Another Look: “The Sailcloth Shroud”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Sailcloth Shroud, by Charles Williams (Dell, 1961); cover artist Robert K. Abbett. Right: The Sailcloth Shroud, by Charles Williams (Pocket, 1972), with a cover illustration by Stanley Borack. (His original artwork can be seen here.)

READ MORE: “The Lost Classics of One of the 20th Century’s Great Hard-boiled Writers,” by Andrew Cartmel (CrimeReads).

McGinnis’ Original Visions

(Above) Murder Is My Business, by Brett Halliday (Dell, 1963).

I hadn’t expected to be writing again about Ohio-born artist and illustrator Robert McGinnis so soon after we celebrated his 99th birthday on this page in February. But the news, broadcast two weeks ago, that he’d died on March 10 left me wanting to make another visit to his impressive portfolio of work, amassed over six decades.

Originally, I thought about creating a gallery of my favorite McGinnis paperback covers—something along the lines of what vintage book collector Tim Hewitt posted in Killer Covers two months ago. But I found it hard to narrow down my choices. An initial list included everything from John Trinian’s North Beach Girl and George Bagby’s Dead Wrong to M.E. Chaber’s A Lonely Walk, A.S. Fleishman’s The Venetian Blonde, and David Lodge’s Angel’s Ransom. By the time my picks exceeded 50 in number, I knew I could not match Hewitt’s half-dozen limit.

(Right) Never Kill a Client, by Brett Halliday (Dell, 1963).

Another option was to look back at the James Bond movie posters McGinnis painted over the years—some of which took liberties with the films’ contents. But this artist’s demise was already followed by new attention paid to those gorgeous one-sheets.

In the end, I realized that I’d drawn much attention in Killer Covers to how his artwork was incorporated into paperback fronts—together with title type, bylines, and publisher identifications—yet had rarely showcased his original pieces. So let me rectify that imbalance a bit today. This post features 22 of the best paintings he produced for books during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Most focus on what have been labeled “McGinnis Women,” lithe and luscious lovelies who simultaneously seduce ... and express unapproachability. The artist frequently manipulated human proportions on his canvasses, making figures taller than the 7.5 heads high they usually are, pushing them to eight or nine heads tall and extending legs beyond what one would expect. The results were captivating and made his women, especially, distinctive.

With each painting here, I have provided a link to show how it was eventually presented in book form. If there are other excellent examples you think should have been added to this gallery, please drop a note about them into the Comments section below.

A Murderer Among Us, by Carter Brown (Signet, 1969).

Kill the Clown, by Richard S. Prather (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1973).

Assignment: Peking, by Edward S. Aarons (Gold Medal, 1969).

Assignment—Sorrento Siren, by Edward S. Aarons (Gold Medal, 1963).

Murder Me for Nickels, by Peter Rabe (Gold Medal, 1960).

A Peak in Darien, by Roswell G. Ham Jr. (Avon, 1960).

The Aseptic Murders, by Carter Brown (Signet, 1972).

Charlie Sent Me! by Carter Brown (Signet, 1963).

Exit Dying, by Harry Olesker (Dell, 1959).

False Scent, by Ngaio Marsh (Crest, 1961).

Death Comes Early, by William R. Cox (Dell, 1961).

Trouble—Texas Style, by John Bramlett (Gold Medal, 1964).

Nymph to the Slaughter, by Carter Brown (Signet, 1971).

The Eighth Circle, by Stanley Ellin (Dell, 1959). This is the first of four different covers shown here that employ McGinnis’ signature One Shoe Off motif. Can you find the other three?

Mum’s the Word for Murder, by Brett Halliday (Dell, 1964).

The Man Inside, by M.E. Chaber (Paperback Library, 1970).

As Old as Cain, by M.E. Chaber (Paperback Library, 1971). Bob McGinnis evidently took performers Goldie Hawn and James Coburn as his models for this painting. But he originally imagined Hawn in the nude. That was apparently too much for Chaber’s publisher, because the finished cover finds her wearing a bikini.

The Girl Who Cried Wolf, by Hillary Waugh (Dell, 1958). McGinnis’ alternative art for that novel can be seen here.

Beebo Brinker, by Ann Bannon (Gold Medal, 1962).

