All Washed Up

Not long after I posted last week’s “Two-fer Tuesdays” entry, which combined a couple of vintage paperback fronts highlighting the unforeseen dangers to be found in bathtubs, I received an e-note from Art Scott, co-author of last year’s The Art of Robert E. McGinnis. It explained that “The late Ellen Nehr, collector, reviewer and bibliographer (The Doubleday Crime Club Compendium), decided many years ago to collect books with dead bodies in bathtubs on the cover (they had to be dead). With the help of lunatic collectors like myself she acquired dozens of them. I inherited the collection when she passed [in 1995] and did a short feature for Paperback Parade some years ago. Let me know if you want to see more well-hydrated corpses; I’ll be happy to supply same.”

Naturally, I wrote him back immediately. And soon after that my e-mailbox filled up with scans of book façades featuring lifeless human limbs draped over porcelain or, in two cases, fetching females frightened in the midst of their ablutions (Scott calls these “strategically placed soapsuds” covers). One of my favorites from among Scott’s assortment is shown at the top of this piece. It’s the 1948 Avon edition of Whose Body?, Dorothy L. Sayers’ first Lord Peter Wimsey whodunit (originally published in 1923). Its cover artistry is credited to Ann Cantor, who worked on a number of Avon fronts during the mid-20th century. (More examples of her work are to be enjoyed here and here.) The cover to the right, meanwhile, taken from the 1948 Avon edition of Fast One, by Paul Cain, is quite appealing as well, but unfortunately its jacket illustrator is unidentified.

Below are other top selections from Scott’s set:

Today’s final example of this breed “comes with a story,” writes Art Scott. “I came across this book while rooting around the late lamented Murder One shop in London. I snapped it up, of course, and when I got home carefully gift-wrapped it and posted it to Ellen Nehr in Ohio, with a note attached that said something like, ‘Here it is, the capstone to your bodies-in-bathtubs collection. You’ll never find another book to top it!’ A couple days later the phone rang; it was Ellen calling to thank me, but it took a minute or so to realize who it was or what she was saying, she was laughing so hard.”

READ MORE: “Murder Leaves a Ring, by Fay Grissom Stanley,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).

Two-fer Tuesdays: Rub-a-Dub-Dead

A twice-monthly pairing of book covers that just seem to go together. Click on either of these images to open up an enlargement.



This is what can happen when you sit on a good idea for too long.

For months now, I’ve been slowly but surely collecting vintage paperback covers that show a person being either threatened or killed in a bathtub, or having already died in one. I figured this would be a logical accompaniment to an earlier “two-fer” post about people being found to have expired on their beds. In both cases--bed and bath--the usual notion is that there’s safety and comfort to be found in such spots. But that isn’t necessarily the case when you’re dealing with tales rooted in criminal misconduct.

So anyway, I had this plan. This great plan. You know, though, what they say about the best-laid plans ... And sure enough, yesterday I happened across this new post in Pulp International focusing on book fronts “featuring various unfortunates who chose the wrong time to be naked and defenseless” in tubs. Most of the paperback façades I had found over the last few months are included in Pulp International’s gallery. Two excellent examples of the breed, however, missed that blog’s notice, so let me highlight them here.

The first, shown above and on the left, comes from Murder Takes a Wife, by James A. Howard (Pocket, 1955). Here’s how Kirkus Reviews synopsized that novel’s plot:

The mark of Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice) may bar this from polite circles but the tricks here have news value. Jeff Allen, operating as a one-man murder incorporated, cleans up on unwanted wives and mothers, covers himself with respectability as a salesman for pharmaceutical companies, and, gambling on new business in Fort Worth, [Texas] runs into obstacles for perfect executions. Involved in killing two women, he is also given a straight big business chance and, diddled by fate, he loses out on everything--even living with himself. A sharp shocker.

My efforts today to locate information on the Web about author Howard have been mostly frustrating. One source says he was born James Arch Howard in 1922, another that he also wrote some novels--such as 1959’s Fare Prey--under the pseudonym Laine Fisher. I have dug up listings of several more Howard works published during the mid-20th century, among them Murder in Mind (1960), Blow Out My Torch (1956), and I’ll Get You Yet (1954)--the latter two of which star a protagonist named Steve Ashe--and a 1962 work with the terrific title The Bullet-Proof Martyr, described as “a fine murder story and a blood-chilling portrait of a demagogue” (the “flag-waving head of a clan of ‘kinsmen’” named Paul Kenneth Kane).

Credit for the cover of Murder Takes a Wife belongs to Wayne Blickenstaff. Born in Pomona, California, in 1920, Blickenstaff went on to attend Woodbury Business College in Los Angeles and then join the U.S. Air Corps in 1942, not long after the United States entered World War II. “Although many artists who served in WWII went on to careers in the illustration field,” explains this Web site, “few can claim such colorful wartime adventures as Lt. Col. Wayne K. Blickenstaff, Ace pilot of the 353rd Fighter Group. What does it mean to be an ace? A pilot who successfully shoots down several enemy aircraft in combat is considered an ace. But Blickenstaff not only qualified as Ace, but also as ‘Ace in a day,’ a pilot who brought down more than five enemy craft in a single day!” After the war, Blickenstaff used his G.I. Bill benefits to study at L.A.’s Chouinard Art Institute, and then moved to New York City to work as an editorial and advertising artist. In addition to illustrating children’s books and creating artwork for magazines, Blickenstaff painted a number of fronts for crime and mystery novels--Murder Takes a Wife as well as others that can be relished here. His obituary says he died in Charlotte, North Carolina, in December 2011 at age 91.

