Motifs for Murder

Giant hands were often featured on crime-fiction covers during the height of the paperback boom. The example above comes from Ride the Gold Mare, by Ovid Demaris (Gold Medal, 1957); illustration by Barye Phillips.

I’m back on the subject of vintage paperback book covers in what is, amazingly, my 20th piece for CrimeReads, posted earlier today. It seemed time to showcase some of the recurring artistic motifs seen during the mid-20th century. As I explain in my introduction,

Commercial artists were called upon to toil at speed, and usually for rock-bottom remunerations, to meet that era’s escalating demand for paperback-cover illustrations. The most talented of the bunch produced work that’s still cherished by collectors. Yet the pace they maintained in order to make ends meet, coupled with pressures to chase aesthetic trends thought to be especially saleable, led to recognizable—and occasionally eccentric—themes cropping up in their artwork. In the same way that aerial photographs of snow-shrouded forests, central figures captured from behind, and sinister children’s playgrounds have all become clichés on the jackets of modern crime, mystery, and thriller novels, so too were images of women exposing themselves to men, corpses in bathtubs, and damsels reclined—and plainly deceased—on bedsheets overly recurrent fixtures of mid-1900s paperback fronts.

Those, however, weren’t the only motifs once pervasive in this genre. Let us venture now into the deeper, dustier recesses of crime fiction’s past, where oversized pates loomed behind every shoulder, bodies had a nasty habit of tumbling from the sky, malicious mitts demanded the spotlight, and shapely shanks got all the attention they deserved.

You will find—and, I hope, enjoy—the full piece here.