Two-fer Tuesdays: Heated Rivalry

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



Will Everett Cook was only 43 years old when he died, yet he left behind a fairly rich trove of novels and short stories, most of which fit within either the Western or adventure genre. According to a short biographical sketch prepared by the University of Oregon Libraries, in Eugene, where many of his papers are now housed, Cook “was born in Richmond, Indiana, in 1922 and died in [July] 1964. He began writing for publication in 1952 for Popular Library. During his short life Cook was a soldier, commercial aviator, deep-sea diver, logger, [and] peace officer … His hobbies included sports-car racing, sailing, judo, and barbershop singing. His pseudonyms include … James Keene, Frank Peace, and William Richards.” Together with Giles A. Lutz, an author who counted erotic novels among his credits, Cook penned additional Westerns under the joint pseudonym Wade Everett. Several of his yarns were adapted for television and film.

It’s not hard to see that the story told in Cook’s 1959 Monarch release, We Burn Like Fire, derives from his interest in what used to be called hot rods. The back-cover copy sets up the plot:

To Wendel Garland, sports-car racing was an intimate and personal thing—like making love to his sensation-starved secretary, Alice Lavery.

He lavished love and money on his Porsche Carrera and she repaid him with quick response and blazing speed—as Alice responded ecstatically to the caressing ministrations of his lips and hands.

Every time he got on the track, Wendel risked his neck to win. He knew the car could be the instrument of his death, yet there was poetry in danger—as there was poetry and danger in Alice’s dedicated depravity.

(As an aside, one commenter on this novel wrote: “‘Dedicated depravity’! I knew there had to be more to the allure of racing than just the cars!”)

In his cover painting for We Burn Like Fire, Harry Barton managed to integrate the abundant thrills of the speed track with the uplifting passions of driver Garland’s downtime. Combined with the front-cover come-on line (“He Was Obsessed with Speed—She Was Ruled by Desire”), this was a paperback guaranteed to draw the eyes of even normally jaded observers.

The same can be said, I think, for the other façade under consideration this week, from Bernice Kavinoky’s We Burn Like Candles (Popular Library, 1954). Unfortunately, its cover illustration is not credited, though one authority on such matters suggests it resembles the work of Lou Marchetti. The art certainly supports the promise, given in a blurb from the New York Herald Tribune, that this is “a story of love in all its sensual yearning and anguished frustration.”

(Right) The back cover from Kavinoky’s We Burn Like Candles.

We Burn Like Candles was originally published in hardcover by Bobbs-Merrill back in 1963 under the title All the Young Summer Days. It was the first novel by poet-playwright Kavinoky, who had apparently won a pair of Hopwood Awards from the University of Michigan, but about whom I have learned little else. Writing in the December 1952 edition of the Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review, Donald Hill noted that All the Young Summer Days “is seriously intended and has been solemnly praised in some big newspapers. Nevertheless it is a trivial and mawkish work only masquerading as something worth your time.”

Ouch! Hill then goes on to describe the story line:

The characters with their psychological burdens are without exception the crudest soap-opera types. They are moved by their compulsions into strange and fitful errors; they wander out into the night (in their bathing suits) and on the beach, amazed, they meet their lovers and their dooms. We all know now that our psychological devils are more than a match for us. Michael Heller should never have married Marion Adler—that was his big mistake—but she threatened to kill herself and in fact made one good try, so what could he do? He could only remember his father (who had deserted his mother long ago and gone to live in Paris with the wrong sort of women entirely) and submit. But Bea, her beautiful, impulsive, well-developed sister was the one he loved (“She looked more grown-up in her black one-piece bathing suit than she had sprawled in the field”), and she loved him. As you might expect, things get worse and worse, until finally Bea is drowned in the lake by her adoptive brother, who had always loved Marion and hated Bea for reasons that—naturally—go back to his early childhood.

If this critique had not so far discouraged readers from investing in Kavinoky’s story, its conclusion may have done the trick:

As one would expect of a Hopwood winner, Miss Kavinoky uses some of the poetic resources of modern fiction, but she is the victim of perhaps the most treacherous taste I ever encountered in print.

After undergoing such editorial evisceration, it’s amazing that Kavinoky went on to pen anything at all. However, she managed to produce at least two more novels, 1957’s Honey from a Dark Hive and 1958’s The Mother (republished a year after that as So Strong a Flame—again, the fire references!—with cover art by Robert McGinnis), plus a 1966 memoir, Voyage and Return, which related the author’s “experience with cancer.” It’s unlikely she sent any of those to reviewer Donald Hill for his consideration.

