback edition that wins the most notice, especially at this time of year. The artwork here is by Robert Stanley, about whom we’ve written extensively before, and the story is the fifth to star newspaper editor Stanley Rockwell, aka Rocky. Author Iams—whose real name was Samuel H. Iams Jr. (1910-1990)—was himself a journalist with more than half a century’s experience, having labored as “a foreign correspondent, a writer for Newsweek, and an author of comic and mystery novels,” according to his obituary.

“This Is for Keeps,” by George Joseph

This Is for Keeps, by George Joseph (Popular Library, 1958). Men’s magazines historian Robert Deis says that Joseph “worked as a lawyer in New Zealand for 40 years. On the side, he wrote hundreds of short stories and a number of fiction and non-fiction books.” Among Joseph’s other works were the novels When the Rainbow Is Pale (1962), Take Any City (1970), Trial and Error (1979), and the non-fiction study By a Person or Persons Unknown (1982), which showcases unsolved New Zealand homicides.

Cover artwork by Harry Schaare.

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).

“Danger for Breakfast,” by John McPartland

Danger for Breakfast, by John McPartland (Gold Medal, 1956).

According to Wikipedia, John Donald McPartland was born in Chicago, Illinois, back in 1911, and later went on to train as an engineer. However, after serving with the U.S. Army in World War II, McPartland transformed himself into a journalist and author. His controversial but fairly successful non-fiction work, Sex in Our Changing World (1947), was described by The New York Times as “essentially a sermon” about how, since the war ended, “America has changed drastically from a sex-shy, inhibited people to a hedonistic, cynical people, openly in search of pleasure.” He followed up that debut in 1952 with Love Me Now, his first work of hard-boiled fiction.

McPartland subsequently composed Tokyo Doll (1953) and Affair in Tokyo (1954)—both influenced by the time he spent in the South Pacific as an Army reservist during the Korean War—as well as The Face of Evil (1954) and The Kingdom of Johnny Cool (1959), the latter of which was adapted into the 1963 film Johnny Cool starring Elizabeth Montgomery and Henry Silva. The novel that gained him the greatest attention, though, was No Down Payment, a tale of suburban sex, alcohol, and marriage troubles that reached print in 1957 and was soon transformed into a movie of that same title starring Joanne Woodward, Sheree North, and Tony Randall.

Danger for Breakfast, featuring paperback cover art by Barye Phillips, has been all but forgotten over the decades. Yet its back-cover plot précis shows the author’s taste for international intrigue:

She was half naked and sobbing when MacBride saw her first, in the fourth-floor corridor of a Tokyo hotel.

Pooled out around her were four men—one dying, one dead, and one ferociously hurt. MacBride had broken the throat of one and blinded another.

Her name was Dorrie Eden. She had copper-red hair and a wonderful body, and the secret she knew made her a living time bomb—the most dangerous woman alive in the East.

They assigned MacBride to Dorrie Eden. They told him to kill her and make it look like an accident.

It was a hell of a way to protect his country—because by then MacBride had fallen in love with her.

In all, McPartland published 11 novels, several of which remain in print (including a Stark House Press combo of Big Red’s Daughter and Tokyo Doll, and Centipede Press’ reprint of 1956’s I'll See You in Hell), and saw half a dozen of his screenplays produced. Unfortunately, his career was cut short by a heart attack in 1958, when he was 47 years old and living in Monterey, California.

Not until the settlement of his estate was it learned that the author had—as Time magazine put it—“lived as harum-scarum a life as any of his characters, had a legal wife and son at Mill Valley, Calif., [plus] a mistress at Monterey who bore him five children and who, as Mrs. Eleanor McPartland, was named the city’s 1956 ‘Mother of the Year.’ Later, McPartland’s legal widow submitted the daughter of an unnamed third woman as one of the novelist’s rightful heirs.”

“Hot Lips,” by Jack Hanley

Hot Lips, by Jack Hanley (Intimate, 1952).

