That “Girl”

Well, look at what today’s mail brought my way! It’s a copy of German-born American author Peter Rabe’s 1965 novel, Girl in a Big Brass Bed (Fawcett Gold Medal), one of his three novels featuring resourceful, globe-trotting lawyer Manny DeWitt. This paperback was sent to me by Philadelphia copy editor and blogger Peter Rozovsky, who last week announced on his Facebook page,

I SCREWED UP, AND YOU CAN WIN A BOOK!

I got so excited ordering books for the panel I’ll moderate at Bouchercon that I inadvertently bought one book twice, and now you can benefit. I'll send a copy of the book, Girl in a Big Brass Bed, by Peter Rabe, to the first person who sends me a Facebook private message with mailing address and the correct answer to this question:

Peter Rabe earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in which field?

Good luck.

It didn’t take but a moment’s Web searching to confirm my memory that the fairly prolific Rabe had been awarded a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in psychology from Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Shortly after I dashed off a note to Rozovsky containing that information, he replied, “You won.” So here I am, the proud new owner of what I believe is Rabe’s 24th novel. Although a photo graces the façade, it’s a splendid addition to Killer Covers’ collection of brass bed fronts.

READ MORE: “Bonus FFBs for Wednesday: Manny deWitt Omnibus (Girl in a Big Brass Bed, The Spy Who Was Three Feet Tall, Code Name Gadget)—Peter Rabe,” by Bill Crider (Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine).

My, You’ve Got Some Brass!

A particularly handsome brass bed front: Grounds for Murder, by John Appleby (Dell, 1958), with art by James Hill.

Late last month, after I posted on this page the cover from the 1959 paperback edition of Noel Clad’s The Savage—featuring a young blonde tied to a brass bed frame—I received a note from Art Scott, co-author of the wonderful 2014 book, The Art of Robert E. McGinnis, saying that he’d like to share with me his collection of 25 other vintage novels on which brass beds have appeared. “More than anything,” he explained, “[those beds] seem to be a universal symbolic indicator for ‘cheap rooming house.’ Not having experience staying in same, I’ll have to take it as gospel, but you’d think brass bedsteads would be a lot more expensive than wood. However, they would also be much more durable, and no doubt the beds found homes in a succession of cheap rooming houses on the used market.”

Once I started flipping around through my files of book scans and searching the far corners of the Web, I realized that brass beds have been even more ubiquitous on paperback fronts than Scott suggested. Some examples have been used previously in a Killer Covers post I wrote back in 2014 about beds as places where danger and death might lurk. (Note there, for instance, the façades from Paul E. Walsh’s The Murder Room, William Holder’s The Case of the Dead Divorcee, Van Wyck Mason’s Secret Mission to Bangkok, and Richard Stark’s The Sour Lemon Score). But I am showcasing below more than four dozen additional such covers, boasting paintings by Robert Maguire (the first, purple covers from The Brass Bed), Victor Kalin (Sinners Wild and the first cover shown below from Berton Roueché’s Rooming House), Robert McGinnis (Assignment: Maltese Maiden, State Department Murders, The Sometime Wife, and The Star Trap), Harry Schaare (The Attic Lover), Paul Rader (A Woman), Rafael DeSoto (The Bed She Made, So Deadly Fair, This Bed We Made), Vic Prezio (The Bed Sharers), James Avati (Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye), and James Meese (Worse than Murder).

Click on any of the covers here to open an enlargement.

American artist Mitchell Hooks, Scott added, “seemed to be particularly fond” of using those frequently ornate brass furnishings (either polished or painted) in his cover illustrations. Indeed, what follows are eight of Hooks’ attractive paperback wrappers, among them the 1957 Bantam edition of The Wench Is Dead, by Fredric Brown, which I remarked on in an early Killer Covers post.