Boeckman Title Overdrive

Not unlike the young man who served as the amorous quarry in Velvet Jackpot (Beacon Softcover Library, 1965), this paperback’s cover illustration really got around. Painted by Victor Olson, it had featured previously—and with only minor variations—on two other Beacon releases: 7 Days to Love (1963), by “Colin Johns,” aka John Bentley and Cornelius J. Collins; and What Makes Sherry Love?, by John Burton Thompson (1970). There’s no question about it: that publisher certainly got its money’s worth from artwork purchases.

In case you’re wondering, “Alex Carter” was a pseudonym employed by Charles Boeckman Jr. (1920-2015). Born in San Antonio, Texas, he was a self-taught jazz musician, skilled with both the clarinet and the saxophone. But he was likewise a fast, accurate typist and an enthusiastic tale-spinner, and he dearly wanted to become a short-story writer. So in between playing gigs all across the United States, Boeckman mailed his yarns off to one publication after another. Finally, after collecting numerous rejection letters, he found the first buyer for his fiction in 1945, when he was 25 years old. He went on from there to bat out mystery, suspense, and western stories (mostly under the byline “Charles Beckman Jr.”), his work being picked up by pulp magazines on the order of Manhunt, Justice, Detective Tales, Dime Mystery Magazine, Pursuit, Star Western, and Dime Western. He even saw one of his stories, “Ambition,” adapted as a July 1961 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, starring Leslie Nielsen.

In addition to penning bookstore-acceptable novels such as Honky Tonk Girl (1953), which exploited his familiarity with the music world, Boeckman—like Lawrence Block, Donald E. Westlake, and others—fed the fast-growing mid-20th-century market for sleaze-and-scandal fiction, the sort of titles usually tucked beneath newsstand counters. As Alex Carter, he churned out not only Velvet Jackpot, but also Traded Wives (1964, with cover art by Clement Micarelli), Change Partners (1963), They All Ran Naked (1967), Boy-Lover (1963, again boasting a Micarelli-painted front), The Games She Played (1966, with an illustration by George Gross), Sex Around the Clock (1965, offering art by Robert Maguire), and Love Too Soon (1966).

Recent years have brought some renewed interest in Boeckman’s work. In 2011, Borgo Press reprinted Honky Tonk Girl. A couple of years later, a collection of his stories from the western pulps—Saddles, Six-Guns & Shootouts—saw print. And in 2015, Bold Venture Press issued Strictly Poison and Other Stories, gathering together 24 of his pulp magazine contributions.

If you’re interested, the late Bill Crider featured in his blog this 22-minute videotaped conversation between Boeckman and fellow author Talmage Powell “sitting in Powell's back yard in Asheville, North Carolina, around 1995 and discussing pulp magazines, digests, paperbacks, writing, and writers.” Great fun!

UPDATE: What do you know, a few months after writing this post, I discovered two more of Boeckman’s “Alex Carter” novels: The Affair (Beacon, 1965) and Nice Girls Finish Last (Beacon Signal, 1964). Unfortunately, in neither case is the cover artist identified.

For a Few Covers More

Oh, what the heck. I so enjoyed putting together that last group of five vintage paperback book fronts—my way of celebrating Killer Covers’ first 500 posts—that I decided to offer up five more fabulous façades. You can go ahead and thank me later.


The Strange Bedfellow, by Evelyn Berckman (Dell, 1958).
Illustration by James Hill.



The List of Adrian Messenger, by Philip MacDonald (Bantam, 1969). Illustration by Mitchell Hooks.



Crack in the Mirror, by Marcel Haedrich (Dell, 1960).
Illustration by Tom Miller.



The Long Ride, by James McKimmey (Dell, 1961).
Illustration by Robert K. Abbett.




Half Girl, Half Woman, by John Furlough (Beacon, 1962).
Illustration by Clement Micarelli.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Well, Which One Is It?

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



Since last week’s celebration of Killer Covers’ first five years focused on book-front illustrations featuring women, I’ve decided to stick to that theme in my initial post-anniversary “two-fer” pairing.

The cover featured above on the left comes from the 1958 Beacon Press paperback edition of Lust Is a Woman, by Charles Willeford (though you’ll notice that his last name has been misspelled “Williford”). If my sources are correct, this was Willeford’s fifth novel and the fourth--and final--one he produced for Beacon during the 1950s, all of which are now considered extremely rare. (The few copies of Beacon’s Lust Is a Woman available through AbeBooks, for instance, are priced at $125 and up!) “He was under pressure to conform to the Beacon style,” explains the Web site Vintage Paperback Archive, “and the result is one of his weakest efforts.” Nonetheless, the playfully suggestive cover of this novel (which Willeford had originally titled Made in Miami) lends it some class. It’s credited to Clement Micarelli, a Rhode Island-born commercial artist who also created a number of recognizable mid-20th-century paperback fronts (some of which can be enjoyed here).

The other cover topping this post is taken from the 1964 Belmont Books edition of Lust Is No Lady, the 14th installment in prolific author Michael Avallone’s series about movie-obsessed New York City private investigator Ed Noon. Reviewing the novel late last year in his blog, Wayne D. Dundee wrote:

Lust Is No Lady (aka The Brutal Kook), is one of the stronger entries in the Noon series. Just incidentally, it marks the end of what might be called Noon’s “more traditional detective mystery” period. After that, starting with … [1967’s The] February Doll Murders, Noon became more of a globe-trotting quasi-superspy (reporting directly to the President of the United States for certain cases), clearly influenced by the James Bond/spy craze that was casting a shadow over everything in those days. The plots and characters got progressively wilder--not necessarily less entertaining, mind you, but nevertheless a departure from the direction of the series as it started a decade-plus earlier.

Not that Lust (nor most of the Noon books, for that matter) is lacking in wild plot twists or distinctive characters either. Start with being air-bombed by bricks out in the wilds of remote Wyoming; mix in a nude deaf mute Indian maiden found staked out in the desert and left for vulture bait; add in a blind old Indian man (the maid’s father) tortured to death and his corpse found hanging by the neck; season with a hidden stash of gold, a cast of men and women (all quite lovely, just incidentally) living secretly in a ghost town-like camp, and top off the whole works with a psychotic dwarf. Propel it all along in Avallone’s energetic, somewhat quirky--yet always compelling, in the sense of making you want to keep turning the pages--writing style, and you have a corker of a tale. The mystery of the lost gold is solved in a basic, but still rather clever manner, and the final denouement where the psycho dwarf “gets his” is quite satisfactory. A bit of a change of pace for Noon, as far as setting, though still satisfying as a tried-and-true P.I. yarn.

I wish I had as much information to share about the captivating but odd (why is the nude, staked-out maiden here missing her nipples?) cover of Lust Is No Lady, but I don’t find its artwork credited anywhere on the Web. And I don’t happen to own a copy of this Avallone book, so I can’t look to see if the illustrator is mentioned on the back cover or inside someplace.

READ MORE: “Ed Noon #14—Lust Is No Lady,” by Tom Simon (Paperback Warrior).