Grisly Adams: Keeping Christie in View

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.


The A.B.C. Murders, by Agatha Christie (Pocket, 1971)—a Hercule Poirot novel that’s far superior to the three-part 2018 BBC One television series it inspired.

It’s often been said that Tom Adams (1926-2019) is the best-known artist to have been associated with mystery fictionist Agatha Christie. That’s because, from 1963 to 1980, he was under commission by British publisher Fontana Books (the paperback imprint of William Collins, Sons, now part of mammoth publishing house HarperCollins) to create covers for the UK and European editions of Christie’s releases, both series and standalones.

“For many of the Christie books,” explains this excellent article on the Web site BeautifulBooks.Info, “Tom designed two, or even three different covers over the course of his work on her mysteries, and his mastery of different techniques and habit of hiding clever clues in the cover designs, combined with the familiarity of his work across different continents creates interest in collecting his paperback designs.” The site goes on to paraphrase Adams as saying that he “read each Christie novel he illustrated three times, first very quickly for the story and mood, second to make notes of characters or incidents, and third to choose ideas for the illustration. Early on he rejected the idea of showing [spinster sleuth] Miss [Jane] Marple or [Belgian detective Hercule] Poirot, rationalizing that ‘the characters were so firmly fixed in the reader’s imagination that they could never be satisfactorily shown.’”

There are simply too many Adams-illustrated Fontana editions of Christie’s works to feature here. But I’ve embedded eight examples below, to give you an idea of his oft-surreal and macabre style. (Additional paperback fronts can be found here.) Click on any of these images to enjoy an enlargement.

Adams’ artwork wasn’t confined only to Christie’s British editions. As the Web site Collecting Christie explains, “Tom Adams was contracted by Pocket Books to design covers for 26 U.S. covers, all of which were published between 1971 and 1974. Pocket Books had a different vision for the covers—ones that provided more narrative, utilizing the full cover with no white space and an image that wrapped around the whole book, using the spine and rear panel. The narrative that these covers communicate has a lot of depth and should be closely scrutinized to fully appreciate.” Indeed, Adams’ Pocket illustrations are dramatically conceived, offering a universally grim, haunting tone but plenty of handsome details drawn from Christie’s tales.

Below are 16 of those fronts. Click here to see the entire set.

Anyone wishing to learn more about Adams’ long association with best-selling author Christie should check out either or both of these two books: Tom Adams’ Agatha Christie Cover Story (Dragons World Limited, 1981) or the newer Tom Adams Uncovered: The Art of Agatha Christie and Beyond (HarperCollins, 2016).

Grisly Adams: Double Amblers

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



Judgment on Deltchev, by Eric Ambler (Fontana, 1966).



A Kind of Anger, by Eric Ambler (Fontana, 1967).

Grisly Adams: “Ghost Story”

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



Ghost Story, by Peter Straub (Jonathan Cape, 1979). You can see Adams’ full cover painting for this British edition of Straub’s acclaimed horror novel here.

Grisly Adams: Interpreting Chandler

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



I frequently kick myself for not having had the foresight to purchase—long ago, when they were new—certain books that I now wish were part of my personal library, and that are considerably harder to dig up in ideal condition all these years later.

For instance, I was just old enough (though not savvy enough) in the early 1970s to have bought all 10 of the paperback editions of Raymond Chandler works for which Tom Adams painted covers. That particularly handsome line, originally released by U.S. publisher Ballantine Books in 1971 and ’72, is today much prized by paperback collectors, with copies going for considerably more money than their original 95-cent asking price. No wonder: Adams’ Chandler illustrations are striking, dramatically composed and marginally surreal, and they manage to incorporate familiar features from the individual stories—such as “the nasty meaty leaves” of General Sternwood’s tropical orchids, from The Big Sleep, and a fish tank from “Goldfish,” one of the four lengthy yarns collected in Trouble Is My Business. It seems likely that Adams actually read Chandler’s work, rather than merely taking suggestions from an art director as to what elements his imagery might incorporate.

