Slice of P.I.: “The Sins of the Fathers”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



The Sins of the Fathers, by Lawrence Block (Dell, 1976).

Block is now 88 years old and well-established as an author of top-notch crime fiction, but in the mid-1970s, he was pretty much an unknown. Yeah, he’d produced a great many novels, but a lot of those had been of the soft-core porn variety (published pseudonymously), and the two series he’d launched up to that point—one about a sleep-deprived, peripatetic spy named Evan Tanner, the other a non-mystery series built around lust-driven teenager Chip Harrison—had not achieved best-seller status. Matthew Scudder was going to change all that.

When we first meet Scudder, in The Sins of the Father, he’s “a 15-year veteran of NYPD who retired after an accidental shooting of a seven-year-old girl,” explains Carol Siwert in her blog Book Reviews Forevermore. “That incident became a breaking point, an emotional trauma that is shared with the reader in bits and pieces. Now living in an emotion-free zone powered by booze and coffee, he works for ‘favors,’ where he investigates for people and they express appreciation in cash. The police force, alas, exists on a favor system as well, and undoubtedly set the stage for Scudder’s mentality now.”

This 276-page story (slim by today’s standards) finds Scudder laboring as an unlicensed gumshoe, taking on clients sent his way by friends on the force. “Desperate people they don’t really want to deal with,” as Benoît Lelièvre characterizes them in Dead End Follies. “Cale Hanniford is one of those people. His estranged daughter Wendy has been murdered in brutal fashion, seemingly by Richard Vanderpoel, her roommate. The case is closed since Vanderpoel has been arrested and hung himself in his jail cell. Cale Hanniford doesn’t really debate the investigation. He just wants some closure. He wants to know how he ended up with a murdered daughter. Scudder accepts the case and sets foot in the strange world of Wendy Hanniford’s ghost, waking up his own at the same time.” A good deal of time is spent in the protagonist’s first-person company, as he questions people in hopes of solving this book’s whodunit plot.

(Right) Lawrence Block.

Block is fairly sparing in his descriptions of Scudder, leaving us with the vague understanding that he’s heavy-set and tough enough to handle himself in dangerous situations. He’s also wandered over the line that separates a problem drinker from an improbably functioning alcoholic, a transition that becomes clearer as the series continues. These are definitively hard-boiled yarns, well introduced by The Sins of the Fathers but, as Kevin Burton Smith opines at The Thrilling Detective Web Site, reaching their creative apex with 1982’s Eight Million Ways to Die, “simply one of the best P.I. novels of all time, and Everybody Dies (1998) ain’t too shabby either.”

Thanks to tech writer-turned-book art authority Tim Hewitt, I know that the paperback cover topping this post was painted by John Melo, who started his career in commercial art around 1970. He worked in motion-picture advertising as well as providing illustrations for books, magazines, films, the theater, and television. Many of his creations fronted science-fiction novels, as well as works of horror fiction, TV tie-in releases (including several linked to the Lee Major series The Six Million Dollar Man), and the occasional tale of crime and mystery—not just Block’s Scudder debut, but also this entry in Dell Books’ Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime series of the 1980s.

Slice of P.I.: “Shady Lady”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Shady Lady, by Cleve F. Adams (Ace, 1955). Originally published as Too Fair to Die, one of two works paired in a cheap, 1951 Two Complete Detective Books edition with Fredric Brown’s Compliments of a Fiend, Shady Lady was expanded, retitled, and repackaged as an Ace Double Novel opposite Harry Whittington’s One Got Away. It marked the sixth and final outing for Adams’ Rex McBride, a controversial Los Angeles dick described by one critic as “a racist, a fascist, and a hypocrite, but a tender ballad brings tears to his eyes. In one word, he’s an oaf, deliberately drawn by Adams so as to pull the rug out from under [Raymond] Chandler’s romantic image of the P.I. as a contemporary knight.” Cover artwork by Harry Barton.

Slice of P.I.: “Blood and Honey”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Blood and Honey, by G.G. Fickling (Pyramid, 1961). Here we find the eighth novel starring Honey West, often touted as “the nerviest, curviest P.I. in Los Angeles—or anywhere else for that matter.” The character was created in the late 1950s by the husband-and-wife writing team of Gloria and Forrest E. Fickling under their “G.G. Fickling” pseudonym. Cover art by Robert Maguire.

READ MORE: “Gloria Fickling, Who Helped Create Honey West, TV’s First Female Detective, Still a Force 60 Years Later,” by Erika I. Ritchie (Orange County Register); “You Can’t Keep a Good Gal Down: An Interview with Gloria Fickling, the Real Honey West,” by Kevin Burton Smith (The Thrilling Detective Web Site).

