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.

Scandalizing the ’Burbs

The cover of Adultery in Suburbia (1964). See the back here.

Once upon a time, the term suburb referred to those areas on the outskirts of cities where mostly poor people found lodgings and very little work. After World War II, however, as servicemen streamed back to the United States to start families and score their representative chunks of the “American Dream,” and as house-building funds became available through President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s G.I. Bill and the Federal Housing Authority, suburban residential areas began to grow like fat tree rings around the nation’s metropolises. Ideally, those new “bedroom communities” would offer all the peacefulness and privacy of older rural environments, but also easier access to urban services, shopping centers, and business offices than were common to farm lands. The model for the middle-class, 20th-century suburban family was the Cleavers, stars of the 1957-1963 TV sitcom Leave It to Beaver.

But as suburbs were firmly established, it became clear they could suffer from the very same downsides as the cities with which they were associated: crime, crowding, poverty, social and racial tensions, and inadequate public works. People couldn’t outrun the problems of living together, no matter how many picket fences they put up or how many martinis were mixed by pipe-smoking dads for convivial weekly bridge groups.

Scandal inflicted the ’burbs, as well. Housewives, bored with baking brownies, seduced or were seduced by milkmen, door-to-door salesmen, and their more handsome neighbors. Husbands weary of driving home over many miles, only to find that their growing children no longer greeted them as warmly as they once had and that their stay-at-home spouses didn’t understand the work pressures they were under, found succor in the silky arms of divorcées down the street. Teenagers who were supposed to be studying or helping little old ladies across busy thoroughfares instead sneaked cigarettes outside school gymnasiums or popped bra hooks in Chevys parked at closed Dairy Queens. And those pool parties … well, who knew how many of the seven deadly sins might be committed twixt the diving board and the lemonade-sticky lounge chairs?

The perceived safety and privacy of the ’burbs could actually engender atypical societal behaviors. “There is a strong tendency in the suburban environment for certain social attitudes to retrogress,” wrote Robert Brooks in his 1967 “exposé,” Adultery in Suburbia. “A situation that highlights this particular type of throwback and negation of the usual and more normal sexual covetousness a man feels for his wife is the organized wife-swapping arrangements that have recently come into public views.”

In other words, humans didn’t lose their faults, just because they lost their urban addresses. They only hoped their indiscretions would escape notice. But no such luck. As the 1960s firmly set in, with its carnal freedoms and curiosity about drugs, suburbs fell under suspicion of harboring secrets and scandals. This was due in part to overactive imaginations, but also to authors such as John Updike, who made his name partly as a “chronicler of adultery,” writing books like Couples (1968) that exposed lustful dalliances beyond the city limits. Licentiousness was a familiar component of cities; the suburbs were fertile new territory in which to explore improprieties.

If there was any “constellation prize” (as young Beaver Cleaver would have phrased it) to be had from all of this, it was the birth of a titillating, if sometimes fairly ridiculous genre of suburban sin fiction. Contributing greatly to that field was prolific American pulpmeister Orrie Hitt (1916-1975), one of whose books, Never Cheat Alone (1960), is displayed above, with other examples embedded below. Hitt’s been pretty much forgotten over the last three decades, but he once made a name for himself turning out provocative paperbacks such as I Prowl by Night, Shabby Street, and more.

He was hardly alone, though, in quickening the pulses of readers intrigued by the illicit adventures of folks living on the urban outskirts. At the top of this post, you’ll find my favorite book cover from this genre, the one attached to Adultery in Suburbia, a 1964 novel by “Matthew Bradley,” which was apparently a pen name used by Peter T. Scott (who also churned out unauthorized Tarzan novels as “Barton Werper”). Credit for that Gold Star edition’s “good-girl art” belongs to Bernard Barton, a mid-20th-century illustrator who, on top of creating erotic novel jackets (another of which can be enjoyed here), developed crime story fronts for such publishers as Ace Books. Unlike some more explicitly painted erotic concoctions, Barton’s Adultery in Suburbia front leaves little to the imagination, yet shows nothing particularly objectionable (although I’m sure it would send more conservative readers into a lather over both its display of partial nudity and its cover teaser: “Her illness was nymphomania, but there were others in town far more disturbed.”).

There are a number of artists behind the 75 covers showcased below, including: Raymond Johnson (Love in Suburbia, Cancel These Vows, Suburbia: Jungle of Sex); Tom Miller (Crack-up in Suburbia); Harry Barton (Her Young Lover, Helena’s House, The Damned and the Innocent); Robert Maguire (Sexurbia County, The Fires Within); Robert McGinnis (Oh Careless Love, The Lion House); Al Rossi (The Empty Bed, Suburbia After Dark, The Sex Rebels, Weekday Widows); Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka (Make Mine Love, Sex Nest, The Night It Happened, The Third Lust); Gino Forte (The Big Bedroom), Fred Fixler (The Passion Hunters); Paul Rader (Spring Fever, Daytime in Suburbia), and Al Brule (Dial “M” for Man, Sex Is a Woman).

One other note about these book jackets: The Big Bedroom (1959) carries the byline “Edward Ronns.” That was just a pseudonym frequently used by Edward S. Aarons, a writer who is probably best remembered for penning the Sam Durell spy novels (Assignment: Burma Girl, Assignment: Maria Tirana, etc.).

Click on any of the covers to open an enlargement.











































































Incidentally, if you know of additional examples of suburban sin fiction, don’t hesitate to cite titles, authors, and Internet-reference locations in the Comments section of this post.