Two-fer Tuesdays: Some Skin in the Game

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



Fire in the Flesh, by Jack Sheridan (Dell, 1960), with a cover illustration by Mitchell Hooks; Trouble in the Flesh, by Max Wylie (Dell, 1960), featuring artwork by Robert K. Abbett.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Trip Traps

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



Journey Into Violence, by Harry Whittington (Pyramid, 1960), featuring a powerful cover illustration by Lou Marchetti; Journey Into Ecstacy, by Albert L. Quandt (Venus, 1951), with cover art by Howell Dodd (see Dodd’s original painting here).

Two-fer Tuesdays: To Each His (or Her) Own

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



Comfort Me with Apples, by Peter De Vries (Signet, 1957); Comfort Me with Love, by “W.E. Butterworth,” aka W.E.B. Griffin (Signet, 1950). Both cover paintings were done by Barye Phillips.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Wrong Directions

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



The Way Up, by Joseph Whitehill (Dell, 1960), with cover art by Tom Miller; All the Way Down, by “M.E. Chaber,” aka Kendell Foster Crossen (Popular Library, 1953)—the second entry in his series starring spy-turned-insurance investigator Milo March, featuring a painting by an unidentified artist.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Are Those Terms Negotiable?

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



Love Me—and Die, by Day Keene (Paperback Library, 1962), featuring cover art by Robert Maguire; and Love Me and Die, by Louis Trimble (Ace, 1960), fronted by an uncredited illustration. (On the flip side of that Ace “Double Novel” was found The Duchess of Skid Row, also by Trimble.)

Two-fer Tuesdays: See What Can Go Wrong?

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



Never Walk Alone, by Rufus King (Popular Library, 1961), featuring cover art by Rudolph Belarski; and She Walks Alone, by Helen McCloy (Dell, 1950), with an illustration by Bill Fleming.

READ MORE: “Mapback Monday: Helen McCloy’s She Walks Alone,”
by Janet Rudolph (Mystery Fanfare).

Two-fer Tuesdays: Give It a Spin

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



The Sex Twist, by John Carver (Beacon Signal, 1962), with its back cover shown here; Sex with a Twist, by Joan Ellis, aka Julie Ellis (Midwood, 1962)—click here to see the flip side. The cover art on both of these books is uncredited.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Rebels Without a Pause

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



The Revolt of Abbe Lee, by James MacBrain (Monarch, 1964), featuring a cover painting by Tom Miller (click here to see the back jacket); The Revolt of Jill Braddock, by Stuart Friedman (Monarch, 1960), with artwork by Harry Barton.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Getting Off

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



Murder Off the Record, by John Bingham (Dell, 1960), with a cover illustration by Robert Maguire (see the full painting here); Murder Off Broadway, by Henry Klinger (Permabooks, 1962), featuring façade art by Harry Bennett.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Mixed Messages Maybe?

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



Never Love a Stranger, by Harold Robbins (Cardinal, 1964), the back cover of which can be found here; and Always Love a Stranger, by Roger Davis (Hillman, 1961), with the back cover posted here. Sadly, I don’t find credits for the cover illustrations on either of these novels. Can anyone identify their artists?

Two-fer Tuesdays: Uh, Is There a Third Option?

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



Say Yes to Murder, by W.T. Ballard (Best Detective Selections, 1943), with a cover illustration by Peter Driben; Never Say No to a Killer, by “Jonathan Gant,” aka Clifton Adams (Ace Double, 1956), featuring a painting by an unidentified artist.

Two-fer Tuesdays: What’s Behind Door No. 1?

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



Killer’s Choice, by Wade Miller (Signet, 1961), with a cover painting by Victor Kalin; Killer’s Choice, by Ed McBain (Permabooks, 1962), featuring an ilustration by Robert McGinnis (one of several he created for McBain’s 87th Precinct series).

Two-fer Tuesdays: Shape Shifting

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



As I’ve mentioned on this page before, it was quite common during America’s paperback heyday of the mid-20th century for publishers to recycle cover illustrations from one book to the next, figuring that readers wouldn’t recognize such budget-saving thievery ... or at least wouldn’t care overly much about it. Less frequently, artists were commissioned to refashion their original paintings for a second (or even third) use. That was the case, for instance, with Ernest Chiriacka’s artwork for 1961’s By Love Depraved and Lou Marchetti’s cover image for 1955’s The Wanton Hour.

It was apparently also what Robert Maguire did in order to supply the two attention-grabbing paperback fronts showcased above.

