McGinnis Nine-Nine: “A Flag Full of Stars”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



A Flag Full of Stars, by Don Robertson (Fawcett Crest, 1965).

Don Robertson (1929-1989) may be largely forgotten nowadays, but that Cleveland, Ohio-born author certainly made his mark during his time. As the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History recalls, “Robertson’s first novel, The Three Days, was blasted by President Eisenhower for the obscene language used by its soldier characters. Robertson would publish eighteen more novels, many of which were set in Ohio and revolved around historical events. Among his best known books are The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, Praise the Human Season, The Second Murder, and Paradise Falls. His novel The Ideal, Genuine Man was published in 1988 by Philtrum Press, Stephen King’s small publishing house. King called Robertson one of his three greatest influences and one of the best unknown published novelists in the United States.”

As if driven by the insistent seductions of sentimentality, Robertson set many of his tales in what to him would’ve been the recent past. And, “like John O’Hara, Robertson often linked novels that were not substantially related by including brief allusions to characters and events in his previous works,” explains Wikipedia.

I don’t find much information online about A Flag Full of Stars, which was first published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1964. But I do know it was set amid the 1948 U.S. presidential election, which—contrary to a memorable banner headline in the Chicago Tribune—saw Democratic incumbent Harry Truman beat Republican New York governor Thomas E. Dewey. Kirkus Reviews had this to say about the book:

[This] is a very big novel which promises an enormous pay-off that it more than half delivers. It is generically modeled after Dos Passos’ U.S.A. and its story takes place everywhere on the special day chosen for the drama—the day when Truman beat Dewey in the upset of the century. Robertson tunes his typewriter up for nostalgia, but vamp as he will those leaden keys of realism, it rarely comes across. But in the many scenes, which are part of the fictional device on which the novel is built, the reader is here and there and everywhere, with candidates running for office, a movie, star, a major-league ball player, or a 110-year-old Civil War veteran. His death occasions one of the more imaginative moments in the book. Robertson … often writes much better than his characters talk, and the whole book revels in the irony of Truman’s triumph. … This may catch on.

I don’t see many copies of the 1965 paperback edition, bearing Robert McGinnis’ cover illustration, available through the Internet. But acquiring the hardcover version at a reasonable price is much easier.

McGinnis Nine-Nine: “One Wife’s Ways”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



One Wife’s Ways, by Gardner F. Fox (Gold Medal, 1962).

New York City-born author Gardner F. Fox (1911-1986) has shown up several times in Killer Covers, under his own name as well as assorted noms de plume. He may be best remembered nowadays for the work he did as a comic-book writer, laboring over such DC titles as Flash, Hawkman, Doctor Fate, and Sandman. He also created Barbara Gordon, which as any Batman fan knows, was the true identity of Batgirl.

Fox, though, began his lengthy career concocting stories for pulp magazines in all genres, especially science fiction and westerns. His first published novel, a historical romance titled The Borgia Blade, was released in 1953 by Belmont. He went on to pen a succession of sword-and-sorcery yarns, historical adventures, and—under the pseudonyms Rod Gray, Glen Chase, and Troy Conway—a wealth of rather risqué espionage tales. He’s credited, too, with a few suspense novels.

One Wife’s Ways fits into that last category. Here’s a plot synopsis:

Somewhere there was a woman who knew the truth about the automobile that plunged over the cliff, the truth about the odd robbery attempt that was no robbery at all, the truth about the bomb that was meant to kill Dan Kinnick.

Somewhere there was a woman …

Midge—liar and cheat, and long past caring whether somebody was really trying to murder Dan Kinnick.

Donna—lover and protector, and courting death the way some girls court mink.

Thyra—temptress and hoyden, not caring how many times the killers failed to get Kinnick, just so long as she could keep him in her bed.

After being long out of print, this slender work was reissued in 2018 by Wildside Press—with its original Robert McGinnis cover art!

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE: Read Chapter One of this novel by clicking over to Kurt Brugel’s extensive site, The Gardner Francis Fox Library.

McGinnis Nine-Nine: “The Valiant Strain”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



The Valiant Strain, by Kenneth E. Shiflet (Dell, 1959).

