Going on 15

I love the above illustration, based on artwork by Barye Phillips. It’s appropriate to post in honor of Killer Covers’ 14th anniversary.

When I launched this blog on January 19, 2009, the first illustration I posted was the front from a 1960 Bantam paperback edition of The Three Roads, the fourth novel by author Kenneth Millar, who would soon begin publishing crime fiction under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald. The quote installed over that Phillips painting, however, comes from Macdonald’s The Wycherly Woman (1961), his ninth book starring Los Angeles private detective Lew Archer.

Writing three decades ago in Reason magazine, Wisconin academics Lester and Deborah Hunt observed that “Macdonald's concern with trouble is conscious and pervasive. ...

“Trouble” is his name for the destructive consequences that follow from human irrationality and viciousness (usually the former). The real trouble begins when we can no longer control the destruction we cause. A blackmailer appears in the aftermath of what seemed a perfect crime; or an illegitimate child shows up, bringing home to his lost father the consequences he has never faced. Things get out of hand.

Once a mistake is made, trouble follows with a logic as intricate and ruthless as algebra. It resembles the “justice” (dike) in Greek tragedy, a cosmic force that the ancients believed restores an imbalance in nature created by wrongdoing. But trouble is not justice in our sense of the word, because it harms the innocent and the guilty alike. Trouble therefore must be stopped, and that is Archer’s task. He discovers who is criminally responsible for it, not so that retribution can be exacted for what they have done, but simply in order to have them locked up someplace where they can no longer harm others or themselves. The point is to bring the tragedy to an end before trouble has expended itself.

There are certainly ample troubles—of the individual, familial, and societal sort—in all of Macdonald’s two dozen novels, which is of course one reason they’re so memorable. Fortunately, fewer tribulations have beset Killer Covers and your humble host, which has made it possible to carry on so long and why we will continue to showcase vintage (and occasionally new) book fronts into the future.

Thank you all for joining us over these last 14 years!