Hitting the Links

• Oh, how I wish I were in London, England! Through this coming Saturday, March 24, that city’s Lever Gallery, in Clerkenwell, is hosting “Uncovered: Illustrating the Sixties and Seventies,” a showcase of the original art from paperback covers of that era. “Artists selected for this exhibition,” explains the gallery’s Web site, “include Ian Robertson, Yorkshire born Michael Johnson, who, with his Fine Art background and distinctive style, soon became one of the most sought after illustrators of the period, and a group of Italian illustrators who worked and lived around Soho and Chelsea, including the highly influential and style-setting Renato Fratini, and other colleagues—many of whom had previously worked in the Italian film industry, such as Gianluigi Coppola, Giorgio De Gaspari, and Pino Dell’Orco.” Flashbak, a photo-obsessed Internet resource, collects a handful of the more than 40 works on display, including Fratini paintings that grace several Mickey Spillane books (The Twisted Thing, The Girl Hunters, etc.) and Johnson’s gorgeous artwork for the 1965 novel A Crowd of Voices, by Richard Lortz. Flashbak’s presentation of these pieces is so captivating, I can even forgive the site its misuse of the term “pulp fiction” and its misspelling of Erle Stanley Gardner’s name. If you’d like to see more of the works on display (sadly, in smaller representations), click here.

• I apparently missed spotting this earlier: Mystery Tribune’s choices of “The 53 Best Mystery and Thriller Covers of 2017”—several of which were also rivals last year for honors in The Rap Sheet’s Best Crime Fiction Cover of the Year contest.

• Literary Hub picks “33 of the Weirdest Philip K. Dick Covers We Could Find.” That description is totally appropriate.

• In a piece for Criminal Element, Eric Beetner looks at some of the ways in which crime-novel fronts can evolve over time.

• Which brings us to Penguin UK’s new-this-month designs for its paperback editions of Raymond Chandler’s novels. Gone are the “block colours, masculine silhouette graphics, and naïve poster-style lettering” of that publisher’s previous Chandler line, replaced by “a subtler photograph[y]-based approach with high contrast [and] full-cap serif typography.” I can get used to this revised look.

• Crime novel covers sure know how to overwork a theme.

• The cover illustrations on Hard Case Crime’s new graphic-novel line, Quarry’s War—penned by Max Allan Collins and starring his series hit man, Quarry—are as powerful as they are beautiful.

• In Men’s Adventure Mags, Bob Deis has posted a new interview with Gil Cohen, who, he explains, “was one of the top men’s adventure magazine artists in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. He did hundreds of cover and interior paintings for MAMs. He also did hundreds of paperback covers and movie posters. Then he became one of one of the world’s premier aviation artists, creating fine-art paintings of planes and their crews that sell for thousands of dollars and are used for high-end lithographic prints.” Also check out Deis’ previous interview with Cohen, which has additional artwork.

• And how can I not applaud an Alberto Vargas pictorial? This one comes from a blog that’s new to me, Slice of Cheesecake.