The façade on the left comes from the 1960 Pyramid edition of Ed Spingarn’s Perfect 36, a novel said to offer “a revealing and riotous story of the bosom business.” I don’t have a scan of the back cover from that issue of Spingarn’s yarn; but the verso of the original, 1957 version (from Pyramid, as well) supplies this slightly more ample description of his plot:

How much is a girl’s virtue worth?

A mink coat? A two-carat diamond ring, with husband attached?

A fling with an intellectual?

A career as a model?

Or a flat $100,000 in cash?

It was up to Rosalie to choose—it was her virtue at stake.
Perfect 36 is the rowdy story of Rosalie—and her figure—and the startling emotions it roused in every male she met! It takes you behind the scenes and screens of the fabulous brassiere trade for the funniest, fastest, most titillating novel of the year!

“Titillating,” get it? Yeah, I don’t think the guy who concocted that suggestive copy received (or deserved) a bonus in his paycheck that week. Nonetheless, given the straightforward goal of drawing as many male readers to Perfect 36 as possible, by whatever creative schemes were available, I’m sure he won at least some appreciation from his bosses, and was invited to practice his teaser-penning talents on other novels.

(Left) Lou Marchetti’s art for the 1957 edition of Perfect 36.

Maguire’s artwork for Perfect 36 was exceptional, yet only slightly less provocative than that façade text, with its beautiful young brunette wrapped in a sparkly, curve-clinging dress, striking poses before an audience of leering gents who you just know aren’t whispering among themselves about her intellectual prowess. Pay special attention to that first guy on the left, the bald-headed one twiddling his cigar … because you’ll find that he, along with a version of the woman holding the limelight on Perfect 36, also appear on this week’s second “two-fer” front, shown above and on the right.

Released in 1966, this “Midwood Double Novel” comprises—as the cover line promises—“two stories about the kind of woman around whom no man is safe”: Test in Temptation, by Laura Duchamp; and Cool and Collected, by Blake Randall. It isn’t hard to recognize that the fetching femme Maguire imagined as that “kind of woman” is essentially the same one he’d pictured half a dozen years before on Spingarn’s novel. In this case, however, she’s clad in white, rather than iridescent red; her black tresses are more tossed than before, evidently as a result of her dancing; and her left arm has finally migrated out from behind her back, but the similarities are greater than those differences. And though the scene around her is more lively and colorful than on the earlier book, the gent (in the lower left corner) most obviously moved by her movements is the same grinning stogie-chomper we saw on Perfect 36, now wearing a light blue shirt and black necktie, rather than a dark blue shirt and a yellow tie.

If you recognize the byline “Laura Duchamp,” it may be because I mentioned it a few times last fall, when Killer Covers celebrated the 110th anniversary of artist Paul Rader’s birth. Duchamp was among the pseudonyms employed by author Sally Singer, who composed a variety of soft-porn novels (including Wild and Wicked, Model Mistress, A Weakness for Men, and The Sunday Lovers) for Midwood Books and—as Pulp International recalls—was “one of the few sleaze writers who was actually female. She was also prolific as ‘March Hastings.’” According to a backside blurb, Test in Temptation focused on a woman by the name of Celeste, who “was ready to violate every rule of house and home, ready to chuck it all, husband, family, the works, in order to get the kind of love she wanted from the kind of man she wanted it from.” Meanwhile, its companion volume—Cool and Collected, by Randall (one of several pen names used by science-fictionist Robert Silverberg)—features a protagonist with broader desires: “There’s a man for every woman, but Rebecca was a woman for every man. She knew she could make men or break them. She knew all she had to do was crook her little finger and they’d fall to their knees in humility.”

With these protagonists to work from, it’s no wonder Maguire’s Midwood cover coquette looks like somebody capable of handling her own affairs—in more ways than one.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Fingers of Fate

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



In large part because he’s now been resting in his grave for more than eight decades, English journalist-author Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) is no longer the “synonym for crime fiction” that he once was. Yet, as Michael Mallory reminded us in the Summer 2013 issue of Mystery Scene magazine, Wallace was “one of the most popular writers of the early 20th century, and certainly one of the most prolific, … [turning] out an astonishing 130 novels (18 alone in 1926), 40 short-story collections, 25 plays, some 15 non-fiction books, plus journalism, criticism, poetry, and columns, in a little over 30 years. During his peak it was claimed that one-quarter of all the books read in England were penned by Wallace, and he remains one of the most filmed authors of all time.”

