Slice of P.I.: “The Sins of the Fathers”

(Part of a series celebrating fictional private eyes.)



The Sins of the Fathers, by Lawrence Block (Dell, 1976).

Block is now 88 years old and well-established as an author of top-notch crime fiction, but in the mid-1970s, he was pretty much an unknown. Yeah, he’d produced a great many novels, but a lot of those had been of the soft-core porn variety (published pseudonymously), and the two series he’d launched up to that point—one about a sleep-deprived, peripatetic spy named Evan Tanner, the other a non-mystery series built around lust-driven teenager Chip Harrison—had not achieved best-seller status. Matthew Scudder was going to change all that.

When we first meet Scudder, in The Sins of the Father, he’s “a 15-year veteran of NYPD who retired after an accidental shooting of a seven-year-old girl,” explains Carol Siwert in her blog Book Reviews Forevermore. “That incident became a breaking point, an emotional trauma that is shared with the reader in bits and pieces. Now living in an emotion-free zone powered by booze and coffee, he works for ‘favors,’ where he investigates for people and they express appreciation in cash. The police force, alas, exists on a favor system as well, and undoubtedly set the stage for Scudder’s mentality now.”

This 276-page story (slim by today’s standards) finds Scudder laboring as an unlicensed gumshoe, taking on clients sent his way by friends on the force. “Desperate people they don’t really want to deal with,” as Benoît Lelièvre characterizes them in Dead End Follies. “Cale Hanniford is one of those people. His estranged daughter Wendy has been murdered in brutal fashion, seemingly by Richard Vanderpoel, her roommate. The case is closed since Vanderpoel has been arrested and hung himself in his jail cell. Cale Hanniford doesn’t really debate the investigation. He just wants some closure. He wants to know how he ended up with a murdered daughter. Scudder accepts the case and sets foot in the strange world of Wendy Hanniford’s ghost, waking up his own at the same time.” A good deal of time is spent in the protagonist’s first-person company, as he questions people in hopes of solving this book’s whodunit plot.

(Right) Lawrence Block

Block is fairly sparing in his descriptions of Scudder, leaving us with the vague understanding that he’s heavy-set and tough enough to handle himself in dangerous situations. He’s also wandered over the line that separates a problem drinker from an improbably functioning alcoholic, a transition that becomes clearer as the series continues. These are definitively hard-boiled yarns, well introduced by The Sins of the Fathers but, as Kevin Burton Smith opines at The Thrilling Detective Web Site, reaching their creative apex with 1982’s Eight Million Ways to Die, “simply one of the best P.I. novels of all time, and Everybody Dies (1998) ain’t too shabby either.”

Thanks to tech writer-turned-book art authority Tim Hewitt, I know that the paperback cover topping this post was painted by John Melo, who started his career in commercial art around 1970. He worked in motion-picture advertising as well as providing illustrations for books, magazines, films, the theater, and television. Many of his creations fronted science-fiction novels, as well as works of horror fiction, TV tie-in releases (including several linked to the Lee Major series The Six Million Dollar Man), and the occasional tale of crime and mystery—not just Block’s Scudder debut, but also this entry in Dell Books’ Murder Ink/Scene of the Crime series of the 1980s.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Swing, Swing Together

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



These “Two-fer Tuesdays” installments have been rather sparse lately, as I’ve focused what free time I have on celebrating John D. MacDonald’s centennial as well as what would have been the 110th birthday of paperback cover artist Paul Rader. For The Rap Sheet and Kirkus Reviews, I must still deal with Best Books of 2016 coverage and other year-end postings. But as things finally wind down for 2016, I hope to resume my regular Killer Covers posting schedule.

So let us begin by comparing the two softcover façades embedded above. The one on the left comes from the original, 1967 Gold Medal release of Tanner’s Twelve Swingers. That was Lawrence Block’s third (of eight) novels featuring Evan Michael Tanner, a seriously sleep-deprived Korean War veteran turned secret agent. A short MyShelf.com review of this “fast-paced” story with “many Cold War references” offers the following plot brief:

As a favor to his good friend, Karlis Mislovicius, Tanner agrees to go to Russia to smuggle a Latvian gymnast, Sofija Lazdinja, out of the country. He travels from New York City, across Europe, to Russia on his mission. His problem is augmented when Sofija refuses to leave without her eleven teammates. Along the way his entourage is increased by a Slav author and the young heir to the nonexistent Lithuanian throne. It takes all of Tanner’s ingenuity and resources to rescue them all.

The dynamic illustration introducing this edition of Tanner’s Twelve Swingers was created by versatile, and now 90-year-old artist Robert McGinnis. It’s one of three stylistically similar fronts McGinnis painted for Block’s Tanner series, the others found on Two for Tanner and Tanner’s Tiger, both of which were published in 1968.

On the cover featured above and to the right, you see the term “swingers” being used in a very different manner. Dee Winters’ The Swingers (Beacon, 1965) was a soft-porn yarn about “rollicking” sex-partner exchanges among married couples. As the back-jacket copy on this other version of the same novel reads:

Welcome to the swinging, swapping suburban set--where couples are rated and partners switched with pushbutton ease.

Rick and Nina found the neighborhood “mating game” gave an exciting new fillip to their own waning marriage. They found new thrills in toting up their score cards, threw themselves with headlong abandon into a vortex of sensation-seeking as they competed with each other for “high-score.”

