The Twelve Dames of Christmas, 2021: #1

After posting two showcases of vintage paperback book covers featuring “Dame” in their titles—first in 2016, and again in 2018—I pretty much used up my resources. But then I remembered that I still had a wide variety of book fronts sporting “dame” in their cover teaser lines. So this morning, as my distinctive way of honoring the legendary “12 days of Christmas” (December 25 to January 5), I am posting the first of what will be a dozen fronts with “dame” superimposed somewhere amid their artwork.

Harry Charles “H.C.” Witwer (1890-1929) was an Athens, Pennsylvania-born journalist, short-story author, and comic-strip writer. Before being hired as a reporter for newspapers (among them the Brooklyn Eagle and The Sun, both in New York City), he worked as a boxing manager, and later penned boxing yarns for Collier’s magazine. His boxing novel, The Leather Pushers, was originally published (by Grosset & Dunlap) in 1921. As Thomas Hauser explained in his review of that book, posted several years back in a fight-focused blog called The Sweet Science,

The story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, a likable rogue who manages a young heavyweight prospect named Kane Halliday a/k/a Kid Roberts. It’s pulp fiction with a plot and ring action that are melodramatic to the point of being unbelievable. But Witwer had a wonderful way with words and conveyed the essence of boxing in a manner that encouraged the reader to suspend disbelief.

The Internet Archive offers the full novel here.

Interestingly, a silent film serial, likewise titled The Leather Pushers and inspired by Witwer’s popular boxing fiction, debuted in 1922. It was scripted, at least in part, by future movie producer Darryl F. Zanuck. That series employed a protagonist named Kane Halliday, too, though it’s not at all clear how closely it followed the plot of Witmer’s novel; episodes are said to have been self-contained and complete in their own right. It’s equally unclear as to how many of those two-reel installments were shot: Wikipedia puts the number at 18, but the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) says there were only half a dozen. In any case, prints of only a trailer for the series and two episodes—viewable here and here—are known to still exist.

The lovely paperback edition of Witwer’s The Leather Pushers featured atop this post was published by Popular Library in 1950. Its cover was painted by Earle K. Bergey. If you would like to read the plot description on the back of that book, simply click here.