Remember, it was Wallace who penned The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1918), The Angel of Terror (1922), The Green Archer (1923), The Door with Seven Locks (1926), The Forger (1927), the J.G. Reeder detective stories, and half a dozen entries in his Four Just Men series (which inspired a 1959-1960 British TV drama starring Dan Dailey). During the 1960s, British newsstands featured issues of Edgar Wallace Mystery Magazine, and Wallace was also credited with writing the first draft of the screenplay for the blockbuster 1933 motion picture, King Kong—though, as this piece in The Guardian recalls, “He died in 1932 while at work on the script.”

Blue Hand is not among Wallace’s better-remembered works. However, one Goodreads reviewer calls it a “ripping yarn,” with “an excellent villain and plenty of dramatic, if far-fetched incident[s].” And Mary Reed, the co-author (with husband Eric Mayer) of the John the Lord Chamberlain mystery series (One for Sorrow, Two for Joy, etc.), says it offers “a few twists [that] will catch the reader by surprise.” She offers this synopsis of its plot:

Legal clerk Jim Steele VC is horrified when told by Eunice Weldon, the girl he loves, that she has taken the post of secretary to the mother of Digby Groat and is going to live in the Groat family home in [London’s] Grosvenor Square.

As well Jim might [be] … Among other things, [Digby Groat] is not above menacing his kleptomaniac mother and torturing small animals. His mother will inherit a fortune from her deceased brother on a certain date if her niece Dorothy Danton cannot be found. Since Dorothy disappeared in a boating accident while still a baby, and has not been seen since, it looks as if the Groats will soon be extremely wealthy. But Jim, who is interested in the Danton case, is determined they will never get their hands on the fortune.

The first night under the Groats’ roof, Eunice receives an unseen nocturnal visitor who leaves a card stamped with a blue hand, advising her to flee the house. Despite this ominous warning, after Jane Groat suffers a stroke Eunice stays on. Other blue hand marks appear at the house and soon the reader is in the thick of a plot featuring a mysterious veiled woman, drugs, gangs, derring-do on trains, in planes, and on the high seas, and a lot more besides. Aside: if this had been a film, no doubt the audience would cheer when they see how a minor baddie comes to a particularly spectacular end.

The cover of Blue Hand shown above and on the left comes (quite ironically) from UK publisher Digit Books’ 1963 paperback edition of Wallace’s tale. There is no apparent artist’s signature on the cover, and I don’t find any reference online to who might have created that painting of an apparently frightened blonde woman, a scrubs-sporting doctor, and a menacing azure palm spread above them both. It’s been suggested that this illustration came from the most able hands of Sam Peffer, a British commercial artist who took on a variety of cover-art-creation assignments for Digit during the early ’60s, and once explained that he didn’t sign all of his work for that house. But I don’t find confirmation that Peffer—or “Peff,” as he liked to be identified—gave us this Blue Hand art.

Having fully appreciated that 1963 cover, let us now turn our attention to today’s other featured front, with its ominous, Gerald Powell-painted illustration. This comes from the 1956 Dell edition of The Restless Hands, by Berlin-born American pulp writer Bruno Fischer (1908-1992). As this article explains, Fischer “was the author of 25 novels and more than 300 short stories, a contributor to Black Mask and Manhunt magazines, and the uncrowned king of the notorious ‘weird menace’ pulps.” The Restless Hands, released originally by Dodd, Mead & Company in 1949, was the third entry in a series starring cop-turned-private eye Ben Helm. As Kevin Burton Smith observes at The Thrilling Detective Web Site, Helm was “not your typical hard-boiled, Hammeresque eye of the time.” He smoked a pipe, was married to a “loving, striking actress” named Greta Murdock, and earned “much of his living as a criminologist, writing and lecturing in that field.”

Although I haven’t found available online a review of The Restless Hands, I did manage to dig up an image (on the left) of the back cover from the aforementioned Dell edition, which provides this description of the cast members in Fischer’s story:

Tony Bascomb was the town’s black sheep. He had run away from a murder, and now he was back, and the night after he got back there was another murder.

George Dentz was the town’s frustrated lover. The poetic type. Liked women, in his own nervous way. Capable of cold-blooded murder? Nobody knew.

Mark Kinnard was the town’s hard worker. A big fellow, friendly, a quiet, dutiful son. He’d never had much fun. Hardly the killer type.