The April Robin Murders, by Craig Rice and Ed McBain (Dell, 1959).

The Black Bird Is Back!

I had known for a long while that Iowa crime novelist Max Allan Collins wanted to pen a sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s genre-defining 1930 private-eye novel, The Maltese Falcon, so when the official announcement of his effort came last September, I was hardly surprised. However, the subsequent rush to print of Return of the Maltese Falcon, due out from Hard Case Crime in January 2026, seems remarkable.

As Collins writes today in his blog, “My editor at Hard Case Crime, Charles Ardai, is something of a wonder. Normally when you turn a manuscript in, it takes an editor months or at least weeks to get you the line-edited manuscript to go over. Charles gets back to you the next day, or if he takes two or three days, he apologizes for the delay. Then he has the book typeset in another day (he does this himself) and provides galley proofs, and to say this is unusual is an understatement.

“It’s very cool to have the process go this quickly. Writers like the feeling when a book has ‘gone to bed.’”

No less cool is the fact that we now have a front for Return!



Both this novel’s cover painting and design (including title type hearkening back to Falcon’s original edition) are credited to Irvin Rodriguez, “an artist working in painting, drawing, digital media and illustration based in Los Angeles.” You can see more of Rodriguez’s work on his Instagram page.

Meanwhile, Collins has posted his afterword to Return of the Maltese Falcon in CrimeReads, which tells how he was first introduced to Hammett’s best-known yarn and what he asked of himself in order to echo that long-dead author’s writing style. An introductory note to the excerpt cites some resources Collins used in order to re-create the Depression-era San Francisco of Sam Spade’s heyday. (Don Herron’s The Dashiell Hammett Tour receives due applause.) Why post this afterword rather than some portion of the actual story? “Where normally an advance look at the first chapter might have been used as a promotional teaser,” he explains in his blog, “something had to substitute, because the public-domain nature of the original novel won’t kick in until my sequel is published next year. So advance promo couldn’t use any of my novel itself—we’d be in violation of the original copyright.”

I’m normally skeptical of another writer being hired to augment a prominent but deceased author’s oeuvre; Collins himself acknowledges that “following in the footsteps of a genius writer as precise as Dashiell Hammett is a sort of suicide note.” However, the creator of series gumshoe Nathan Heller has already done a fine job over these last 16 years of doubling the number of novels starring Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (a run that ended recently with Baby, It’s Murder). I am confident Return of the Maltese Falcon will do Hammett proud, too.

* * *

Max Collins’ CrimeReads post today reminds me that a “somewhat different version of [The Maltese Falcon]’s initial pulp serialization” was included in Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (2010). I never did get around to reading that variant. Perhaps now is the time to take it down off the shelf.

Upfront About Its Cursorariness

“The world’s most superficial book reviews.” How can you not love a Web site that promotes its contents so unabashedly?

Judge a Book by Its Cover (JABBIC) says it “offers brief, irreverent reviews and ratings of current books based solely on their covers. No pre-reading plot summaries. No peeking inside. Just an honest reaction to the visual pitch publishers [make] to readers. Each book gets a short, snappy review and a star rating—all judged from the cover alone. ‘This isn’t about literary analysis—it’s about that first, instinctive reaction every reader has when they see a book for the first time,’” explains founder Gary Apple, a comedy writer.

For example, here is JABBIC’s assessment of The Writer (Little, Brown), a March release from James Patterson and J.D. Barker:

This strikes us as a book that’s a little insecure about what it is. Maybe it doesn’t trust readers to figure it out on their own, so it spells things out: “A Thriller” and “You’ll Never Forget the Ending …” (Neither of which are review quotes, by the way—just bold declarations slapped on the cover like a marketing intern’s fever dream.) And ANY book can say “You’ll never forget the ending.”

The oversized gold text screams JAMES PATTERSON while poor J.D. Barker plays the backup singer with slightly smaller font. Oddly, the smallest name is “James.” Go figure.

The title, The Writer, is vague bordering on generic—but the design does pull us in. That blazing red aura around the woman’s silhouette (the writer, we assume?) gives the whole thing a heat that’s hard to ignore. Paired with the tagline, it’s trying really hard to say, “Something shocking is coming …”

We’re not diehard Patterson readers (sorry), but this cover might get us to flip it over and check the back. Mission accomplished?