I don't own this long-forgotten paperback novel, but in its 2019 write-up about Hot Lips, Pulp International said its story is

about an ‘all-girl’ orchestra called the Musical Queens and the things they do when boys aren’t around. Which we can understand. Just look at the male figure [on the cover], whose name is Pete. What exactly does he bring to this party? A sense of brooding entitlement? A vague homophobic hostility? The latter, for sure, since he lost his wife to another woman and is dismayed to find himself in sexual competition with the band’s man-hating sax player. Why does saxy Mona hate men? Because her husband turned out to be a drag queen. But all Pete has to do is wait a bit, because while the wholesome, virginal object of desire in this, Althea, may be tempted by wild musical lesbians, such assignations are never permanent in mid-century genre fiction. It’s heteronormativity or death—literally, sometimes. Put Hot Lips in the lesbians-are-bad bin with a pile of other novels from the period.

The party responsible for this tantalizing tale, Jack Hanley (1905-1963), has been described as “a novelist and television writer of no special talent, [who] specialized in racy material:” Among Hanley’s other works of fiction were Star Lust (1951), Very Private Secretary (1952), and New York Model (1953). He also penned non-fiction books, including Let's Make Mary: Being a Gentleman's Guide to Scientific Seduction in Eight Easy Lessons (1937).

As to the cover of Hot Lips, it was painted by Warren King (1916-1968). In addition to creating magazine illustrations and book covers, King was a longtime editorial cartoonist for the New York Daily News and a comic-book artist.

“Above Suspicion,” by Helen MacInness

Above Suspicion, by Helen MacInness (Fawcett Crest, 1981). Cover illustration by Ron Lesser. This same artwork was also used to front the 1983 Leisure Books mass-market paperback edition of The Microwave Factor, by Aaron Fletcher.

(Hat tip to Tim Hewitt.)

Another Look: “Striptease”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Striptease, by Georges Simenon (Hamish Hamilton UK, 1958); with an altogether spectacular cover illustration by an unidentified artist. Right: Striptease, by Georges Simenon (Penguin, 1963); cover painting by Romek Marber.​

“Close-Up,” by Len Deighton

A plot synopsis for this eighth novel by British pastry chef-turned-editor-turned-author Len Deighton reads:

Ageing Hollywood star Marshall Stone is scared. Scared that the parts are drying up. Scared of being forgotten. So when he hears an eminent author is writing his biography, Stone seizes the chance of immortality. But painful memories and suppressed scandals soon threaten to destroy the carefully-constructed fiction of his life. Inspired by Len Deighton's own experiences of the film industry, Close-Up is a brilliant exposé of the sleaze, venality and betrayals of the studio machine.

The Cover-Up wrapper showcased above and below comes from a softcover edition published in 1973 by Signet Books. I like the artwork a great deal, but the identity of its painter seems lost to history. Even Tim Hewitt, the South Carolina former tech writer and paperback collector to whom I often turn for such answers, is stumped.

“I really wish I had a definitive answer on this one,” he wrote to me recently, “but no such luck. I’ve always been inclined to think it’s Elaine Duillo. It’s easily within her style and reminds me of her covers for the Ron Goulart ‘Johnny Easy’ books. But there’s some other quality about it that I can’t quite put my finger on that makes me think it could possibly be Sanjulián. (The shading on the woman’s body; the hard line separating her from the camera in the background; something intangible?)

“Unfortunately, I don’t have anything to go on except feeling and impression. It’s too bad, because Close-Up is easily the best cover Len Deighton ever got, at least in the U.S.”

I guess we’ll just have to be content with the credit for this illustration being a mystery—at least for now.

When “Dolls” Come Out to Play

South Florida resident Robert Deis, with whom I worked on last year’s The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens, alerts me to this month’s release of its sequel, The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 2: Dangerous Dames and Cover Dolls, co-edited by Deis, Bill Cunningham, and Daniel Zimmer. I haven’t yet laid my hands on a copy, but here’s Amazon’s skinny on its intents and contents:

In the late 1950s, while studying with the legendary art teacher Frank J. Reilly at the Art Students League in New York City, Ron Lesser embarked on a long career as one of America’s top illustration artists. Over the next four decades, his artwork was used for thousands of paperback book covers, movie posters, magazines, and advertisements. Many great artists once made a good living doing such illustration artwork and Ron Lesser is among the greatest. He’s also one of the few who are still alive and still painting.