Rebecca Sprague was the town’s beauty. These three men wanted to marry her, but two women had been strangled, and one of the three was the slayer. Nobody knew which, least of all Rebecca.

She had a choice: lose the man she loved, or take a 3-to-1 chance on marrying a brutal killer!

There’s no mention in that text of New York City gumshoe Helm. But then, as The Thrilling Detective’s Smith makes clear, Fischer’s protagonist is “rarely the central character in these multiple-viewpoint thrillers, although he does always seem to be the one to (mostly) tie things up.” Presumably, he sweeps in at some point to accomplish the same thing here.

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.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Just a Little Off the Top

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



Midwood Books was an American paperback-publishing company that, from 1957 to 1962, churned out myriad works of “sleaze fiction” targeted at a primarily male audience (though they attracted lesbian readers, as well). Employing the early—and often pseudonymous—talents of such authors as Mike Avallone, Donald E. Westlake, and Orrie Hitt, Midwood competed for sales with Beacon Books, Nightstand Books, and similar enterprises. Southern California bookseller and vintage books historian Lynn Munroe recalls Midwood’s origins in this excellent piece from his Web site:

Harry Shorten came from the Midwood section of Brooklyn, NY. With his partner, artist Al Fagaly, Shorten made his fortune with a comic strip called “There Oughta Be a Law.” Shorten thought up the ideas and Fagaly would do the drawings. Looking around for somewhere to invest all the money he was making from his cartoon, Shorten decided to become a paperback-book publisher. He looked at the success of Beacon Books, a series of slick cheap throwaway melodramas and sexy romances with flashy girlie art covers marketed to men and published by Universal Distributing. Shorten figured he could do the same, and at 505 8th Avenue in Manhattan, in 1957, he started a paperback book line named for his old neighborhood.

The first batch of Midwood Books were either “There Oughta Be a Law” paperbacks or unnumbered experimental forays in the Beacon style. By Midwood 7 in 1958, the authors and artists we recognize as Midwood Books were in place. Midwood 7 [Love Nest] is by Loren Beauchamp [aka Robert Silverberg] and has a cover by Rudy Nappi, Midwood 8 [Carla] is by Sheldon Lord [aka Lawrence Block] and has a cover by Paul Rader. Shorten was getting his early manuscripts from the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, where Meredith’s band of employees and clients were soon churning out a book a month for Nightstand Books, too. And he was getting his cover paintings from the Balcourt Art Service, the same agency that supplied many of the covers for Beacon.

As provocative as some of Midwood’s titles could be—from Anybody’s Girl and The Seduction Game to Morals Charge and Ladder of Flesh—its illustrated covers could be still more titillating. Just two examples are shown atop this post. The one on the left the comes from 1961’s Intimate, by Martha Marsden, while its next-door neighbor graced 1963’s Take Me, by John B. Thompson (who also penned such never-bestsellers as Hitch-Hike Hussy and Male Virgin). The term “male-fantasy novel” might have been created to describe both these works, with their images of women enthusiastically stripping off their tops. According to its back cover, Intimate focuses on a woman named Linda Gardner, “who dared throw herself into the whirlpool of life and reach its most intimate depths”—where both male and female partners craved her companionship. Take Me promises “a completely uninhibited sex story” that’s “shockingly candid.”

The painting that fronts Intimate is credited to award-winning Connecticut artist and graphic designer Victor Olson (1927-2007), who produced a variety of cover illustrations for Midwood over the years, and about whom I have written before on this page. The façade from Take Me has also been identified as Olson’s work, though not with quite the same confidence. If anyone can confirm Olson as the creator of Take Me’s artwork, or supply a correction to that attribution, I’d be most grateful. Click on the image for an enlargement.

Finally, since I hate not to overwork a theme, let me just leave you with one additional example of a paperback featuring a woman removing her shirt in alluring fashion. The front on the left comes from Bedroom a Go-go (Brandon House, 1965), by “Amy Irwin,” a nom de plume employed by an author named Harry Kantor. Its illustration was done by Fred Fixler.

LEARN MORE: A Web site called Book Scans features collections of covers from Midwood releases, as well as those from books published by Beacon, Greenleaf, and other mid-20th-century houses.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Beasts Within

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



Strange Abominable Snowmen. Really, some bright bulb thought it necessary to add the adjective “Strange” to the title of a book about the giant Yeti and his equally legendary, hirsute cousin, Bigfoot? As if “Strange” wasn’t already quite obvious?