Naturally, I have all of Chandler’s books in my collection, in various editions—but not a single example from Adams’ Ballantine series. If I could travel back in time to tell my younger self to pick up all of those paperbacks and save them, you can rest assured I would.

Although I previously posted the front from The Simple Art of Murder as part of Killer Cover’s Tom Adams tribute, I am including it again below for the sake of comprehensiveness.

Grisly Adams: “The Rich Are With You Always”

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



The Rich Are With You Always, by Malcolm Macdonald, aka Malcolm J. Ross-Macdonald (Book Club Associates, 1977; originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1976). This was the second book in Macdonald’s four-volume saga about the wealthy Stevenson family, and followed World from Rough Stones (1974). Tom Adams did a number of wraparound cover paintings during his career, and we’ll address more of those later in this series. But for now, here is his full jacket art for The Rich Are With You Always:

Grisly Adams: Fowles Play

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



The Collector, by John Fowles (Pan, 1971). Also in 1971, Adams contributed no-less-eye-catching cover art to another Fowles novel, Pan’s paperback reprint of The Magus:

Grisly Adams: “An American Dream”

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



An American Dream, by Norman Mailer (Andre Deutsch, London; 1965). This was Mailer’s fourth novel.

Grisly Adams: “A Holiday for Murder”

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



A Holiday for Murder, by Agatha Christie (Bantam, 1985). Originally published in 1939 as Hercule Poirot's Christmas, this locked-room mystery has also been released under the title Murder for Christmas. It was Christie’s 16th novel to star brainy Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot.

Grisly Adams: “Patron of the Arts”

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



Patron of the Arts, by William Rotsler (Ballantine, 1974). This same Adams cover illustration was used on another work of science fiction: Pan Books’ 1979 reprint of Capricorn Games, a short-story collection by Robert Silverberg.

Grisly Adams: “I and My True Love”

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



I and My True Love, by Helen MacInnes (Fontana, 1968).

Grisly Adams: “Colonel Sun”

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



Colonel Sun, by “Robert Markham,” aka Kingsley Amis (Jonathan Cape, 1968). This was the very first James Bond continuation novel, published four years after the death of that British superspy’s creator, Ian Fleming. The front cover, above, shows only part of Adams’ full, wraparound jacket painting; the rest can be enjoyed by clicking here.

This same art was subsequently appropriated for use on a completely different book, the 1970 Ballantine paperback edition of Brian N. Ball’s science-fiction novel Timepivot.

READ MORE: “Double 007 Design II,” by Jason Whiton (Spy Vibe).

Grisly Adams: “The Simple Art of Murder”

Part of a series honoring the late cover artist Tom Adams.



The Simple Art of Murder, by Raymond Chandler
(Ballantine, 1971).

Grisly Adams: Artistry Meets Mystery

Well, this is certainly sad news to have to deliver just before Christmas: Tom Adams, the Providence, Rhode Island-born illustrator and painter perhaps most famous for creating the covers for paperback reprints of works by Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, died in Great Britain on December 9. He was 93 years old and had enjoyed an active, in-demand career that spanned more than half a century. As The Gumshoe Site notes, Adams’ cover work had been collected in two volumes: Agatha Christie: The Art of Her Crimes (1981) and Tom Adams Uncovered: The Art of Agatha Christie and Beyond (2015). He had also contributed his talents to Julian Symons’ Great Detectives: Seven Original Investigations (1981), a large-format book that offered new cases for some of mystery fiction’s foremost sleuths—Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple, Nero Wolfe, Ellery Queen, Jules Maigret, and Philip Marlowe.

Even if you’ve never heard of Adams, you may recognize his artistry. In tribute to this man who once thought to become an architect, but instead wound up building a career around “meticulously detailed artworks with grisly themes,” Killer Covers will roll out a series of Adams’ book fronts, at least one per day through the end of this year. We begin, below, with one of his most recognizable covers, from Death in the Clouds, by Agatha Christie (Fontana, 1976).

