Two-fer Tuesdays: Well, Which One Is It?

A twice-monthly pairing of book covers that just seem to go together. Click on either of these images to open up an enlargement.



Since last week’s celebration of Killer Covers’ first five years focused on book-front illustrations featuring women, I’ve decided to stick to that theme in my initial post-anniversary “two-fer” pairing.

The cover featured above on the left comes from the 1958 Beacon Press paperback edition of Lust Is a Woman, by Charles Willeford (though you’ll notice that his last name has been misspelled “Williford”). If my sources are correct, this was Willeford’s fifth novel and the fourth--and final--one he produced for Beacon during the 1950s, all of which are now considered extremely rare. (The few copies of Beacon’s Lust Is a Woman available through AbeBooks, for instance, are priced at $125 and up!) “He was under pressure to conform to the Beacon style,” explains the Web site Vintage Paperback Archive, “and the result is one of his weakest efforts.” Nonetheless, the playfully suggestive cover of this novel (which Willeford had originally titled Made in Miami) lends it some class. It’s credited to Clement Micarelli, a Rhode Island-born commercial artist who also created a number of recognizable mid-20th-century paperback fronts (some of which can be enjoyed here).

The other cover topping this post is taken from the 1964 Belmont Books edition of Lust Is No Lady, the 14th installment in prolific author Michael Avallone’s series about movie-obsessed New York City private investigator Ed Noon. Reviewing the novel late last year in his blog, Wayne D. Dundee wrote:

Lust Is No Lady (aka The Brutal Kook), is one of the stronger entries in the Noon series. Just incidentally, it marks the end of what might be called Noon’s “more traditional detective mystery” period. After that, starting with … [1967’s The] February Doll Murders, Noon became more of a globe-trotting quasi-superspy (reporting directly to the President of the United States for certain cases), clearly influenced by the James Bond/spy craze that was casting a shadow over everything in those days. The plots and characters got progressively wilder--not necessarily less entertaining, mind you, but nevertheless a departure from the direction of the series as it started a decade-plus earlier.

Not that Lust (nor most of the Noon books, for that matter) is lacking in wild plot twists or distinctive characters either. Start with being air-bombed by bricks out in the wilds of remote Wyoming; mix in a nude deaf mute Indian maiden found staked out in the desert and left for vulture bait; add in a blind old Indian man (the maid’s father) tortured to death and his corpse found hanging by the neck; season with a hidden stash of gold, a cast of men and women (all quite lovely, just incidentally) living secretly in a ghost town-like camp, and top off the whole works with a psychotic dwarf. Propel it all along in Avallone’s energetic, somewhat quirky--yet always compelling, in the sense of making you want to keep turning the pages--writing style, and you have a corker of a tale. The mystery of the lost gold is solved in a basic, but still rather clever manner, and the final denouement where the psycho dwarf “gets his” is quite satisfactory. A bit of a change of pace for Noon, as far as setting, though still satisfying as a tried-and-true P.I. yarn.

I wish I had as much information to share about the captivating but odd (why is the nude, staked-out maiden here missing her nipples?) cover of Lust Is No Lady, but I don’t find its artwork credited anywhere on the Web. And I don’t happen to own a copy of this Avallone book, so I can’t look to see if the illustrator is mentioned on the back cover or inside someplace.

READ MORE: “Ed Noon #14—Lust Is No Lady,” by Tom Simon (Paperback Warrior).

Twice Sly

Isn’t she lovely? See if you notice any similarities between these two Robert McGinnis paperback fronts.

Which Covers Do You Like Best?

Here’s a chance to make your voice heard! The Rap Sheet today posted a poll asking its many readers to choose their favorites from among a collection of 15 top-quality crime-fiction book covers, all of which were published in 2013. The candidates include works by Stephen King, Arlene Hunt, Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane, Michael Gruber, Eleanor Catton, and Derek B. Miller. Study the nominees closely, and then register your favorites.

Voting will remain open for the next two weeks, until midnight on Friday, February 7, after which the results will be announced.

What are you waiting for? Go vote!

Taking the Fifth: Opium Flower

Celebrating half a decade of Killer Covers postings.



Opium Flower, by Dan Cushman (Bantam, 1963).
Illustration by Robert McGinnis.