Slice of P.I.: “Killers Are My Meat”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Killers Are My Meat, by “Stephen Marlowe,” aka Milton Lesser (Gold Medal, 1957)—the third novel in his series about globe-trotting, Washington, D.C.-based gumshoe Chester Drum. The artwork here, by Gerald Powell, boasts one of the giant heads that often popped up on this genre’s paperback covers during the mid-20th century.

Slice of P.I.: “The Kissing Gourami”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



The Kissing Gourami, by Kin Platt (Charter 1980), with a cover illustration by David Plourde.

First published in a 1970 hardcover edition by Random House, The Kissing Gourami was the initial installment in a seven-book series built around Max Roper, who The Thrilling Detective Web Site describes as a “Los Angeles-based operative for EPT (Emergency Procedure Terminus), a nationwide private investigation/security firm ... that frequently works for big business concerns, as well as doing the dirty work for various local and national government law-enforcement agencies when they need some behind-the-scenes work that will not come back to haunt them.” Author Platt (1911-2003) was a comics artist, caricaturist, and the author of both adult and young-adult mysteries.

In his excellent blog The Paperback Palette, Denver, Colorado, librarian Jeff Christoffersen (aka Jeffersen) writes that book and magazine cover artist Plourde painted not only the front for this title in the Roper series, but also created the art for at least three others: The Pushbutton Butterfly, The Princess Stakes Murder, and The Giant Kill. All of those, too, were released by Charter Books in 1980.



Click any of these covers to open an enlargement.

Slice of P.I.: “The Lady Is Afraid”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



The Lady Is Afraid, by George Harmon Coxe (Dell, 1953), with a cover illustration by Frank Cozzarelli. First released in 1940, this is the second of only two novels starring hawkshaw Max Chauncey Hale, a blue-blooded Bostonian for whom criminal inquiries were more pastime than profession. Hale had previously headlined 1939’s Murder for the Asking. Author Coxe (1901-1984) is better remembered for creating the photographer-sleuths Jack “Flashgun” Casey and Kent Murdock.

Slice of P.I.: “Death of a Dastard”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



Death of a Dastard, by Henry Kane (Signet, 1963), with a cover illustration by Jerry Allison. Here we have just one of more than 30 novels Kane produced starring “private richard” (his distinctive spin on “private dick”) Pete Chambers, a fashionable, man-about-metropolis New Yorker with a wolfish eye for women.

Slice of P.I.: “30 for a Harry”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



30 for a Harry, by Richard Hoyt (Penguin, 1984). Cover illustration by noted Polish painter Rafał Olbinski.

Published originally in a hardcover edition in 1981, this was the second of Hoyt’s nine novels starring John Denson, a journalist turned “soft-boiled” private investigator who operated in Seattle, Washington (though he later relocated to northern Oregon). “Consider him Gonzo-lite, Kevin Burton Smith explains in The Thrilling Detective Web Site. “Or maybe a New Age Northwest reincarnation of Shell Scott. Or just a hippy-dippy eye who has certainly inhaled.”

As Wikipedia explains, “-30- has been traditionally used by journalists in North America to indicate the end of a story or article that is submitted for editing and typesetting. It is commonly employed when writing on deadline and sending bits of the story at a time, via telegraphy, teletype, electronic transmission, or paper copy, as a necessary way to indicate the end of the article.” This specific novel finds Denson going undercover at a Seattle newspaper in order to unearth a “Harry”—a reporter who’s been using inside information for the purposes of extortion. Therefore, its title suggests Hoyt’s man intends to put an end to the blackmailer’s machinations.

Slice of P.I.: “True Detective”

(Above) True Detective (1986), with the artist’s hidden signature.

If you did not remember that July 24 is National and International Private Investigator Day, have no worries. I wouldn’t have a clue about it either, had not the blog Guns, Gams & Gumshoes—launched in 2009 by Colorado detectives Shaun Kaufman and Colleen Collins, but not updated since last summer—alerted me to this annual event way back in 2018. With the passage of each successive year, I try to remember to celebrate. More often than not, though, I forget.

But not this time. That’s because private eyes have been much on my mind lately, particularly one such character: Nathan Heller.

I was contacted in March by a writer who said he’d been laboring “for several years” on a “fully authorized” literary biography of award-winning Iowa crime novelist Max Allan Collins, creator of the aforesaid Mr. Heller. He went on to explain that he had read and been impressed by my long-ago interview with Collins in January Magazine, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in penning a foreword to his book.