You might not be surprised to learn, after appreciating the cavalry lineup featured in this Robert McGinnis cover, that author Kenneth E. Shiflet served much of his life in the U.S. military. Born in western New York state in 1918, he went on to become a signal corps communications officer during World War II. He was stationed variously in Africa, Sicily, and Italy, “and helped develop mobile communications units used during the invasion of Italy,” according to his obituary in The Washington Post. Subsequently, Shiflet assisted signal corps in Germany and Ecuador. During the late 1960s, he was a member of the staff of General William Westmoreland, who was then the Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army.

Shiflet started writing while he was still in uniform. In the aftermath of World War II, he apparently took first-place honors in an Army-sponsored short-story competition. He made his first magazine fiction sale to Esquire, his tale (“Donna”) reaching print in 1951. After he retired from the military with the rank of colonel, in 1972, he joined the Congressional Schools (now “School”) of Virginia in Falls Church, and by the time of his death half a dozen years later, at age 60, had risen to the chairmanship of that institution’s English department.

The Valiant Strain was the first of two historical novels penned by Shiflet. I don’t a copy of this work, nor do I know much about the story it contains, having not found a single review online. So I am left to rely on the back-cover text—which is really just a longer version of the teaser on its front—for even the most modest understanding of its plot: “A story as big and rugged as the Oregon Territory in 1855 … A story of a long Dragoon company fighting for a future it might never see, and of a shavetail lieutenant who had nothing in common with his men, except the valiant strain the brought them to their final glory.”

Both that 47-year-old Post obit and Shiflet’s Find a Grave page confidently state The Valiant Strain “was made into a movie by MGM,” but I have yet to find any corroborative evidence.

Shiflet’s only other novel, The Convenient Coward, was released in hardcover by Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based Stackpole Books back in 1961. Its jacket flap copy describes it as “a fictionalized biography based on the life of Marcus A. Reno, who commanded the battalion of the 7th Cavalry that survived the Custer Massacre [of 1876].”

McGinnis Nine-Nine: Milo’s March of Crimes

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



About two years ago, when I was visiting an old college friend in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we stopped by the new home of Uncle Edgar’s Mystery Bookstore (relocated after a fire in 2020). While there, I happened across a shelf filled with Paperback Library reprints of Kendell Crossen yarns from the early 1970s—all with Robert McGinnis-painted covers. Crossen, you will likely remember, produced more than 20 novels starring globetrotting insurance investigator Milo March, published initially under the pseudonym M.E. Chaber.

Needless to say, I promptly loaded my arms with the titles not already in my collection, and headed to the sales counter.

Crossen’s crime and mystery works were once very popular with readers, especially with readers of the male persuasion. And you can probably tell why, if you notice some of the cover blurbs on his March books, describing their protagonist as “smoothly impudent” and “one of the most convincing he-man detectives that ever hoisted a martini.” Those lines don’t mention March’s desirability among the female population, but the Web site Spy Guys and Gals points out that in these fast-paced and often fun stories, he “never sees a drink that doesn’t need sipping or a lovely lady that doesn’t need kissing and he is too gallant to refuse either.” McGinnis’ Paperback Library fronts only emphasized those points, being filled with long-legged and never overly attired lovelies, and March (looking very much like actor James Coburn, it should be said) inevitably with a glass and gun in hand.

Most of the Milo March books were published during the 1950s and ’60s, and for many years afterward, it was only by poking through used bookstores that they could be obtained. All that changed in 2020, when pulp house Steeger Books—with help from the author’s daughter and literary executor, Kendra Crossen Burroughs—began releasing remastered, uniform editions of the March tales boasting bonus articles, Burroughs’ forewords or afterwords, and retro-style artwork. All 21 of the originally published books are now available again, together with a previously unpublished 22nd novel, Death to the Brides, and a collection of March short stories titled The Twisted Trap.

I must admit, though, that I still have a soft place in my heart for McGinnis’ Paperback Library (PL) series, which rolled out from 1970 to 1971. While some of those March entries have already been featured on this page in the past, and need not be revisited, the remainder are making their Killer Covers debuts here. I haven’t arranged them according to the numbers PL gave each, as they do not correspond to the order in which the books first saw print, but only to the sequence in which PL brought them before the reading public.













In addition to “M.E. Chaber,” Kendall Crossen also penned crime novels under a variety of the other noms de plume, including Bennett Barlay, Christopher Monig, Richard Foster, and Clay Richards. Paperback Library made the smart decision to assign McGinnis the responsibility of creating covers for the reprints of some of those, too.