Taking the Fifth: Naked She Died

Celebrating half a decade of Killer Covers postings.



Naked She Died, by Don Tracy (Pocket Books, 1962)
Illustration by Harry Bennett. If you are interested, click here to see this paperback’s rear cover.

Taking the Fifth: Kiss Hollywood Good-by

Celebrating half a decade of Killer Covers postings.



Kiss Hollywood Good-by, by Anita Loos (Ballantine, 1975.)
Illustration by Morgan Kane. His original artwork can be seen here. And this is quite obviously part of the same set of eye-catching paintings from which Kane drew the cover image for the paperback edition of Loos’ 1966 memoir, A Girl Like I.

Taking the Fifth: Widow’s Pique

Celebrating half a decade of Killer Covers postings.



Widow’s Pique, by “Blair Treynor,” aka Selina Abraham Treynor.​
Illustration by James Meese. Click here to find both Meese’s original artwork and the back jacket of this book.
(Published in hardcover by M.S. Mill William Morrow, 1956.)

Taking the Fifth: Nightmare

Celebrating half a decade of Killer Covers postings.



Nightmare, by Guy Endore (Dell, 1956).
Illustration by Victor Kalin.
(Previously released in hardcover as Methinks the Lady … [Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1945]).

Taking the Fifth

Don’t misunderstand that headline: This piece isn’t going to be about more inner-circle aides to Chris Christie searching for legal means to save themselves from the New Jersey governor’s worsening scandals. Instead, it’s about Killer Covers’ fifth anniversary. Yes, I began posting on this page on January 19, 2009, which also happened to be Edgar Allan Poe’s 200th birthday. (That launch date seemed a nice match with the fact that my other big blog, The Rap Sheet, celebrates its birthday on the same day as Arthur Conan Doyle.)

Things have been rather up and down here ever since, as I have sought to find a time and effort balance between blogging in The Rap Sheet, keeping up my Mysteries and Thrillers column for Kirkus Reviews, and fulfilling other freelance-writing obligations. However, the debut last August of Killer Covers’ “Two-fer Tuesday” series--highlighting vintage “book covers that just seem to go together”--has added greater regularity to the blog’s updatings. And I’ve given up trying to make every post a comprehensive, “important” look back at some renowned artist/illustrator’s history and talents; I’m now more content with dropping articles of various lengths onto this page (though I still hope to pen longer retrospectives on the work of such talents as Walter Popp, George Ziel, and Paul Rader).

To celebrate five years of Killer Covers, I shall spend the coming business week posting one book front per day that I discovered during the last year. Each by a different artist. Each decorating a work that I would eventually like for my own collection. This will be a purely biased selection, made up of covers that caught my eye. You’ll have to let me know if they give you pleasure, as well.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Undressed for Distress

A twice-monthly pairing of book covers that just seem to go together. Click on either of these images to open up an enlargement.



Yes, I know it wasn’t long ago that I highlighted toplessness in this series; and even more recently that I promoted some sandy salaciousness on this same page. But so numerous are vintage crime novels fronted by bared lovelies, that it would be a disservice to the intent of this blog not to focus on such art now and then.

Don’t you agree?

So, let us begin on the left, above, with Murder in the Nude, a 1968 Greenleaf/Companion Books soft-porn release credited to “John Dexter.” Dexter, however, was a house name employed by now-renowned authors on the order of Robert Silverberg, Lawrence Block, Harry Whittington, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Donald E. Westlake, and several others. The Dexter paperbacks tended to boast unabashedly suggestive titles such as Miami Call Girl, The Bra Peddlers, Sharing Sharon, and Sin Cycle--not exactly the sort of material one wanted to be seen reading aboard subways or in doctors’ waiting rooms. Most of those works were poorly illustrated, with fronts that one could imagine a first-year art student concocting. By comparison, the cover of Murder in the Nude is fit for hanging in the Louvre. It was apparently the work of artist Robert Bonfils, who--according to this Web site--“started his illustration career in Chicago in the mid-fifties, doing various commercial art assignments such as advertisements, lunch box decorations, catalog illustrations, magazine covers, interior story illustrations, record jacket covers, and book covers.” Bonfils’ efforts in that last category are as lustful as they are plentiful, and have been amply collected on the Web, including here, here, and here.

