“Willa,” by Gilbert Terrell

Willa, by “Gilbert Terrell,” aka Evans B. Harrington (Dell, 1961).

As book collector Tim Hewitt wrote on Facebook earlier this year, Harrington (1925-1977) was an English professor at the University of Mississippi. Willa, which followed this author’s 1961 novel, Missy, “is the second of three racy eponymous novels of ‘sensual’ and ‘shocking’ women in pursuit of ‘passion’ and ‘desire’ that Harrington published under the pen name ‘Gilbert Terrell.’ (I can only speculate, but I assume that as the Chair of the University of Mississippi English Department he didn’t want to call attention to himself in the early ’60s as a purveyor of trashy pulp fiction.) The third book, Lily, was published three years later with a routine (but not unappealing) photo cover.”

Cover artwork by Ernest Chiriaka (“Darcy”).

Had I known four years back that Harrington had penned this trio of works, I would have included them all in Killer Covers’ gallery of paperback novels titled simply with women’s first names.