Every once in a while I need to revisit a theme here in Killer Covers. Today, it’s the use of butterfly chairs on paperback fronts.
My first gallery of such covers was posted way back in 2015. Seven years later, I included butterfly chairs in a CrimeReads feature focused on “seven colorful cover themes from crime fiction’s past.” Now I bring you a couple of new examples fitting this motif, plus three that I didn’t include in the 2015 Killer Covers selection.
The image shown above comes from Counterfeit Kill, a 1963 Gold Medal release attributed to “Gordon Davis,” which was one of several pseudonyms employed by E. Howard Hunt (later infamous for his role in Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal). The artwork for that standalone novel is attributed to the great Mitchell Hooks. Meanwhile, Harry Barton created the front of Hank Janson’s Cold Dead Coed (Gold Star, 1964). The cover image for Tudor from Lesbos (Beacon, 1964) is regrettably uncredited. Murder on Ice (Ensign, 1973), by “Michael Bardsley,” aka Anthony Nuttall, carries an illustration by Spanish comics artist Manfred Sommer. And Hooks was again behind the cover of John D. MacDonald’s On the Make (Dell, 1960).
If I owned a butterfly chair, I’d happily sit back in it and fully appreciate all five of these vintage works.
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