Once Around the Blogs, Please

I spent much of this last weekend fielding and posting (in The Rap Sheet) information from UK correspondent Ali Karim, all having to do with award winners and other goings-on at CrimeFest 2014. However, I managed at the same time to organize some recent book-cover-related links, and am presenting those below.

• It wasn’t long ago that I added the oddly named Ragged Claws Network to Killer Covers’ blogroll (under the heading “Book Design/Illustration”), and I’m glad I did. Two recent postings of note there: this piece about Dashiell Hammett paperbacks from the 1940s; and this other one that displays J. Lombardero’s Sax Rohmer covers for Pyramid. Learn more about those Rohmer releases here.

• Nick Jones spotlights" Peter Cheyney’s eight-book “Dark Series” of spy novels in Existential Ennui. “The novels,” writes Jones, “detail the exploits--both wartime and postwar--of a rotating cast of counter-espionage agents of British Intelligence, notably Michael Kane and Ernie Guelvada, along with their boss, Peter Quayle.”

• A blog called Quartz (yeah, that’s a new Web resource for me, too) points out the design similarities among dozens of volumes “either set in Africa or written by African writers. The texts of the books were as diverse as the geography they covered: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly divergent styles, by writers that included several Nobel Prize winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orange sunset over the veld, or both.” The full post is here.

• British comics historian Steve Holland delivers another eye-catching gallery of book covers in his blog, Bear Alley. This time, his focus is on Martin Cruz Smith’s novels, everything from Gypsy in Amber to last year’s Tatiana. He’s even thrown in the fronts from a trio of tales Smith contributed to the Nick Carter series.

• In Too Much Horror Fiction, Will Errickson offers a line-up of façades from John Saul’s numerous suspense novels.

• And I recently mentioned a couple of titles from the sexually suggestive Beacon Books line of paperbacks. Now The Golden Age rolls out more than 30 illustrations that once fronted those books.