I don’t usually remark on works about the supernatural, monsters, and other creeps that go crawling through the night (and through the human imagination), but this pair of images has been sitting in my computer files for some while, screaming for attention. I held off only because I haven’t been able to find out much about either title. 1970’s Strange Abominable Snowmen, a Popular Library paperback, was produced by Iowa writer Warren Smith (1931-2003). Wikipedia says the book “claimed to offer scientific proof as to the existence of Bigfoot,” much of it provided by a “‘Major Stoyanow,’ who allegedly came into contact with a Bigfoot and relayed the information.” However, this post about Brad Steiger—another Iowan interested in the pseudoscience of cryptozoology, with whom Smith co-wrote several books under the pseudonym Eric Norman—contends that Strange Abominable Snowmen “is partially fictionalized.” (Under the Norman guise, Steiger had previously penned another book, 1969’s The Abominable Snowmen, but the authenticity of that one doesn’t seem as broadly questioned.) Unfortunately, the artist behind Strange Abominable Snowmen’s cover illustration isn’t identified, and the original painting is said to have been lost for decades, until it suddenly turned up in a yard sale back in 2014.

A bit more is known about our second book under consideration today, Nights with Sasquatch, by John Cotter and Judith Frankle (Berkley, 1977). This is not your usual yarn dealing with unlikely sightings of hominid-like creatures, mysterious beings that appear in America’s Pacific Northwest only long enough to be hastily photographed and leave scattered footprints behind. The cover line here promises “an explosive ordeal of rape and revenge beyond any woman’s experience.” Fortunately, Nights with Sasquatch is a novel. Here’s the back-cover description of its plot:

Does Sasquatch exist? The terrifying truth behind the ancient legend. A team of young scientists sets out to explore the Northwest Mountains. Both John Cotter and Judith Frankle were trained level-headed observers with liberated views on life and love. Until they confronted Sasquatch—a half-human monster who claimed Judith as his captive mate. This is the explosive novel of a woman forced to endure barbaric, sexual lusts beyond any human experience. And a man driven by revenge.

Again, the art fronting Nights with Sasquatch isn’t credited. Which, I think you’ll agree, is hardly the strangest aspect of this book.

READ MORE: “Some Enchanted Evening … You May Meet a Yeti,” by Mimi Hall (Mimsywords).

Two-fer Tuesdays: Just Your Hype

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



“The behind-the-scenes novel of a talent agency … whose tentacles reach world-wide into every phase of show business … fascinating.” That’s what the San Francisco Chronicle said of The Flesh Peddlers, when this Stephen Longstreet novel was originally published (by Simon & Schuster) in 1962. Meanwhile, The Columbus Dispatch said it offered “a liberal education in the know-how of bars, bedrooms, and beds.” Kirkus Reviews summed up the book’s plot this way:

COK (Company of Kings), the petulant, arrogant talent organization run by the King Brothers (“money smelled good at the Kings’ place”) is the labyrinth through which numerous crudely drawn characters live out their half-lives “flesh peddling” big and small talent, locally and internationally. A script-type vernacular and a flood of comment on current authors, “pop” idols, and affairs (the lesbian scene and the guilt-laden adultery sequences are here, typically) relate COK to its human communicators. Our “hero,” Garrison, wends his way through this colorful maze, his fast contemporary ear cocked for the nuances. His demise is an inevitable consequence of COK manipulations, for the organization is loyal to nothing. Here is slick stuff about Storyland, USA, to the tune of flashy cars, willing women, and an insatiate business octopus—all cemented in place with a very obvious, hard-money universe. ...

Such a wealth of flash and sexual frivolity might not seem especially interesting, or even provocative, nowadays. But during his long and varied career, from the 1930s through the ’80s, Longstreet (born Chauncey Weiner) not only churned out scripts for radio, theater, film, and television (he holds credits for both 1946’s The Jolson Story and 1957’s The Helen Morgan Story), but made a prominent name for himself in book-publishing circles. He started out penning detective yarns, two of which—Crime on the Cuff (1936, published under the alias Henri Weiner) and Death Walks on Cat Feet (1938, bylined “Paul Haggard”)—starred John Brass, a one-armed sleuth and ex-Secret Service man, who also happened to be a cartoonist (an avocation Brass shared with his creator). He went on, under the Haggard nom de plume, to produce other mysteries novels, such as Dead Is the Door Nail (1937), featuring “Mike Warlock, sports reporter for the New York Globe, and his faithful companion and cameraman, Abner Gillaway.” But it’s as Stephen Longstreet that he became a bookstore fixture. Among his best-known titles: Stallion Road (1945); Wild Harvest (1955); The Crime (1959); Geisha (1961, written with his wife, Ethel Longstreet); The Golden Runaways (1964); The Divorce (1974); The Kingston Fortune (1975); and The Dream Seekers (1979). In addition, recalls Longstreet’s 2002 obituary in the Los Angeles Times, this author concocted an “extensive list of non-fiction works,” among them A Century on Wheels: The Story of Studebaker (1952), Chicago: An Intimate Portrait of People, Pleasures, and Power, 1860-1919 (1973), and a number of books relating the history of jazz, including 1986’s Storyville to Harlem: Fifty Years in the Jazz Scene.”