Cop Talk

Although he’s now better recognized for painting dusty cowboys and nude women (a few of the latter collected here), Howard Rogers—born in San Diego, California, in 1932—also built up an impressive portfolio of paperback book fronts during the mid- to late-20th century. That turn in his professional path was not inevitable.

As one online biography explains,

Howard’s career began in 1959. He emerged from the Art Center of Los Angeles and began a decade of work in Detroit illustrating for the auto industry. He didn’t illustrate cars, but instead he illustrated the people who went into the cars. As the auto industry moved towards photography instead of illustrations for their advertisements, Howard headed to New York to work for publishing houses, advertising agencies, and magazines. He did illustrations for McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, Harlequin Romance novels, and W.S. George.

Another of his clients was Bantam Books, for which he created the artwork atop this post. That cover comes from the 1972 paperback edition of The Law Unto Themselves (originally released in hardback two years earlier), written by Peter R. Runkel, then the chief psychologist at the Winston Churchill Clinic in Harlow, Essex, not far outside London, England. As the cover lines explain, this volume contains “eleven psychiatric case studies which reveal the turbulent drives, the inner torment, [and] the secret sex life of the cop on the beat.” Runkel writes in the opening pages that “over a period of ten years I have taped several hundred conversations held between myself and American policemen who came to talk with me about matters communally sacred and privately profane.” Those therapeutic exchanges—often ripe with what used to be called “dirty words”—can be a tad dry at times, but they’re also revealing of how police officers see their responsibilities, hardships, and anxieties. Of at least, how they saw them during the Vietnam War era.

I hadn’t realized until recently that Rogers also provided the illustrations for a succession of 1970s Bantam reprints of Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan yarns, most of which I inherited a decade or so ago, following my father-in-law’s unexpected demise. (Like me, he was an enthusiastic reader of crime fiction, though we didn’t have many years together to discuss the subject.) Since I also own a newer uniform line of the half-dozen Chan novels, put out in 2008 and 2009 by Academy Chicago Publishers (and featuring cover paintings by Chris Rahn), I haven’t had reason to dig up those older Bantam Chans for a while. However, as further examples of Rogers’ painterly expertise, I did so this morning, and am embedding their images below. In addition to five of Biggers’ books, I’m including here the front from Charlie Chan Returns (1974), described as “a novelization of a script by Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander that was never produced.” It was composed by Dennis Lynds, aka Michael Collins, author of the Dan Fortune detective series.

Fashionable but Fatal

It’s not an exact theft, but pretty damn close.

The (sadly uncredited) artwork fronting this premiere issue of Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine, published in August 1964, looks remarkably like the illustration Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka created for the cover of the 1958 short-story collection The Best of Manhunt, right down to the woman’s clingy red dress (one shoulder strap fallen) and trailing fur stole. Don’t you agree?

Two-fer Tuesdays: Shape Shifting

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



As I’ve mentioned on this page before, it was quite common during America’s paperback heyday of the mid-20th century for publishers to recycle cover illustrations from one book to the next, figuring that readers wouldn’t recognize such budget-saving thievery ... or at least wouldn’t care overly much about it. Less frequently, artists were commissioned to refashion their original paintings for a second (or even third) use. That was the case, for instance, with Ernest Chiriacka’s artwork for 1961’s By Love Depraved and Lou Marchetti’s cover image for 1955’s The Wanton Hour.

It was apparently also what Robert Maguire did in order to supply the two attention-grabbing paperback fronts showcased above.

The façade on the left comes from the 1960 Pyramid edition of Ed Spingarn’s Perfect 36, a novel said to offer “a revealing and riotous story of the bosom business.” I don’t have a scan of the back cover from that issue of Spingarn’s yarn; but the verso of the original, 1957 version (from Pyramid, as well) supplies this slightly more ample description of his plot:

How much is a girl’s virtue worth?

A mink coat? A two-carat diamond ring, with husband attached?

A fling with an intellectual?

A career as a model?

Or a flat $100,000 in cash?

It was up to Rosalie to choose—it was her virtue at stake.
Perfect 36 is the rowdy story of Rosalie—and her figure—and the startling emotions it roused in every male she met! It takes you behind the scenes and screens of the fabulous brassiere trade for the funniest, fastest, most titillating novel of the year!