To the right of Bonfils’ cover, you will find Murder in the Raw, William Campbell Gault’s first novel featuring Los Angeles athlete-turned-gumshoe Brock Callahan. That tale was originally marketed in 1955 as Ring Around the Rosa. E-book publisher Prologue Books, which in 2012 made Murder in the Raw available in electronic formats, offers this teaser about the novel’s plot:

Stripped for Murder

She was a night club stripper, a black-haired, white skinned beauty, an all-out performer few men could resist. When she came on, wolf whistles drowned out the music.

And she was the kind of gal who loved her work. Something had to be wrong when she didn’t show one night. In fact, she didn’t show her face--or anything else--for quite a while.

She had good reason to hide. Because she’d beat it from a shady, hot-pillow motel, where the other occupant of her bedroom was a dead man!

Admittedly, that’s not much information to help one decide whether to purchase a new book. But in this post, blogger Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders adds that “The protagonist, Brock Callahan, is a former football player just starting out as a private investigator. He’s boiled, but not too hard. He waxes bitter toward a police officer friend, but he never lapses into moodiness, isolation, or self-destruction. The self-deprecating wit never goes over the top; I haven’t laughed out loud yet, but I’ve enjoyed every joke. None has been off-target.

“Callahan and his creator walk firmly in the middle of the hard-boiled road, and the book has me considering, for the first time in my career as a crime reader, the delights of competence and professionalism.”

Then, of course, there’s the cover of Murder in the Raw. It’s another one credited to the great Victor Kalin, who I’ve noted before was one of “the mainstays of mystery cover art for [publishers] Dell and Berkley in the 1960s.” Although this one is nowhere near as captivating as some of his other fronts, including those of A Real Gone Guy, Nightmare, and Suddenly a Corpse, Kalin’s use of the dead woman’s reflection on Murder in the Raw is really rather haunting.

Meeting a Pop Culture Rembrandt

It’s been my pleasure to write about artist-illustrator Robert McGinnis many times in this blog, as well as a few times in The Rap Sheet. But I have never had the opportunity to interview him. So I was understandably jealous when I spotted this piece by one Timothy Dumas, who--on behalf of Greenwich magazine--talked with McGinnis recently at his “cozy studio above a row of shops in Old Greenwich,” Connecticut. Dumas introduces his subject this way:

Robert E. McGinnis is a sort of pop culture Rembrandt. Collectors of his art especially prize the languorous “McGinnis women” he painted to adorn the covers of detective novels by writers like John D. MacDonald, Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson (“the Dimestore Dostoyevsky”), bearing such campy titles as Who Killed Dr. Sex?, The Homicidal Virgin and Dig That Crazy Grave.

Another sort of McGinnis collector hunts down his movie-poster art. His very first poster, for Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), is a classic of the form. A bejeweled and black-dressed Audrey Hepburn stands with one hip cocked, a cat perched in the crook of her neck and an impossibly long cigarette holder extending from her perfect red mouth. The last movie poster McGinnis painted, for the animated smash The Incredibles (2004), shows Mr. Incredible standing super-heroically before a pool of bubbling lava, impervious to the bad-guy chaos whirling around him. When Brad Bird, the film’s writer and director, received McGinnis’s working sketches, he pinned them to a wall at Pixar Studios, summoned his battalion of CGI geniuses and instructed, “Think like Bob McGinnis.” …

Though few know him by name, McGinnis is probably among the most widely encountered artists of the last half-century. “There wasn’t a person alive in the seventies who didn’t see Bob’s painting,” says Charles Ardai, a publisher of crime fiction who stumbled upon McGinnis’s artwork in childhood, while rummaging through his father’s collection of detective novels. “Besides that, he’s an extraordinary artist.”

Find and enjoy all of Dumas’ piece here.

“The Major Pitfall Can Be Being Too Literal About What Happens in the Book, a Healthy Amount of Artistic Licence Is Needed”

I don’t often see authors giving widespread kudos to the folks who design their book covers, but J. Sydney Jones--who I interviewed for Kirkus Reviews last year--has devoted a generous amount of real estate in his blog to Jem Butcher, a freelancer who created the front for Jones’ new historical mystery, A Matter of Breeding (Severn House), as well as its two predecessors. You’ll find their conversation about creating top-quality and relevant book fronts here.