Like a number of other top 20th-century illustrators, Lesser went on to do paintings for galleries as the market for illustration art faded away in the 1990s. His gallery artwork includes Civil War and Western scenes, sports, celebrity portraits, and new versions of the types of subjects he once did for paperback covers. The Art of Ron Lesser Vol. 1 is the first in the series covering Ron's paperback, movie and advertising art. The Art of Ron Lesser Vol. 2 covers Ron's transition out of paperback illustration and into advertising, movie, and gallery illustration which he continues to this day.

In his Men’s Pulp Mags blog, Deis explains that Dangerous Dames and Cover Dolls “showcases scores of the paintings of sexy women Lesser has done in recent decades for galleries. Some are modern versions of the ‘dangerous dame’-style cover art he did for paperbacks in the 1960s and 1970s. Others are paintings of sexy celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page, Brigitte Bardot, and Pam Anderson, and pop-culture characters like Vampirella, Red Sonja, and Harley Quinn.”

Like its predecessor, this book is said to include “commentary by Ron about his artwork and career.”

It sounds like a beautiful, fun follow-up to our previous work!

“The Tritonian Ring,” by L. Sprague de Camp

And what a lovely book front this is! It comes from the 1971 Paperback Library edition of The Tritonian Ring, by American science-fiction and fantasy writer Lyon Sprague de Camp (1907-2000), part of his Pusadian “sword and sorcery” series. Sadly, I don’t own this novel, so cannot judge it on any basis other than its cover. But a plot summary from Wikipedia reads:

When the gods resolve to destroy Lorsk, principal kingdom of the sinking continent of Pusad, because Prince Vakar, heir to its throne, is thought to be a threat to them, the king sends the prince on a quest to save the realm from destruction. Vakar is tasked with traveling the known world in search of what the gods most fear, accompanied only by his servant, Fual. He finds himself hampered by ignorance of just what that might be and continual attempts to murder him by parties unknown; meanwhile, his treasonous brother Kuros is plotting with the pirates of the Gorgon Isles, Lorsk's enemies, to overthrow their father. On his quest Vakar encounters Amazons, a seductive queen who is under a spell, an amorous centauress, sorcerers who command legions of headless warriors, and the dangerous Gorgonians themselves, masters of the medusas with their paralyzing glares.

I thought the willowy young woman shown above might be the “amorous centauress” in question; she’s clearly an essential character in de Camp’s yarn, being also represented on other versions of this book (such as this one). However, while said filly sports a tail, she lacks the horse’s aft end that I normally associate with such a mythical creature. Perhaps Midwestern artist David McCall Johnston decided that feature might not be universally appealing.

Johnston, born in South Bend, Indiana, back in 1940, painted a small number of SF covers. During the years he spent as a book-cover artist, he came to be known much better for his contributions to the fantasy-fiction field. You can enjoy more of his work here.

Another Look: “The Mad Hatter Mystery”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Mad Hatter Mystery, by John Dickson Carr (Dell, 1953). This cover illustration is by Denver Gillen, perhaps best remembered for helping to create the image of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Right: The Mad Hatter Mystery, by John Dickson Carr (Berkley, 1958); cover art by Lu Kimmel. This was the second installment in Carr’s series starring Dr. Gideon Fell.

This Is How Human Kindness Works

Here’s a happy follow-up to a story we brought you in mid-July. A GoFundMe campaign launched to pay the housing and medical bills of renowned 95-year-old artist, art instructor, and author Jack Faragasso has exceeded its goal. His niece, Denise Acerra, was hoping to raise $10,000 for Faragasso’s care. When I went to look for an update yesterday, I discovered that $10,551 has been pledged, and GoFundMe now says, “This fundraiser is no longer accepting donations.”

Faragasso posted a note of appreciation on Facebook last week:

As I reflect today on my life, it is truly overwhelming to see how many beautiful fans and friends, including my students, have shown me so much kindness, generosity and support. I am honored and so humbled. Thank you Thank you Thank you all for purchasing my artwork, books and prints through the years. You all have truly blessed my life.

We wish Faragasso only the best for the future.