Nina made the rounds of husbands and Rick completed the circuit of wives. But at last one fatal step too far down the perverse path brought them face to face with a shocking realization about themselves—and about their friend, attractive Gerry Dennison. Gerry’s forbidden longings, it was clear, rendered her completely vulnerable to the warped ways of--The Swingers.

Responsibility for the cover art here belongs to Ernest Chiriacka (aka “Darcy”), one of my favorite paperback illustrators of the mid-20th century. I haven’t succeeded in learning much online about The Swingers’ author, but I do know that Dee Winters also gave readers such tales as 1962’s Motel Marriage (another wife-swapping adventure) and 1966’s You May Hate Lonnie Browning (“about nurses and the temptations in their intimate lives”).

By the way, while I was digging around on the Web, I happened across another vintage paperback that picks up on this week’s title theme. Sex-Swinger (shown on the left) was published by Beacon Books in 1963. Its author is listed as “Andrew Blake,” but according to AbeBooks, that was just a pen name employed by Lary [sic] Mark Harris, who wrote additional books under such pseudonyms as Laurence M. Janifer, Barbara Wilson, Mark Phillips, and Alfred Blake. In addition to Sex-Swinger, Harris produced The Bed and I (1962), The Ecstasy Kick (1967), Love Hostess (1963), and 1969’s Topless (“a case history report … revealing portraits of the everything-goes woman in today’s anything-goes world”). The wonderful blog Pulp Covers: The Best of the Worst attributes the artwork for Sex-Swinger to Charles Schridde (1926-2011), who grew up in the American Midwest and was once a top illustrator in Detroit, Michigan, contributing his talents to automobile catalogues, and painting futuristic residential scenes for use in Motorola TV advertisements. (See examples of those here and here.) Schridde was also known during his later years for his Western imagery. Since his death, Schridde’s Web site has been taken down, but you can still access it via the Wayback Machine.

Talent Enough for Any Genre

Blogger Ben Boulden posted earlier this month, in Gravetapping, about a 1971 Ace Books paperback release titled If Dying Was All. It was prolific author Ron Goulart’s first of four novels featuring Southern California private eye John Easy. Boulden wrote in his post that “the cover art is absolutely groovy. Not just anyone can pull off an ascot, polyester bell bottoms, and Florsheims. The artist: Beats me. Although I do know I really, really like this cover.”

As it turns out, that illustration was done by Elaine Duillo. The Lynn Munroe Books Web site offers a short bio of Duillo, which begins:

Elaine Duillo was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928. As a teenager at the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, she met her future husband John Duillo [also an artist]. Elaine was not the first female paperback artist, but she was the first that most collectors noticed. She was not the only female romance cover artist; she was the best romance cover artist period. Her ability to capture fantasy by using realism captivated us. Her extraordinary talent, vivid use of color and eye-catching details engage the viewer every time. Around 1959 or 1960, Elaine began doing magazine illustrations and paperback covers for the Balcourt Art Service. It was still a man's world in those days, and on some of her early work, especially for the men’s adventure magazines, she signed a male name.

“The men's magazine illustrations were usually signed with a man's name as the publisher would not hear of a woman artist,” Elaine told me in a letter last year. “The Art Director of course knew who I was. I no longer remember those male names that I used, nor do I remember the titles.” Elaine tells us her first two covers were circa 1960 romances, their titles lost for now. The earliest paperback cover I have found with the distinctive “Elaine” signature is a 1961 Ace paperback called Obsession by Kim Darien.

Munroe provides a quite lengthy checklist on her site of Ms. Duillo’s artistic creations, including romance novels, crime and mystery tales, and “adult” paperbacks. There doesn’t seem to be anything about the style of her work that identifies it as having been executed by a woman: her male figures are hard-jawed or comical, whatever the assignment demands; her female subjects are every bit as sexy as those that might have dripped from a man’s paintbrush--as you can see by looking at the cover of 1975’s The Topless Tulip Caper, by Chip Harrison (aka Lawrence Block), shown atop this post.

The Society of Illustrators, which added Duillo’s name to its Hall of Fame back in 2003, is lavish in its praise of her work:

In the admittedly highly specialized realm of American romance fiction Elaine Duillo is heralded by readers of that genre as “The Queen of Romance Cover Art,” but she is far more than that. The artist’s commitment to stories of romantic adventure is what gives her work its inspiration and its edge, but she is, also, easily, as skillful as any artist who has ever been inducted into the Illustrators Hall of Fame. Her superlative draftsmanship, her exquisite sense of design, her feeling for gesture and nuance, and the striking command of mood through use of color, are coequal and exceptional attributes of her work. One might say, not knowing of her passion for this kind of story, not for the literary merit such stories can often attain, that the qualities of her art go far beyond the needs and limitations of the genre with which she is so well associated. But this is the mark of a truly great illustrator--to be able to transcend the inherent limitations of a subject and too take with equal commitment, each assignment as it comes along, producing, with flawless veracity and dependable consistency, works of true artistic excellence.

I don’t have many chances to toast women illustrators on this page; they simply weren’t as well-recognized or active during the heyday of crime and mystery paperback novels as were some of their male counterparts. So let me showcase, below, a few examples of Duillo’s work. Click on any of the images to open an enlargement.