READ MORE: “Milo March #2—No Grave for March” (Paperback Warrior).

McGinnis Nine-Nine: “Gentian Hill”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



Gentian Hill, by Elizabeth Goudge (Popular Library, circa 1970).*

Beyond the multitude of modern novels for which Robert McGinnis has created cover illustrations, he’s also painted first-class images for myriad works of historical fiction. Included among those was this front for Gentian Hill, a standalone novel initially released by Coward-McCann (an imprint of G.P. Putnam’s Sons) in 1949.

Its author was Elizabeth Goudge (1900-1984), an Englishwoman who, immediately after World War I, began penning fiction for adults as well as children. She published her first novel, Island Magic, in 1934. Wikipedia says that the prolific Goudge only really loved three of her own books: The Valley of Song (1951), The Dean’s Watch (1960), and The Child from the Sea (1970). Yet she may be best-remembered today for a 1946 children’s fantasy, The Little White Horse, which J.K Rowling has said influenced her work on the best-selling Harry Potter series. Her 1944 historical yarn, Green Dolphin Country (retitled Green Dolphin Street in the States), was adapted for the big screen in 1947, with Lana Turner, Van Heflin, and Donna Reed starring.

Goudge’s novels are described as being patiently plotted, though predictable at times, with significant attention given to their settings. They are known, too, to bear “strong Christian theme[s],” as one reviewer put it a few years back, “yet without any preaching. Faith is taken for granted, not just in God but in dreams, and superstitions, and also the ability to recognise kindred spirits.”

Robert McGinnis’ illustration for Gentian Hill, shown above, well reflects that novel’s amorous and prominent seafaring elements. Its action takes place in Devon, England, during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century. A frigate has anchored in a Devonshire bay, carrying a 15-year-old midshipman who determines to desert his post and free himself from the ship’s abusive captain. He swims to shore, and thereafter disappears into the surrounding countryside. His wandering eventually takes him to Weekaborough Farm near Gentian Hill, where he meets a notably sensitive 10-year-old girl, Stella. A romance soon blossoms between the pair, but it’s tragically interrupted by the boy having to return to the sea, this time under an alias.

“There is no guarantee that they will be reunited,” warned another blogger. Yet this wouldn’t be a true love story if they were not.

* Nailing down a firm publication date for this paperback has been difficult. Online sources were unhelpful, so I finally sent a note to collector Tim Hewitt, who said he owns a copy of the book. “But unfortunately,” he replied, “Popular Library was notorious (as far as I’m concerned, anyway) for not including any publication data on the copyright page other than the original copyright date. That’s the case with this one. Nothing there but the original 1949 copyright date.

“Popular reprinted a ton of older literary and former bestseller titles from decades earlier, so a lot of their books from the 1960s and ’70s have no print date for their edition. And you’re right; [1949 is] too early for McGinnis. He didn’t paint his first paperback cover until 1958! (Also, Popular Library paperbacks didn’t look like this in 1949. They were stubby and had a yellow rectangle with the words ‘Popular Library’ in the upper left corner of the cover.)

“I wish I could nail down a date, but the best I can do is say is that based on the cover price it's from sometime between 1970 and '75, probably on the lower end. (Lately I’ve just been labeling these Popular Library titles with ‘circa [pick a date].’ I had a history professor tell me once that as long as you said something happened ‘circa 1880’ you were right, even if the event happened in 1885!)”

McGinnis Nine-Nine: “Some Like It Cool”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.

Some Like It Cool, by “Robert Kyle,” aka Robert Terrall (Dell, 1962).

After crime novelist Robert Terrall died at age 94, breathing his last at a Connecticut retirement community back in 2009, I went looking for as many of his books as I could locate. A number of them were out of print, while others had never been widely credited to him (including 20 or more Mike Shayne yarns he ghost-wrote under the Brett Halliday byline). In the end, I think I acquired perhaps a dozen titles, including a couple of his Shaynes, a handful of his standalone novels, and his complete series starring New York City shamus Ben Gates.

Some Like It Cool, with its vivid Robert McGinnis-painted front, was the fourth of five Gates tales Terrall published during the late 1950s and early ’60s, all originally appearing under his Robert Kyle pseudonym. It’s also the only one of those that I have not yet read.