Anyone who has kept up with my work in January or The Rap Sheet knows what a fan I am of Collins’ fiction, not just his Heller stories, but also his tales starring killer-for-hire Quarry, his Road to Perdition graphic novel and its prose sequels (another of which, Road to Hell, is in the works), his more than a dozen novels continuing the not-infrequently violent escapades of Mickey Spillane’s Gotham gumshoe, Mike Hammer, and of course, his sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, released earlier this year. So I agonized for a full few hours before deciding my answer to the offer had to be “yes.”

In the end, I delivered a 2,850-word essay that talked about Collins’ creative influences, his position in the pantheon of modern crime writers, and the three protagonists he will be principally remembered for dispatching onto the mean streets of fiction. In addition, I recounted my discovery of his first Heller yarn, True Detective. This would have been in the mid-1980s, when I was working for a magazine in downtown Portland, Oregon. Looking for something new to read, I wandered one lunchtime into a nearby branch of J.K. Gill, a locally owned office supply store that did a rather brisk trade in books as well. Quickly, the 1986 Tor Books paperback version of True Detective (seen above) caught my eye, and as I recall in my foreword, “I couldn’t plunk down my hard-earned folding money fast enough to acquire a copy!”

The cover of that edition boasted three components to entice a young man of my bibliophilic inclinations: a Depression-era automobile adorned with gleaming silver grille, a wide wave of fender … and bullet damage to both the driver’s-side headlamp and front windshield. It wasn’t until I set about writing my foreword that I gave much thought to who was behind that art. The novel’s copyright page didn’t supply that information. Neither did that same page in True Crime, Tor’s release of Collins’ second Heller tale, which was published only months after True Detective and looked to carry a painting by the very same artist. However, the copyright page inside Tor’s 1987 edition of The Million-Dollar Wound, the third Heller outing, did credit its cover illustration to one Joe DeVito. Only then did I spot the name “DeVito” atop the grille of that shot-up car fronting True Detective. It seems the artist’s signature had been hiding in plain sight all along!

Artist, sculptor, and storyteller Joe DeVito.

Not much effort was required to locate a Web page for DeVito, which told me that he was born in New York City, grew up in New Jersey, “and graduated with honors from Parsons School of Design. … He is the founder of DeVito ArtWorks, LLC, an artist-driven trans-media studio dedicated to creating and developing imaginative properties across publishing, film, gaming, and fine art. Among its flagship creations are King Kong of Skull Island, War Eagles, and The Primordials.” It went on to mention that “Over the decades, DeVito has painted and sculpted many of pop culture’s most legendary figures—Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Spider-Man, Tarzan, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and even MAD magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. His art has graced hundreds of book and magazine covers, collectible posters, trading cards, and concept designs for film and television.” Learn more here.

In response to an e-mail inquiry, DeVito said he has “many fond memories” of painting the covers for Max Allan Collins’ earliest three Heller books. “I began illustrating professionally 45 years ago, in 1981,” he said, “so from that perspective it was relatively early” that he undertook this assignment. What was his design process? “I believe I was given a synopsis when illustrating all three books and chose the scenes I wanted to illustrate. That said, I always ran various rough sketches by my [art director], Joe Curcio (an all-time favorite AD), before deciding on a final direction. I would then do a small color sketch to work out value/color/edges, etc. (much easier to make changes on a small sketch). Only then would I start the actual painting. I would normally draw up several thumbnail sketches to choose from, then Joe and I would discuss which one we thought worked best …”

(Left to right) DeVito’s fronts for True Crime (1986) and The Million-Dollar Wound (1987). Notice that unlike True Detective, each of these paintings contains a human. As the artist explains, “In Million-Dollar Wound I used myself in a WW II military uniform, and in True Crime I painted the reflection of a woman in the fender. The images of the figures were added later from separate photo shoots.”

Naturally, I was curious to know whether DeVito had done more with this trio of paperback titles than simply give them covers. Had he actually read the stories, and if so, what were his impressions? “I have always read both fiction and non-fiction in genres across the board,” he related. “That said, I am partial to historically accurate books and Max Allan Collins’ novels were what I would call ‘faction’ novels (fiction based in fact). I remember reading True Detective and enjoyed it, but can’t remember all the details after all these years.”

Most of what Joe DeVito told me didn’t make it into my foreword, despite its length. But a couple of things did. You will find those in the finished book, which may appear in print as soon as the end of this year. I’ll report more on that as time passes.

In the meantime, I don’t want to end Killer Covers’ celebration of fictional P.I.s with this single post. So over the next seven days or more, I shall roll out additional fronts from this subgenre. Stay tuned.

Because I Needed a Furst Fix ...

The Caribbean Account, by Alan Furst (Dell, 1983), with cover illustration by Ron Lesser. This was the last of three novels Furst penned in the late 1970s and early ’80s, before he gained fame as an author of historical spy fiction.