“Titillating,” get it? Yeah, I don’t think the guy who concocted that suggestive copy received (or deserved) a bonus in his paycheck that week. Nonetheless, given the straightforward goal of drawing as many male readers to Perfect 36 as possible, by whatever creative schemes were available, I’m sure he won at least some appreciation from his bosses, and was invited to practice his teaser-penning talents on other novels.

(Left) Lou Marchetti’s art for the 1957 edition of Perfect 36.

Maguire’s artwork for Perfect 36 was exceptional, yet only slightly less provocative than that façade text, with its beautiful young brunette wrapped in a sparkly, curve-clinging dress, striking poses before an audience of leering gents who you just know aren’t whispering among themselves about her intellectual prowess. Pay special attention to that first guy on the left, the bald-headed one twiddling his cigar … because you’ll find that he, along with a version of the woman holding the limelight on Perfect 36, also appear on this week’s second “two-fer” front, shown above and on the right.

Released in 1966, this “Midwood Double Novel” comprises—as the cover line promises—“two stories about the kind of woman around whom no man is safe”: Test in Temptation, by Laura Duchamp; and Cool and Collected, by Blake Randall. It isn’t hard to recognize that the fetching femme Maguire imagined as that “kind of woman” is essentially the same one he’d pictured half a dozen years before on Spingarn’s novel. In this case, however, she’s clad in white, rather than iridescent red; her black tresses are more tossed than before, evidently as a result of her dancing; and her left arm has finally migrated out from behind her back, but the similarities are greater than those differences. And though the scene around her is more lively and colorful than on the earlier book, the gent (in the lower left corner) most obviously moved by her movements is the same grinning stogie-chomper we saw on Perfect 36, now wearing a light blue shirt and black necktie, rather than a dark blue shirt and a yellow tie.

If you recognize the byline “Laura Duchamp,” it may be because I mentioned it a few times last fall, when Killer Covers celebrated the 110th anniversary of artist Paul Rader’s birth. Duchamp was among the pseudonyms employed by author Sally Singer, who composed a variety of soft-porn novels (including Wild and Wicked, Model Mistress, A Weakness for Men, and The Sunday Lovers) for Midwood Books and—as Pulp International recalls—was “one of the few sleaze writers who was actually female. She was also prolific as ‘March Hastings.’” According to a backside blurb, Test in Temptation focused on a woman by the name of Celeste, who “was ready to violate every rule of house and home, ready to chuck it all, husband, family, the works, in order to get the kind of love she wanted from the kind of man she wanted it from.” Meanwhile, its companion volume—Cool and Collected, by Randall (one of several pen names used by science-fictionist Robert Silverberg)—features a protagonist with broader desires: “There’s a man for every woman, but Rebecca was a woman for every man. She knew she could make men or break them. She knew all she had to do was crook her little finger and they’d fall to their knees in humility.”

With these protagonists to work from, it’s no wonder Maguire’s Midwood cover coquette looks like somebody capable of handling her own affairs—in more ways than one.

Happy Valentine’s Day, Everyone!

This Spring of Love, by Charles Mergendahl (Popular Library, 1950). Illustration by Rudolph Belarski. See the back cover here.

READ MORE: “Sweetheart Sleuths for Valentine’s Day” and “Valentine’s Day Crime Fiction,” by Janet Rudolph (Mystery Fanfare).

Friday Finds: “The Faces of Love”

Another in our growing line of vintage book covers we love.


The Faces of Love, by John Hearne (WDL Books, 1959).
Illustration by Edgar Hodges.

I had intended to write about this 1959 paperback novel only because of the egregious typo in its top cover line. How in the world did the obvious misspelling “Carribean” make it past editors and art directors, and into print? This must have been particularly galling to its author, John Hearne, who—though he was born in Montreal, Canada, in February 1926—was the light-skinned, mixed-race son of Jamaican parents, did his first undergraduate studies at Jamaica College in the island capital of Kingston, and spent much of his adulthood teaching and writing in the West Indies.