Which I admit is puzzling, given that the plot of this 160-page mystery burgeons with appealing ingredients: a proposal pending in the New York legislature to set up off-track betting stations in the state; bookies who are concerned for their jobs if the bill passes, and gambling prohibitionists adamant that it should not; plus bucketfuls of cash being flourished by both sides to sway votes. The sharp-witted, cigar-smoking Gates is brought into these matters initially to help publicize the bookies’ palm-greasing tactics, but a dark-tressed knockout from his past, as well as blackmail, murder, and the occasional gun being pointed in his general direction (or else wielded at his skull) keep him in the mix till the end. In its review of Some Like It Cool, Mystery*File questioned the drive and drama of Kyle/Terrall’s hard-boiled storytelling, but conceded that he “does have a sense of humor about the whole thing, which makes it go down a whole lot more easily.

Example: All of the suspects are gathered together a couple of chapters [before] the end to help close up the case. Nothing new about that, you say, and you’d be right, but have you ever read about one that takes place in a public ladies’ room? With an unfortunate woman unfortunately trapped in one [of] the stalls the whole time, with Ben Gates asking [her] often whether or not he’s making everything clear to her.

OK, maybe I need to move this vintage paperback up higher in my to-be-read pile. The late crime-fictionist Ed Gorman once described Robert Terrall as a “really fine craftsman” who was “especially good with dialogue,” and whose “sex scenes are really sexy and they’re good clean fun as well.” I won’t disagree with any of those points.

McGinnis Nine-Nine: “Shoot an Arrow to Stop the Wind”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



Shoot an Arrow to Stop the Wind, by Colin Stuart
(Popular Library, 1971).

With any luck, there will be no further works in this Killer Covers series that find me so utterly lacking in knowledge of their authors as this one does. Colin Stuart penned at least two novels, Shoot an Arrow to Stop the Wind (published originally in 1970 by Dial Press) and Walks Far Woman (which came out in 1976 from Doubleday). That’s pretty much all I know for certain about him. There’s another Colin Stuart who is an astronomy author and speaker, but judging from photos of him, he is far too young to have produced this paperback novel 54 years ago.

Fortunately, I can tell you a little bit about Shoot an Arrow’s plot. A February 1970 review in The New York Times called it

A gentle, unforced, lovely book. A novel that reads like a memoir, it is a record of a boy’s idyllic summer in northern Montana, near the Canadian border. The time is 1926, the boy is 16 and the whole world’s young. He is part, a very small part, Blackfoot Indian, but living with his “breed” family, the Indian side of him dominates the white. The boy learns a lot about white attitudes, Indian attitudes and mixed attitudes. He also learns a great deal of lore not found in books, mostly through his full‐blooded Indian great‐grand mother, a magic‐maker of prodigious proportions. He falls in love twice and discovers that life can become too complicated to explain.

Farm labor in the summer is a muscle wearying, energy‐draining enterprise, and Mr. Stuart doesn’t sweeten it up for us. On the other hand, he does let us share some of the compensations: a cold swim in the stream, the fresh summer‐grown food, the continual contact with the outdoors, the peace and harmony of a united effort in a productive cause. Modest in attitude, relaxed in the telling, the book is serious without being portentous, humorous without exaggeration, authentic without striving to be exotic. Only someone whose horizons are bounded by the Manhattan skyline would fail to enjoy it.

But about this novel’s author? Well, he is shrouded in mystery. His identity is made all the more confounding by the fact that credit for writing Walks Far Woman—which served as the basis for a 1982 Raquel Welch TV flick—is given by Amazon to both Colin Stuart and one Clark Spurlock. For a while, I toyed with the notion that “Colin Stuart” was a nom de plume for Spurlock, the latter of whom was responsible for a 1955 study of how the U.S. Supreme Court has dealt with various education issues. Their initials—“C.S.”—are the same, so … maybe? In the end, however, I decided that Amazon is simply mistaken. Other online sources make no mention of Spurlock having had anything to do with Walks Far Woman, and the copyright page of that novel’s 1978 Popular Library paperback edition lists only Stuart as its author.

Finally, I dug up a not-wholly-favorable critique of Walks Far Woman, published in the Autumn 1977 issue of American Indian Quarterly, that describes Dr. Colin Stuart as “a retired history professor.” Sadly, no mention is made of where he taught. Another dead end.