Adams included this book on the gallery page of his Web site. With it he added the following comment: “I am besotted by old aircraft. My father flew one in the First World War. The Imperial Airways biplane was certainly one of the most marvellous aircraft ever built. The name is a stupid mistake. It should have been Prometheus!”

Meanwhile, a poster on the photography/art site Flickr wrote, “This is the book that the Doctor had in the [May 17, 2008] Doctor Who episode, ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp,’ and the cover inspired the incorporation of the giant alien wasp in that episode featuring Agatha Christie with the Doctor and [his then companion] Donna.”

Another Look: “Friday”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Friday, by Robert A. Heinlein (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982); cover art by Richard M. Powers. Right: Friday, by Robert A. Heinlein (Del Rey, 1983); cover by Michael Whelan.

Challenging Times Changed Popular Fiction

(Above) The Sit-In, by George B. Anderson (Ace, 1970). Cover illustration by George Gross.

“As has been widely celebrated, derided, and mythologized, the 1960s was a time of significant social and political change across the world,” write editors Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre in their diversely entertaining new book, Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980 (PM Press). “Decolonization, second-wave feminism, mass opposition to conscription and the Vietnam War, Black Power, wildcat strikes, campus ferment, lesbian and gay liberation, a flood of ‘hip and groovy’ consumer items”—all of these, they say, “swirled together in a surge of radical and rebellious ideas and practices challenging everyday life and existing structures.”

During that same era, paperback novels witnessed their heyday, offering inexpensive distractions (“particularly in the fields of crime, erotica, thrillers, and romance”), but also often reflecting the cultural shifts and political uncertainties of the time. Subjects that had previously been considered taboo—such as “prostitution, interracial relationships, and homosexuality”—became creative fodder for the authors of those mass-marketed softcover works. “With some publishers happy to push the envelope to make their otherwise niche books stand out,” notes Steve Holland in his Bear Alley review of Sticking It to the Man, “writers found their subjects in the headlines of newspapers—not always the best source of accurate information, but certainly a good guide to what people were talking about and what authors who could turn a book around quickly should be writing about to take advantage of the zeitgeist.”

It’s that intersection of societal upheaval and more or less literary fecundity that Nette and McIntyre, together with their 24 other contributors, investigate in this beautifully illustrated new paperback, a follow-up to their 2017 release, Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats: Pulp Fiction and Youth Culture, 1950 to 1980. The text covers everything from the works of Chester Himes (A Rage in Harlem) and the proliferation of college campus revolt fiction to Vietnam War/antiwar yarns, vigilante thrillers, and pulpish tales featuring Aboriginal Australians. (The editors are both based in Melbourne, so have broadened their book’s perspective to encompass not only American and British stories, but also some that were once popular Down Under.) E.R. Braithwaite’s autobiographical 1969 novel, To Sir, With Love, is the subject of an essay here, as are other individual books such as Marc Olden’s Black Samurai (1974), Kristin Hunter’s The Soul Brothers and Sister Lou (1968), and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975).

Ernest Tidyman’s famous black series private eye, John Shaft, wins the attention in these pages of not merely one, but two different contributors: Steve Aldous, who gave us 2015’s The World of Shaft, and Harlem native Michael A. Gonzales. And California educator Bill Mohr offers a fond recollection of Joseph Hansen, who created gay gumshoe Dave Brandstetter (Fadeout, 1970). But of course it’s the Sticking It to the Man articles examining less-familiar writers to which I am most drawn. People such as Joseph Gober Nazel (the man behind the Iceman series), Nathan Heard (Howard Street, 1968), and Roosevelt Mallory, who gave readers African-American series hit man Radcliff and is one of two subjects tackled by sometime Rap Sheet contributor Gary Phillips. His second contribution to the book looks back at Virgil Tibbs, I Spy’s Alexander “Scotty” Scott, killer-for-hire Larry Jackson (Daddy Cool), and other “archetypes of black male characters in mystery and crime novels.”

(Left) Bad Day for a Black Brother (1970); art by Mitchell Hooks.