Now let’s turn our avid attention to today’s other attraction, The Deadly Combo, by John Farr (Ace, 1958). “Farr” is a nom de plume used by Jack Webb (1916-2008), an L.A.-born author--not to be confused with Dragnet actor Jack Webb--whose mysteries often built around the sleuthing pair of Father Joseph Shanley and police homicide cop Sammy “Elijah” Golden (The Deadly Sex).

The Deadly Combo was released by Ace in a paperback double-book edition, on the flip side of which was found Murder Isn’t Funny, by J. Harvey Bond. Both covers, I understand, were painted by Bernard Barton, who was born in New York in 1920, attended Cooper Union in Manhattan, and after a stint with the U.S. military during World War II, moved into commercial illustration work. He also, though, contributed to what in the postwar years was a hungry market for paperback art. Other examples of Barton’s work can be found here. He apparently lived much of his life in Westport, Connecticut, finally perishing there in 1993.

Before we leaving the topic of “blood baths,” let me showcase--on the left--two extra specimens. The first is the cover from what I believe is a 1930s edition of Inside Detective magazine, with pleasingly racy artwork by Norman Saunders. (Had I known about this publication front six years ago, I would definitely have shuffled it into my gallery of peeping-tom covers.) Beside it you will find the 1967 Pocket edition of Dead, Upstairs in the Tub, by Michael Brett. This was the sixth novel starring Brett’s tough, Chevy-driving, Scotch-drinking Manhattan private eye, Pete McGrath, and though it offers a photographic cover, rather than a potentially more interesting illustrated one, Dead, Upstairs in the Tub definitely fits into our theme here.

Murder Leaves a Ring, by Fay Grissom Stanley

As I’m putting my collection of book fronts back together once more, I have had the chance to revisit some of those that I’ve not seen in a long while. This one is among them, the 1953 cover of Murder Leaves a Ring, by Fay Grissom Stanley (1925-1990).

A fabulous title. But sadly, opines Michael E. Grost wrote in a short biographical sketch, the story Stanley tells isn’t equally clever:

The murder takes place in a basement apartment in chic Greenwich Village in New York City, just like Kelley Roos’ The Frightened Stiff (1942). And like Roos and other members of the [S.S.] Van Dine school, the book is set against a background of New York intelligentsia, theater people, writers and models. The first half of the book (Chapters 1-9), describing the crime and the original murder investigation, is not bad at all. There is a floor plan, and we follow the movements of the characters around the crime scene with it, in the pleasant Van Dine school tradition. These scenes are logically constructed, and show moments of invention. Stanley also does a reasonable job evoking New York City cultural figures, and the book’s first half is readable and interesting. But then the book goes downhill into grimness. There is also no Great Detective here, something that is sorely missed, and no clever puzzle plot ideas in the finale. This reader was also disappointed that the book largely lacks the humor present in its title. Instead, the book is often soap opera like in its tone. The policeman hero of the book, Captain Steele, is intelligent, but mainly he exists as a romantic foil for the narrator heroine of the novel. A book like this is a mixed bag. It is not good enough, or successful as a whole, to recommend reading to anyone; yet it is not illiterate junk, either.

Hmm. Not exactly a roaring recommendation. Steve Lewis is somewhat kinder, though, in a piece he wrote about the same book for Mystery*File several years back:

It’s told by the primary protagonist, Katheryn Chapin, a would-be mystery writer herself, as we learn on page one: she’s working on the manuscript of a novel called “Murder on Monday,” just before climbing into a tub, where she first must clean the ring left behind by one of her two roommates, a showgirl named Iris McIvers.

Later on, during a party of fellow Manhattanites, many in the world of the theater, it is Iris’s body who’s found in the very same tub, fully clothed, but with a stocking knotted tightly around her neck. It is learned soon after that Iris had been doing a brisk business of shakedown, if not out-and-out blackmail, among other secrets that Katy and Bonnie, the other roommate, had not known about her.

One of Iris’s recent meaner tricks was that of stealing Katy’s fiancée from her, a writer of plays named Mark, and it is her that Katy tries to protect when questioned by the police in the form of Captain Steele, who castigates her quite vigorously on pages 76-77 for both her lack of observation (significant, he suggests, for someone who hopes to write mysteries) and/or her lack of cooperation (for which at least the reader knows the reason).

There is a long laundry list of suspects in Murder Leaves a Ring--all to the good!--all with varying degrees of conflicting interests; a map of the three girls’ apartment even before page one--and it’s needed!; and an elaborate trap for a suspected killer toward the end. And if I were to mention several twists in the tale along the way, I hope you will forget that I said that, as the pleasure’s in the reading, and not in the reading about it.

Fay Grissom Stanley saw only two of her mystery novels published, Murder Leaves a Ring and Portrait in Jigsaw (1975). I have never seen that second work, but artist James Meese’s cover illustration for the 1953 Dell Books edition of Murder Leaves a Ring definitely makes it worth adding to my bookshelves someday.