McGinnis Nine-Nine: “The Return”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



The Return, by Herbert Mitgang (Avon, 1973).

That I have enough still-unposted images of Robert McGinnis covers to fill out a birthday tribute series is largely down to two sources: Today’s Inspiration, a members-only Facebook page devoted to “classic illustration, animation, cartoon, and comic art from the mid-20th century”; and South Carolina resident Tim Hewitt, a former tech writer and “web monkey” turned ardent paperback collector, who has assisted me with several Killer Covers projects (such as this one). Tim was responsible for introducing me to today’s paperback front.

Herbert Mitgang was born on Manhattan Island, in New York City, back in 1920, earned a law degree from St. John’s College in Brooklyn (now St. John’s University), edited the military newspaper Stars and Stripes during World War II, and then spent 47 years at The New York Times, where he supervised the Sunday drama section (today’s Arts & Leisure), helped create the Op-Ed page in 1970, and served a lengthy stint as a book critic. (I used to relish his witty reviews.) Oh, and in 1956 Mitgang took up writing his own books, eventually penning 15 of them, including biographies of Abraham Lincoln, a retrospective on the 1930s confrontation between New York Mayor Jimmy Walker and then-governor of New York Franklin D. Roosevelt, and what the Times called “an exposé of the F.B.I.’s bulging files on America’s most renowned writers—John Steinbeck’s dossier was 800 pages long …”

The Return was the first among a handful of novels to his credit. Initially published by Simon & Schuster in 1959, its story builds around an American ex-GI who returns to Sicily after the war, searching for both strategic materials on his company’s behalf and for a young Italian woman he’d known and loved there. A contemporary Times critique called it “a sound and serious novel,” adding that Mitgang “displays a sure understanding of the Sicily he knew as a soldier in the Mediterranean theatre and of the profound post-war currents that have rent the ancient fabric of its traditions.”

(Left) The original, 1959 edition.

Mitgang was a lion in Gotham journalism circles. Beyond his career at the Times, he was assistant to the president and executive editor of CBS News, a visiting professor at Yale University, and an executive board member of the New York Newspaper Guild. He did time as president of both the Authors League Fund and the Authors Guild, and even scripted two one-man plays. After his demise in 2013 at age 93, the Times lauded him in a fashion every journalist might wish to be recalled, as “a perceptive reporter and deft stylist.”

Robert McGinnis was better recognized for creating sexy paperback covers, or ominous ones, but he was no slouch, either, when the assignment called for a romantic floral profusion. I’ll probably never own a copy of Avon’s issue of The Return, but after the many times I’ve studied it, it has become one of my favorites from his portfolio.

McGinnis Nine-Nine: “Dragon’s Mount”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



Dragon’s Mount, by “Deirdre Rowan,” aka Jeanne Williams
(Fawcett Gold Medal, 1973).

Looking over a list of this author’s profuse works is enough to make an aspiring novelist cringe in fear of never measuring up. Yet I had never even heard of her until now. She was born Dorothy Jeanne Williams in Elkhart, Kansas, in 1930, and spent most of her life penning historical romances set on the American frontier and elsewhere, released under her own name as well as various pseudonyms (including Jeanne Crecy, Kristin Michaels, and of course Deirdre Rowan). According to an obituary published after her death in 2024, Williams “was only the second female to be invited to join the Western Writers of America and she became an active member, serving on the board and as president and membership chair.” During her career, she received four Spur Awards for her fiction and in 2015 was inducted into the Western Writers Hall of Fame.

Dragon’s Mount, with its original cover art by Robert McGinnis, definitely falls into the “elsewhere” category of Williams’ storytelling backdrops. Here’s Goodreads’ plot summary:

Jill Underwood had come from America to England—to Dragon’s Mount, the Regiers’ huge old house near Stonehenge. The Reigers were an ancient family, and there were many dark, scandalous tales about them. Jill tried not to listen to them. The private lives of the family were none of her business. Only her young charge, Kelsey Regier, was her concern. But then frightening things began to happen … the slashed toys, the beheaded doll, the mysterious references to Paul Regier’s runaway first wife. And of course the warnings to Jill to leave at once. Then Jill stumbled upon the terrible secret of the hidden passage and her own life was suddenly in danger!