Even I managed to get into the act. Nette kindly invited me to submit a 2,500-word profile of Joseph Perkins Greene (1915-1986), a Spokane, Washington-born songwriter and composer who, under the pseudonym B.B. Johnson, concocted a six-book series (beginning with 1970’s Death of a Blue-Eyed Soul Brother) that starred Southern California football player-turned-troubleshooter Richard Abraham Spade, aka “Superspade.” As I explain in the article, Greene’s concupiscent protagonist—“the spitting image of Hollywood star Cary Grant, ‘but a bit darker’”—briefly rivaled Shaft as “the baddest, blackest, and most beautiful crime solver of the 1970s.” My essay for this book is an expansion of a piece I wrote for Killer Covers four years back.

While this book’s prose is certainly intriguing and informative, it’s the illustrations that really make it special. More than 350 vintage book covers are peppered throughout the volume, many of them boasting striking artwork. This follows the pattern set by Girl Gangs, Biker Boys, and Real Cool Cats. I only wish the publisher and editors had made an effort, whenever possible, to identify the painters behind those handsome façades. I’ve done my best to credit the artists in captions accompanying the 13 fronts embedded in this post, all of which also appear in Sticking It to the Man.

The Real Cool Killers, by Chester B. Himes (Avon, 1959). Cover illustration by George Ziel (aka Jerzy Zielezinski).

Black Cop, by “Dom Gober,” aka Joseph Nazel (Holloway House 1974). Cover artist identified as Monte Rogers.

Beebo Brinker, by “Ann Bannon,” Ann Weldy (Gold Medal, 1962). Cover illustration by Robert McGinnis.

Harlem Hit, by Roosevelt Mallory (Holloway House, 1973). Cover illustration by Monte Rogers.

The Dark Angel series, by James D. Lawrence (who penned many of the early Hardy Boys mysteries): Dream Girl Caper, The Emerald Oil Caper, The Gilded Snatch Caper, and The Godmother Caper, all published by Pyramid in 1975.

A Cold Fire Burning, by Nathan C. Heard
(Simon & Schuster, 1974).

Havana Hit, by “Mike Barry,” aka Barry N. Malzberg
(Berkley Medallion, 1974).

The Last Shaft, by Ernest Tidyman (Corgi UK, 1977).

For readers and collectors of old-time paperbacks, as well as for anyone who’s curious to learn more about how cultural upheavals of the mid-20th century were mirrored in that period’s often-now-forgotten novels, Andrew Nette and Ian McIntyre’s new book is an essential purchase. Or perhaps a great gift idea to suggest to friends and family members. Isn’t there some kind of present-oriented holiday coming up later this month?

The editors state, in their introduction, that they have yet a third non-fiction study, this one showcasing experimental and offbeat science fiction—tentatively titled Dangerous Visions & New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1980—due out sometime next year. I’ve already made a bit of room on my bookshelves, right next to their other two volumes, where it can be accommodated.

READ MORE: “Sticking It to the Man,” by Paul Bishop (Bish’s Beat); “A Groovy Pulp-in: Sticking It to the Man,” by Richie Narvaez (Mystery Tribune); “Blowback: Late 1960s and ’70s Pulp and Popular Fiction about the Vietnam War,” by Andrew Nette (CrimeReads); “Get Radcliff!: The Search for Black Pulp’s Forgotten Author,” by Gary Phillips (CrimeReads).

Worth Having for Their Fronts Alone

Literary Hub last week released its list of “The 78 Best Book Covers of 2019,” based on the suggestions of 26 designers. The majority are drawn from mainstream fiction, but at least a couple (by Olga Tokarczuk and Rachel Eve Moulton) come from works that arguably belong in the crime-fiction section of bookstores.

Because I Needed a Gallico Fix ...

Trial by Terror, by Paul Gallico (Dell, 1953).
Cover illustration by Walter Brooks.

Another Look: “Pattern for Panic”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Pattern for Panic, by Richard S. Prather (Berkley, 1956); cover art by Robert Maguire. Right: Pattern for Panic, by Richard S. Prather (Gold Medal, 1961); cover illustration by Barye Phillips. To see a still different version of this novel—one that features a painting by Paul Rader—click here.