Like its predecessor, Your Day in the Barrel (1976) and The Paris Drop (1980), it starred “marijuana dealer Roger Levin (Levy in the first book), who has the habit of becoming caught up in espionage scams and helping in the retrieval of a missing heiress,” recalls Australian critic-blogger Jeff Popple. “They were fun, easy going reads, notable more for their cool tone and dialogue, than their plotting.” In 1981, the year of its original hardcover publication, Kirkus Reviews called The Caribbean Account “a third too long and sometimes sophomoric, [but] more consistently amusing than Levin's previous doings.”

The magazine offered this plot description:

This time Levin is hired by a lawyer friend to deliver $500,000 to a stranger at Miami’s Orange Bowl Stadium. And though the delivery goes okay, the stranger is then promptly murdered (the money stolen) before Levin’s eyes. So, back in N.Y., Levin demands to know what’s going on—and he learns that the $500,000 was, in effect, a ransom for the release of young, crazy, missing heiress Fiona De Scodellaire: in exchange for the dough, her latest cult/guru was supposed to kick her out and send her home. But now that scheme has fallen through, and Levin is hired to find the heiress and the cult’s hideout. He sleuths around, traces the cult to the isle of St. Maarten, locates pudgy Fiona (who immediately lusts for Levin), and uses the sex hookup to lure Fiona home. Then, however, a miserable, Levin-less Fiona is lured back to the isle by her Jim-Jones-y guru (for assorted kinky rituals)—and finally there’s a lethal showdown between Levin and the guru.

Kirkus went on to criticize Furst’s habit of mixing storytelling styles. “When he shifts from hard-boiled comedy and sex-farce to more emotional stuff (Levin’s love life, the death of his chum), the effect is lame,” its review read. “And the thin plot here is self-indulgently stretched out—with the guru’s verbose journal, with Levin’s fantasies, etc. But it’s reasonably entertaining overall—with enough truly stylish and funny moments to promise better things ahead if Furst can continue to get his spunky talent under control.”

Better things, indeed.

(Hat tip to Robert Deis for the cover scan.)

Another Look: “Forbid Me Not”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Forbid Me Not, by Blair Fuller (Berkley Books, 1958); cover illustration by Charles Copeland. Right: Forbid Me Not, by Blair Fuller (Berkley Medallion, 1962), featuring cover art by Robert K. Abbett. Originally published in 1957 by Harper & Brothers as A Far Place, this was apparently one of two novels penned by Fuller, a former editor of The Paris Review and onetime creative writing teacher at Stanford University (the other being Zebina’s Mountain, 1975). He passed away in 2011 at age 84.

The Shadows Know

Book cover design trends come … and some go. Others, however, manage to stick around far longer than seems advisable. Take images of people shown from the rear, for instance. Or aerial photos of snow-shrouded forests. Or spooky-looking trees. Or figures, especially women, running in fright (a holdover theme, really, from illustrated Gothic horror fiction of the late 20th century). Publishers spend a lot of time studying what book-front features sell best, and they can be slow to abandon a fad that has outlived its welcome.

One that’s become particularly ubiquitous on American crime, mystery, and thriller shelves over these last several years is silhouettes of people in windows. An example is the cover—above—of Mark Stevens’ Two Truths and a Lie, being released today by Thomas & Mercer. It’s the author’s second case for TV journalist Flynn Martin, following 2025’s No Lie Lasts Forever. (Speaking of trends, have you noticed how often versions of the words “lie” or “liar” appear in recent novel titles? Could this be Donald Trump’s influence?) A plot brief calls Two Truths both “taut” and “haunting,” and explains that in its 462 pages, Martin confronts a serial killer who’s copycatting behaviors of her quarry in the preceding yarn. “Scandal. Conspiracy. Murder,” we are promised, with the précis adding: “Flynn hardly knows where to begin―and if her stalker has their way, she might not live to see the end.”

The fact of this being only the second installment in a continuing series could undermine any “might not live” anticipation. But let’s just move on ...

If my memory is correct, it was with the publication of Gillian McAllister’s 2022 page-turner, Wrong Place, Wrong Time, that I initially twigged to the frequent occurrence of shadowy profiles in artwork used for this genre. By the time Lauren Willig’s 2025 mystery, The Girl from Greenwich Street (based on the first well-recorded murder trial in American history, in which both Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr participated), saw print, I had already begun to amass a file of cover images. Today, I have well over 100 specimens of the breed in my computer files.

Fear not: I won’t inflict all of them upon you. The following 50 images should prove how overworked this motif is. All of these employ photographs, though I suspect a number of them have been manipulated, adding silhouettes where they did not originally appear.

Click on any of the covers below to open an enlargement.

This brand of ominous artwork has clearly played itself out. It’s time for book designers to move on to something different.