If you would like to read the whole book, a 1975 UK edition is available here, courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Williams produced at least a quartet of other “Deirdre Rowan” works: Shadow of the Volcano (1975), Silver Wood (1975), Time of the Burning Mask (1976), and Ravensgate (1976), all classified as “European suspense” yarns. In addition to her many adult novels, she penned works for young adults. Judy Alter, a Texas critic and fellow author, applauded Williams for her “careful and accurate research,” and once opined that by her later years, Williams had “moved beyond the confines of historical romance and … may be classified as mainstream fiction.”

Raging Beasts and Riveting Busts

Mort Künstler, the Brooklyn, New York-born artist best known for painting paperback book covers, illustrations for men’s magazines, and depictions of historical events, died on February 2 at age 97. The newspaper Newsday recalls that as a young man, Künstler

was a member of four college teams. He even received an athletic scholarship to attend UCLA after three years at Brooklyn College but had to leave in his first semester when his father had a heart attack. After returning to Brooklyn, he studied art at Pratt Institute, where his backup career choice as an illustrator and fine artist took root.

Künstler would go on to paint about 4,000 magazine covers, movie ads and canvases for NASA, the U.S. Postal Service (a depiction of Black soldiers in the Indian Wars in 1994), institutions and private collectors. His paintings are in the permanent collection of more than 50 museums and his work has been featured in more than 20 books. He was the subject of an A&E documentary in 1993.

His specialty was images of the Civil War, and historians and art critics considered him the premier historical artist in the country—one known for his detailed research and accurate depictions of scenes from Colonial times through the Space Age.

In 2006, M. Stephen Doherty, editor of American Artist magazine, wrote, “Künstler is now known as America’s foremost historical artist” and since the late 1970s “has been recognized as a distinguished fine artist.”

Like probably most readers of this blog, though, I am more familiar with Künstler’s year’s working for periodicals and book publishers.

(Above) Two examples of Mort Künstler’s work for men’s magazines. Top: From Stag, May 1972, art by Kunstler as “Emmett Kaye.” Bottom: Male, February 1965. (Hat tip to Robert Deis)

A biographical sketch at his Web site says that, after apprenticing with elder artist George Gross, Künstler started out in the early 1950s seeking employment as an advertising illustrator—just as ad agencies were “increasingly moving towards television rather than print media. This loss of revenue caused magazines to fail or merge, as more illustration work was being replaced by color photography.

However, Mort worked hard and thrived in this competitive environment. By the mid-1950s he had become a skilled working artist receiving jobs from many of the most prominent and popular publishers of the day. Book publisher Dodd, Mead & Company, and magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Classics Illustrated, Sports Afield, Boys’ Life, Outdoor Life, and Magazine Management’s Men’s Adventure, Male, and True Magazine regularly published his work for covers and interior illustrations. They liked his dynamic illustrations, which focused on themes of man’s encounters with nature, criminals and mobsters, damsels in distress, espionage, and military conflicts. They were gripping, rich in detail and immensely popular.

Mort completed at least three cover illustrations and two inside illustrations every month for one publisher, Magazine Management Company, alone. It’s the main reason he used pen names such as Martin Kay and Emmett Kaye: the editors didn’t want it to look like one person was doing all of the magazines’ illustrations.

If you would like to revisit Künstler’s book and magazine art, both Flickr and Pulp Covers host excellent examples of that work. Or take a rewarding spin through the blog he wrote for 15 years.

His Web site notes that during the 1970s, Künstler began receiving assignments from mainstream magazines such as Newsweek and Good Housekeeping. It was during that same period that he started painting movie posters (for The Poseidon Adventure, for instance). In 1979, he was hired by NASA as official artist for the Space Shuttle Columbia, and three years later, Künstler was commissioned to create artwork for the CBS-TV mini-series The Blue and the Gray. That convinced him to concentrate on imagery from the American Civil War and U.S. history. Samples of his work in that field can be enjoyed at this link.

Mort Künstler was an exceptional artist, who could capture drama, danger, and the delicacy of a beautiful woman in the stroke of a brush. He will be sorely missed, but his work lives on and will likely continue to earn new fans well into the future.

McGinnis Nine-Nine: “The Way We Live Now”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



The Way We Live Now, by Warren Miller (Crest, 1959).