If we had to guess …
It’s about a famous female writer whose life unravels when a man accuses her of stealing his book. She insists it’s fiction. He insists it’s his life. Someone’s lying—and someone’s about to turn up dead.

What a fabulous gig! As one who’s spent much of his life actually reading books in order to come up with thoughtful analyses—which can demand many hours, or even days to complete—I envy those JABBIC contributors who dash off their opinion of a new work after a perfunctory inspection. Imagine all of the time I could have saved, if I’d only known this sort of critiquing was an option!

JABBIC’s contents include best-selling fiction and non-fiction works, brand-new releases as well as some older tomes. And at the bottom of every page, a pop-up delivers the publisher’s description of the book in question, so you can see how accurate the reviewer was in his or her guess. The site updates its features weekly.

One change I’d like to see made: JABBIC is all about the book covers, so shouldn’t it tell who created those fronts? Crediting the designer and photographer/artist would seem the respectful thing to do.

Never to Be Matched: McGinnis Is Gone

(Above) The Case of the Duplicate Daughter, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1962). Cover illustration by Robert McGinnis.

Art Scott, co-author of the gorgeous 2014 book The Art of Robert E. McGinnis, brought me the sad news today that McGinnis—who became famous by painting covers for paperback books and posters for Hollywood films—died in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, on March 10. That was just a month after I posted on this page my latest tribute to him, tied to his 99th birthday.

Here is an excerpt from McGinnis’ obituary, written by two of his children and posted at the online memorial site Legacy.com:

Bob was one of the most prolific illustrators of the 20th century. It’s likely you have seen one or more of his artwork images somewhere. They appeared in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest and Guideposts; on very many book covers (especially paperback books, spanning many genres, from Detective to Mystery to Gothic to Historical Fiction to Romance to Fantasy); in the form of personal-project paintings that included many Old West scenes; and also on movie posters for culturally significant movies (and also on soundtrack album covers). In our biased opinion, Bob was the very best of the James Bond/007 artists, having created exciting images for the posters for movies such as Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale (parody movie), and Live and Let Die. In 1993, Bob was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. This was a tremendous honor for Bob. He said he had to have three drinks before walking up to the podium to deliver his acceptance speech; he was a shy and unpretentious person.

Born in Cincinnati on February 3, 1926, Bob never allowed the limited vision in one of his eyes to slow him down: playing as number 74, left tackle, on the Ohio State University undefeated team of 1944, working as a teenage apprentice at Walt Disney Studios (he met Walt), and serving on boats in the Merchant Marines right before WWII ended. He was a man’s man. Among other things, he loved fishing with friends and his son, socializing with other artists and cartoonists and writers (he was friends with some of the top illustrators and gallery artists of his generation), and playing poker with a group of friends. He reveled in being surrounded by nature, whether it was as a kid roaming the fields of his grandparents’ farm in Oxford, Ohio, or later paddling a canoe on Ahmic Lake in Ontario, or fishing amid the Catskill Mountains, or jogging around Tod’s Point with his dog, Nellie.

Much is written about Bob, in books and magazines and online, regarding his massive talent and output. He was an active, competitive and innately hard-working person, and, most of all, he loved to draw and paint. His drive to succeed and his endurance at the easel enabled him to leave behind a body of work that will never be matched. …

Remember Bob the next time Ohio State beats Michigan in football. Or when you see the Breakfast at Tiffany’s movie poster image of Audrey Hepburn with a cat perched on her shoulder. Our father created that!

This is so sad. I was hoping Robert McGinnis would be around to celebrate the centenary of his birth next February. That is not to be. Fortunately, he left behind a profusion of outstanding artworks, some more of which I am likely to post here soon. Stay tuned.

READ MORE: “Robert McGinnis (1926-2025),” by Matthew Field (MI6).

“The February Plan,” by Robert L. Duncan

The February Plan, by Robert L. Duncan (Ballantine, 1978).

Duncan, who was born in Oklahoma and died there in 1999 at age 71, was a highly productive TV screenwriter, turning out scripts for popular series such as The Man From Blackhawk, Bonanza, Have Gun, Will Travel, The Virginian, and Lost in Space. In addition, he penned mystery and thriller novels, and at least one biography, some published under the pseudonyms James Hall Roberts and W.R. Duncan.