However, as I researched John Edgar Colwell (or Caulwell) Hearne, I came to realize that The Faces of Love—originally published in hardcover in 1957—deserved more than a snarky comment about oblivious proofreading. This was the author’s third novel, following Voices Under the Window (a 1955 yarn said to be “narrated entirely in flashback, … focus[ing] on a young lawyer at the point of death reflecting on his ultimately lethal involvement in Jamaican politics and his racial origins”) and Stranger at the Gate (1956). Like that latter work, The Faces of Love (which was first released in the United States under the title The Eye of the Storm) was set, according to Wikipedia, “in the imaginary island of Cayuna, which is a fictionalized Jamaica” (“right down to Green Stripe beer,” adds Jamaican poet-professor Mervyn Morris). A non-fiction work, The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950 (2016), edited by Simon Gikandi, explains that Hearne’s novels

generally focus on the educated, brown-skinned middle-class stratus of Caribbean society. Hearne was clearly interested in class position and anti-colonial politics … However, Hearne is most famous for his rich and sensitive depictions of everyday middle-class life and love on the fictional Caribbean island of Cayuna. The Faces of Love (1957), for example, details a multiplicity of love relationships between characters, concentrating on the dilemma of Rachel Ascom, a newly wealthy and powerful [mixed-race] newspaper executive choosing between the love of a rowdy local builder and a British expatriate brought in to edit her newspaper.

After The Faces of Love, this author’s next pair of novels—The Autumn Equinox (1959) and Land of the Living (1961)—also used Cayuna as their backdrop and “referred to issues relating to Jamaican life at the time, such as the beginning of the bauxite industry and the Rastafari movement, or to events in nearby territories such as the [1950s] Cuban Revolution.” Hearne later produced The Sure Salvation (1981), an alternately pessimistic and terrifying tale set aboard a slave ship, which Britain’s Times Literary Supplement called “an absorbing novel. The old power of the sea story to provide pleasure and instruction seems to be as potent as ever ...” And again per Wikipedia: “In the late 1960s and early 1970s he collaborated with planter and journalist Morris Cargill on a series of three thrillers—Fever Grass, The Candywine Development, and The Checkerboard Caper—involving an imaginary Jamaican secret service. These were written under the pseudonym ‘John Morris.’”

(Right) The 1957 Faber and Faber hardcover edition of The Faces of Love.

Yet in the wake of his Cayuna series seeing publication, Hearne’s novel-writing career tapered off noticeably. “After 1961,” recalls an excerpt from the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, “Hearne busied himself teaching, working for the government, writing plays and commentaries for radio and television, and producing a regular newspaper column in one of the leading daily papers of Jamaica [The Gleaner]. His articles appeared in Public Opinion, News Week, New Statesman, Nation, Pagoda, and Spotlight. Several of his radio plays were aired by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Between 1962 and 1992 Hearne served as director of the Creative Arts Center at the University of the West Indies, and as chair of the Institute of Jamaica. He also taught for short periods at several universities in Canada and the United States.”

And following his death in Jamaica in 1994, at age 68, Hearne’s books slowly began to disappear. “John Hearne almost suffered the fate most writers dread most: oblivion,” observed a feature piece in the Caribbean Airlines magazine, Caribbean Beat, in 2005. “His works quickly became unavailable and his reputation faded just as rapidly.” Kwame Dawes, a Ghana-born poet who grew up in Jamaica, was quoted in that article as saying, Hearne “sadly, proves that it is quite possible for a writer of significant ability and accomplishment to go out of print and be virtually forgotten.”

However, in 2005 the UK-based publisher Peepal Tree Press—which claims to be the “Home of the Best in Caribbean & Black British Writing”—reprinted Hearne’s debut novel, Voices Under the Window, for a whole new generation of readers. Most of whom, I’d bet, know perfectly well how many Rs and Bs there should be in “Caribbean.” (Forgive me, but I had to get in one snide remark.)

READ MORE: “‘I Am Looking for a Hero,’” by F.S.J. Ledgister (The Caribbean Review of Books).

Because I Needed a Hammett Fix ...

The Creeping Siamese, by Dashiell Hammett (Dell, 1950).
Illustration by Robert Stanley.

Seating Arrangements

Just over a year ago, and with the backing of paperback-art expert Art Scott, I put together a post for this page about classic Butterfly chairs appearing on book fronts. At the time, I had in hand half a dozen examples. Since then, however, I’ve happened across four more, which I am pleased to share with you below.

Click on any of these images to open an enlargement.

(Above, left to right) All the Way Home, by Walter Freeman (Signet, 1955), with cover art by Clark Hulings; On the Make, by John D. MacDonald (Dell, 1960), with cover art by Mitchell Hooks.

A Man Called Sex, by Peter Kanto (Brandon House, 1964), with cover art by Fred Fixler; Cold Dead Coed, by Hank Janson
(Gold Star, 1964).

Picks of the Pack

Two weeks ago, The Rap Sheet asked its discriminating readers to select the Best Crime Fiction Cover of 2016 from a field of 12 candidates. Earlier today, it announced the top five vote-getters in that survey. How did your own favorite fare? Click here to find out.