Although his name no longer sparks the recognition it once did, Miller (1921-1966) was known in the mid-20th century for his novels exploring issues of race. As the National Book Foundation Web site explains, his most famous work, 1959’s The Cool World, focused on “a youth gang called the ‘Crocadiles’ in 1950s Harlem, New York City.

Narrated in the first person by the protagonist and Crocadile member Duke, The Cool World recounts the story of Duke and his gang’s adventures and travails as they deal with street life in the ghetto and a rival gang called the Wolves. Drug dealing, fights, prostitution, guns, and gambling are rampant throughout this engaging, slim novel that rarely has a dull moment. Written entirely in African-American street vernacular of the time, Miller—a Caucasian academic—accomplished a great, and mostly unnoticed, linguistic and narrative feat with this novel.

None other than James Baldwin applauded The Cool World as “one of the finest novels about Harlem that had ever come my way.” That forceful yarn was later among the finalists for the 1960 National Book Award, and in 1963 it was adapted for the big screen.

The Way We Live Now, first published in January 1958 by Little, Brown, made less of a splash than its predecessor. However, it did turn some readers’ heads, being described, by Louisiana’s old Lafayette Observer, as “Peyton Place with a New York setting,” and winning the then-36-year-old Miller favorable comparisons to J.D. Salinger. It’s the sad story of advertising executive Lionel Aldridge, who—feeling restless in his middle years—walks out on his wife and daughter, only to embark on a string of ill-fated love affairs. Miller “records it [all] with a telltale accuracy and more than a little sympathy,” opined Kirkus Reviews.

A film based on The Way We Live Now, starring Nicholas Pryor, Joanna Miles, and a young Linda Blair, premiered in 1970.

Warren Miller went on to produce additional books, including the novels Love Me Little (released in 1962 as by “Amanda Vail”) and The Siege of Harlem (1964), and three children’s works he co-authored with cartoonist Edward Sorel. He also reportedly “doctored into publishable health” Return to Peyton Place, a 1959 sequel to Grace Metalious’ Peyton Place (1956). And he did time as literary editor for The Nation magazine. Miller died of lung cancer at age 44.

In addition to painting the cover, shown above, of the 1959 edition of The Way We Live Now (see his signature obscured by the author’s byline?), Robert McGinnis was responsible for the illustration fronting the 1963 paperback version of Miller’s Flush Times.

McGinnis Nine-Nine: “Warrant for X”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



Warrant for X, by Philip MacDonald (Dell, 1962).

Born in London, England, in 1901, MacDonald broke into novel-writing in 1924 with The Rasp, the first of a dozen whodunits—including his best-known work, The List of Adrian Messenger—that he’d write about Colonel Anthony Gethryn, an ex-secret service agent and newspaper reporter. By 1938, when his Gethryn thriller The Nursemaid Who Vanished (later retitled Warrant for X in the United States) first saw publication, he had become one of the world’s most popular crime novelists and had moved to Hollywood to embark on a parallel screenwriting career. His TV credits include episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Richard Diamond, Private Detective, and Perry Mason, while among his movie projects were Charlie Chan in London (1934), Mr. Moto’s Last Warning (1938), and Love from a Stranger (1947). MacDonald did not, however, pen the scripts for either the 1939 UK film version of The Nursemaid Who Disappeared or its 1956 U.S. adaptation, 23 Paces to Baker Street. He died in California in 1980.

I don’t know about you, but every time I look at McGinnis’ Warrant for X cover, I think he must have modeled his smoking man in the chair on American author Gore Vidal.

McGinnis Nine-Nine: “The Innocent”

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



The Innocent, by Madison Jones (Popular Library, 1970).

Published originally in 1957, this was “the first novel by one of the major writers of contemporary Southern fiction,” explains an oft-repeated description of The Innocent. “Although Jones [1925-2012] won many awards in his lifetime, his work is not as well known as it should be. This is the story of a young man returning to his father’s farm in Tennessee after a failed career and a disastrous marriage only to find change, regimentation and a loss of freedom everywhere he looks. The idealism of Duncan Welsh is contrasted with the willfully evil Aaron McCool, a moonshiner encamped on Duncan's family’s property.”

McGinnis’ original art for this novel can be enjoyed here.

READ MORE: “Remembering Madison Jones,” by Jeremy Henderson
(The War Eagle Reader).