The February Plan was published originally in 1968 by William Morrow under the author’s Roberts alias. An Amazon reader review says its story “takes place in Tokyo, Japan, and is about novelist/father Phillip Corman trying to find out what exactly happened to his Army Lieutenant son (Paul), who turns up dead shortly after the Christmas/New Year’s Day holiday. What is the Army/U.S. government trying to hide and why?”

Cover illustration by Elaine Duillo.

Another Look: “The Judas Hour”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Judas Hour, by Howard Hunt (Gold Medal, 1951); cover artist unidentified. Right: The Judas Hour, by Howard Hunt (Gold Medal, 1959), with a front painted by Charles Binger.

“Howard Hunt” is, of course, E. Howard Hunt (1918-2007). Although he later became infamous for participating in a 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate Office Building (which earned him a three-year prison sentence), Hunt spent much of his career as an operative and officer in America’s Central Intelligence Agency. He also penned dozens of hard-boiled and espionage novels, many under pseudonyms such as Robert Dietrich, David St. John, and Gordon Davis.

Publisher Cutting Edge has reissued (in both print and Kindle versions) many of Hunt’s novels in recent years, including The Judas Hour.

READ MORE: “From Watergate with Love—Howard Hunt, the CIA Spy Who Wrote Fake 007 Novels” (Spyscape).

McGinnis Nine-Nine: Drum Struck

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.




With this being the final day of Killer Covers’ 99th birthday tribute to famous American artist Robert McGinnis, let us dip back into his extensive portfolio of crime and thriller novel fronts.

The author Stephen Marlowe was actually born Milton Lesser in Brooklyn, New York, in early August of 1928. He went on to pen dozens of books, some under his own moniker, but others behind a flurry of pen names, including Adam Chase, Andrew Frazer, Jason Ridgway, C.H. Thames, Darius John Granger, and once (for 1961’s Dead Man’s Tale), Ellery Queen. His most-implemented alias, though—by far—was Stephen Marlowe. And it in that guise that he published 20 tales starring itinerant private investigator Chester “Chet” Drum.

The Web site Spy Guys and Gals describes Drum thusly:

He works out of Washington, D.C. That may be where his office is, but his beat is really the world, or at least a good part of it. Very few private eyes of fiction spend more time travelling to interesting places in Europe and the Americas than does Drum. Sometimes he is fighting spies, theirs and ours, and sometimes he works with them. Sometimes his cases are standard fare, such as blackmail and bodyguarding, and other times it is helping to take down a dictator or free a political prisoner.

Drum has a law degree, acquired so he could quit his policeman’s job and join the FBI. Having done that for a few years, he quit the Bureau and hung up his shingle in the nation’s capital, using many of his contacts [to] find paying customers. While he at times has an assistant, he keeps his agency a small affair but is now seldom without work and, unlike many other hard-boiled detectives of his time, is not constantly broke and wallowing in booze. Drum definitely makes ends meet, drinks in moderation, usually, and tends to avoid fights when possible.

That “when possible,” though, is not often and Drum’s escapades show that trouble seems to naturally follow him. Told in a first-person style, the books give the reader an excellent insight into the character’s mind as Drum goes up against very interesting opponents. The plots are fairly standard-type detective stories but with an international touch that truly make them special.

The earliest Drum yarn, The Second Longest Night, arrived in 1955 and quickly birthed sequels graced with titles in a distinctive pattern: Killers Are My Meat (1957), Murder Is My Dish (1957), Terror Is My Trade (1958), Homicide Is My Game (1959) … well, you get the idea. Among that mix Lesser (who eventually adopted Stephen Marlowe as his legal name) collaborated on a book, 1959’s Double in Trouble, which yoked Chet Drum to Richard S. Prather’s phenomenally successful (but sometimes outlandish) gumshoe, Shell Scott, on a case that encompassed kidnapping, blackmail, and labor politics.

Marlowe’s final five Drum books, released originally in the 1960s, established a different consistency: their names all began with the words Drum Beat. McGinnis painted covers for all of those but the first, Drum Beat—Berlin. As you can see by scrolling through this post, they make an attractive set, in more ways than one.





