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.

A Cartoonist’s Existential Crisis

Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American cartoonist and author, passed away last week at age 95. Cause of death: congestive heart failure. “[He] left an abundant legacy across a range of artistic media,” Etelka Lehoczky recalls in an obituary for National Public Radio. “The history of graphic art, literature, film and the theater bear the imprint of his ever-distinctive, ever-wayward pen.”

But Feiffer is most familiar to the most people for his artwork, whether it be his satirical cartoons, his comic strips, or his illustrations, many of them reprinted in books, such as 1958’s Sick, Sick, Sick: A Guide to Non-Confident Living. In addition, however, he left behind two novels: 1963’s Harry the Rat with Women and 1977’s Ackroyd, the latter of which is subtitled “A Mystery of Identity.” On The Thrilling Detective Web Site, Kevin Burton Smith calls it

a rather strange book, taking the form of the diary of Robert Hollister, a neurotic young man who has decided to become a private eye named Roger Ackroyd (a tip of the fedora to Agatha Christie’s classic The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) by posting an ad in the Saturday Review. But Robert/Roger becomes obsessed with one of his very first clients, Oscar “Rags” Plante, a newspaper sports columnist/novelist and his wife Annabelle, whose parakeet has gone missing.

The case? Investigate the bad case of writer’s block that Rags claims he’s suffering from.

Smith explains that this book “covers several years of Robert/Roger’s (and Oscar’s) life, and as their characters slowly merge, we’re treated to a sort of blurry (but often amusing) existential crisis.”

I read Ackroyd decades ago, and still have the 1978 Avon paperback edition featured above, though I can’t seem to lay my hands on it just now. When I started writing this post, I logically assumed that Ackroyd’s cover must have been painted by Feiffer; he did, after all, create the fronts for other books (Norton Juster’s The Phantom Toolbooth being a prime example). Yet that was incorrect. There’s a signature at the bottom of the illustration, and it clearly reads “Stanislaw Fernandes.” Fernandes is an artist, born in 1945, who I know best for his science-fiction and fantasy covers.

(Above) Stanislaw Fernandes’ signature on Ackroyd.

Never in a million years would I have guessed that Feiffer’s “funny, but not funny enough” novel (to quote Smith again) would have shared a cover artist with classics by Arthur C. Clarke, Stanislaw Lem, and Michael Moorcock. The world never ceases to surprise.

LISTEN UP: “Remembering Pulitzer Prize-winning Cartoonist Jules Feiffer” (National Public Radio’s Fresh Air).

We Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen

I absolutely love the paperback artistry of Ernest Chiriacka, aka “Darcy” (1913-2010), so I’ll employ pretty much any excuse to post more of his work on this page. But today is a special occasion—Killer Covers’ 16th birthday! To celebrate that, I am finally displaying (above) his front from the 1960 Pyramid Books edition of Roadside Night, by Erwin N. Nistler and Gerry P. Broderick.

Alas and alack, this is not a novel from my collection. But I’ve heard favorable comments about it over the years. The excellent blog Reading California Fiction—which was written by Don Napoli, before his death at age 79 in early 2021—offers this synopsis of its plot:

Ex-Marine Buck Randall is settled into a comfortable life. He owns and manages a small bar and motel up the coast from San Diego. The business keeps him solvent. His assistant Dom reliably helps out around the place. Joyce, an attractive eighteen-year-old who’s had a crush on him for years, is eager to become a serious girlfriend. His steady customers are also his friends. Then one day a stunning redhead, Sylvia Landon, comes into the bar. She exudes a sex appeal that Buck hasn’t felt before. Even after she leaves he can’t stop thinking about her. She returns; they talk briefly. She returns again; he cooks dinner for her. They spend the night together. He’s hooked.

The general outline of this story is apparent from the first few sentences. Sylvia is going to lure Buck into trouble to fulfill some nefarious purpose of her own. That’s not an original premise. So the question is how effectively Nistler and Broderick work it out. And here the authors deserve kudos all around. Buck, the first-person narrator, not only describes events but relays his feelings as well. These change with each plot twist. Longing, satisfaction, doubt, curiosity, guilt, anxiety all run through his mind. The writing is spare almost (but not quite) to the point of parody: short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, and of course a short book. The terseness keeps the story moving quickly and generates tension until the very end. Fans of the femme fatale are bound to enjoy this book.

The pair behind that slender example of “motel noir” are hardly household names. Novelist James Reasoner wrote in a 2009 critique of Roadside Night that “As far as I’ve been able to discover, this is the only book [Nistler and Broderick] ever published.” Nonetheless, he agrees with Napoli that it’s a better-than-average crime yarn. “What makes it worth reading is the prose,” Reasoner opines, “which is bleak and fast-paced, and the sweaty air of doom and desperation that hangs over the book like fog rolling in from the sea. … This isn’t some lost masterpiece of crime fiction, but it’s well worth reading and would make a good candidate for reprinting.”



There have already been several editions of Roadside Night produced, all by Pyramid. The one presented just above and on the left is the original printing from 1951, boasting an illustration by Canada-born Hunter Barker. To its right sits a still more captivating version, released in 1955. I regret not knowing the identity of that one’s cover artist. Does anybody reading this recognize the style?

When I launched this blog in 2009, I never imagined I’d still be writing it more than a decade and a half later. Yet here we are. I have a multitude of covers just as interesting as these stored away in my computer files. All I need is the energy, free time, and—in cases such as this—the proper occasion to retrieve and post them. Thank you for sticking with me during this long and oft-surprising ride!

(And yes, a classic song inspired the title of this piece.)

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).