McGinnis Nine-Nine: A Sizzling Start

There’s every chance that, even as you read this, renowned American artist and illustrator Robert McGinnis is blowing out candles and making wishes in celebration of his 99th birthday. That’s right: He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on February 3, 1926. So while he hasn’t yet achieved Jimmy Carter’s longevity, he is awfully damn close.

I have written about McGinnis a number of times over the last two decades. There are so far more posts in Killer Covers showcasing his artistry than the work of anyone else (examples to be found here and here). And for CrimeReads in 2019, I penned a well-illustrated appreciation of his longer-than-60-year career, which I noted back then had already “produced more than 1,000 unique paintings employed on American paperback book covers.”

While McGinnis’ abundant existing paintings continue to adorn new books, notably those published by Hard Case Crime, I understand that the death, in 2023, of his wife, Ferne—to whom he’d been married for three quarters of a century—hit him very hard, and he has ceased working. Well, he is certainly due a rest. His output his been so prodigious, and his paintings featured in so many diverse places, that even today, his fans are “discovering” new McGinnis creations they didn’t know belonged in his oeuvre. (A case in point: His cover for the 1977 hardcover novel Florinda, by Dana Broccoli.)

In honor of his 99th birthday, I intend to display, over the coming weeks, dozens of book fronts boasting Robert McGinnis’ art that have not appeared previously in this blog.

Let’s begin this morning with Miami Golden Boy, by Herbert Kastle (Avon, 1971). Born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 11, 1924, Herbert David Kastle wrote science-fiction short stories and a wide variety of genre novels during the mid-20th century, among them One Thing on My Mind (1957), The Movie Maker (1968), and The Gang (1976). However, he is best-known for Hot Prowl (1965) and The Reassembled Man (1963). “Later in his career,” explains Southern California bookseller and books historian Lynn Munroe, “he found success writing steamy ‘mainstream’ hardcover novels in the style of Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldon for publishers like Arbor House and Delacorte.” Miami Golden Boy sounds like one of those more arousing yarns. In its write-up, Kirkus Reviews related that its plot involves people with too much money and too little sense, adding:

On the side there are diversified lubricious activities with “creaking groans” and “streaming buttocks” and spasm as an intransitive verb (he spasms—she spasms), which the arbiters of the new American Heritage Dictionary certainly would never accept. But then they never had to finalize any judgment on a book like this.

Kastle passed away on October 19, 1987.

I only stumbled across Miami Golden Boy a couple of weeks ago, but immediately decided it should begin Killer Covers’ latest tribute to Robert McGinnis. With any luck, you will make some gratifying discoveries of your own as this series goes forward.

Pull Up a Chair and Stay Awhile

Every once in a while I need to revisit a theme here in Killer Covers. Today, it’s the use of butterfly chairs on paperback fronts.

My first gallery of such covers was posted way back in 2015. Seven years later, I included butterfly chairs in a CrimeReads feature focused on “seven colorful cover themes from crime fiction’s past.” Now I bring you a couple of new examples fitting this motif, plus three that I didn’t include in the 2015 Killer Covers selection.

The image shown above comes from Counterfeit Kill, a 1963 Gold Medal release attributed to “Gordon Davis,” which was one of several pseudonyms employed by E. Howard Hunt (later infamous for his role in Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal). The artwork for that standalone novel is attributed to the great Mitchell Hooks. Meanwhile, Harry Barton created the front of Hank Janson’s Cold Dead Coed (Gold Star, 1964). The cover image for Tudor from Lesbos (Beacon, 1964) is regrettably uncredited. Murder on Ice (Ensign, 1973), by “Michael Bardsley,” aka Anthony Nuttall, carries an illustration by Spanish comics artist Manfred Sommer. And Hooks was again behind the cover of John D. MacDonald’s On the Make (Dell, 1960).

If I owned a butterfly chair, I’d happily sit back in it and fully appreciate all five of these vintage works.

“Holocaust,” by Anthony McCall

Holocaust, by “Anthony McCall,” aka Henry Kane (Pocket, 1968). Published originally in hardcover in 1967, this appears to be one of only two novels Kane—the creator of swingin’ New York City private eye Peter Chambers—published under his McCall pseudonym. The other was Operation Delta.

Cover illustration by Harry Bennett.