Although Marlowe also produced science-fiction works (1953’s The Star Seekers and 1965’s Secret of the Black Planet, for example), it’s his crime fiction that cemented him in literary memory. In 1997, the Private Eye Writers of America bestowed upon him The Eye, its Shamus Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died six years later at age 79.

Robert McGinnis has already outlasted Marlowe by 20 years, and has given us a proliferation of painted treasures. If you’d like to see more of the paperback fronts he created during his six-decades-long career, check out previous Killer Covers tributes here and here.

McGinnis Nine-Nine: Fright Nights

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



Timbalier, by Clayton Coleman (Dell, 1969). The blog SpookyBooky notes the dearth of information about Coleman, suggesting the moniker may be a pseudonym. It goes on to speculate that the circa 1965 domestic suspense novel Nightmare in July was written by the same person, this time using the byline Clara Coleman.

Robert McGinnis is no slouch, either, when it comes to producing covers for paperback works of Gothic romance and horror. The commonalities seem to be women as the victims of one fright or another, and eerie mansions or—better still—sinister castles as their backdrop.



(Left) Farramonde, by “Katherine Troy” (Dell, 1969). Troy was a nom de plume employed by Anne Maybury. (Right) Wait for What Will Come, by “Barbara Michaels,” aka Barbara Mertz (Fawcett Crest, 1978). Under another byline, “Elizabeth Peters,” Mertz penned the famous Amelia Peabody historical mysteries.

(Left) Chateau in the Shadows, by “Susan Marvin” (Dell, 1969). Marvin was actually prolific New York fictionist Julie Ellis. (Right) The Diamonds of Alcazar, by Mary Kay Simmons (Dell, 1972).

(Left) House of Shadows, by Mair Unsworth (Avon, 1971). In case you’re wondering, that’s supposed to be a “brooding Welsh mansion” behind the fleeing figure in white. (Right) The Return, by Daoma Winston (Avon, 1972). According to the book-focused Web site Fantastic Fiction, “all of [Winston’s] novels have a strong occult theme and usually feature ghosts, witches, demons or magic.” Yeah, I could’ve guessed that with a mere glance at McGinnis’ cover art.

Journey into Danger, by Beatrice Taylor (Ballantine-Beagle, 1974).

McGinnis Nine-Nine: Derring-do and Damsels Too

Part of a celebration of Robert McGinnis’ XCIXth birthday.



The Sun Princess, by Sylvia Pell (Avon, 1981).

I observed on this page a couple of weeks back that, even though Robert McGinnis is best recognized for having painted covers for crime and thriller novels, his artistry can also be appreciated on an abundance of historical novels. Below are a few more choice examples.

(Left) The Sea Hawk, by Rafael Sabatini (Popular Library, 1961). Italian-born British author Sabatini made his living during the early 20th century penning tales of adventure and romance, several of which were later made into movies. (Right) Mistress Wilding, by Rafael Sabatini (Popular Library, 1963).

(Left) Captain Blood Returns, by Rafael Sabatini (Popular Library, 1963). My all-time favorite representation of the fictional Irish doctor-turned-swashbuckling pirate, Peter Blood, can be found on Bantam’s 1976 paperback edition of Captain Blood, the first entry in Sabatini’s Blood trilogy, with illustrations by David Grove. However, McGinnis’ interpretation certainly has much to commend it, particularly his pairing above of the buccaneer with a lovely lass wrapping herself in his riches—and not much else. The original cover art is here. (Right) Master-at-Arms, by Rafael Sabatini (Popular Library, 1963), also known as The Marquis of Carabas.

(Left) The Vows of the Peacock, by Alice Walworth Graham (Popular Library, 1963), which is a recognizable updating of the 1955 Doubleday hardcover edition. (Right) Give Me Your Golden Hand, by Evelyn Eaton (Popular Library, circa 1968).

(Left) Delilah, by “Jefferson Cooper,” aka Gardner F. Fox (Popular Library, 1962), a work of Biblical fiction. (Right) Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress, by Daniel Defoe (Popular Library, 1962), which really belonged in Killer Covers’ long-ago gallery of book fronts featuring women exposing themselves to men.

(Hat tip to Tim Hewitt.)