The front and back covers of The Flesh Peddlers, shown here, come from the 1963 Dell edition, with artwork by Mort Engel.

I wish I was equally prepared to say who painted the altogether captivating face of this week’s second showcased paperback, Flesh Agents, by Jean C. Bosquet (Avon, 1957). Unfortunately, I’m not. I did, though, manage to track down a fine short critique of that novel in the Reading California Fiction blog:

Paul DeSilva quits his newspaper job to become a publicist for Triumph Studios. His fiancée thinks he's selling out, but he quickly comes to enjoy the work. He focuses his efforts on boosting the career of Darlene Lamont, a young contract player determined to do whatever is necessary to become a star. Paul launches a successful campaign of newspaper stories, public appearances and photo opportunities which gives Darlene the attention she wants. He also becomes deeply smitten with the beautiful actress. But he can’t determine whether she reciprocates his feelings or is just grateful for his loyalty and dedication.

This is a straightforward Hollywood insider story. By detailing the activities of the book’s savvy but lovelorn protagonist, Bosquet shows what publicists do and why they are an essential part of the movie business. The author doesn’t emphasize the vacuousness of attention-getting. Paul is not a noble figure—he treats most women in his life callously, for example—but the nature of his work is not one of his shortcomings. Actors, directors and studio honchos, on the other hand, are treated with profound cynicism. As in most plot-driven novels, the characters are delineated rather than developed. Bosquet, however, delivers (if just barely) on the promise that Paul’s story will have an arc of some sort. The book is an fast read and a pretty entertaining one.

If anybody out there can identify the party responsible for this Flesh Agents artwork, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Twisted Justice

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



One thing I enjoy about writing this blog is discovering authors I’d never heard of before. Such a practitioner is Nancy Hermione Bodington, who, from the 1940s through the swinging ’70s, produced a string of mystery and psychological suspense novels under the pseudonym Shelley Smith—books that earned her acclaim from at least one eminent authority on the genre: Julian Symons. As critic Mike Ripley recalled in a “Getting Away with Murder” column he penned for Shots back in 2012, “Symons likened [Bodington/Smith] to a cross between Mary Roberts Rinehart and Francis Iles—good company to be in.” Ripley added that another reviewer called her, “rather generously, ‘the English Patricia Highsmith’ although the Shelley Smith books are far more genteel.”

A bit of Web searching tells me the author was born Nancy Hermione Courlander in Surrey, England, on July 12, 1912. According to the Golden Age of Detection Wiki, “she was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris and married Stephen Bodington in 1933.” Her premiere as Shelley Smith came with the 1942 publication of Background for Murder, a novel that modern British mystery writer Martin Edwards describes as “a genuine whodunit, with a dizzying list of suspects.” It was that book in which Smith introduced Jacob Chaos, an English detective who would reappear in one later yarn, 1947’s He Died of Murder! Most of Smith’s tales were standalones, including The Woman in the Sea (1941), The Man with a Calico Face (1950), An Afternoon to Kill (1953, which Edwards calls “a real tour de force”), The Party at No. 5 (1954), The Lord Have Mercy (1956, aka The Shrew Is Dead), The Ballad of the Running Man (1961), and A Grave Affair (1973).

The Crooked Man was Smith’s eighth novel to see print, published in the States by Harper & Brothers in 1952 (and in Great Britain under the title Man Alone). The 1954 Perma Star paperback edition—shown atop this post, with a beautiful but ominous cover painting by George Erickson—calls it “the terrifying story of a man whose mind was warped by strange desires.” Kirkus Reviews offered the following assessment:

The downgrade from meticulous petty thievery to murder in the life and crimes of Thomas Bates. There’s Grace Pickering, whose life he saves and who rewards him with an affection he avoids until he finds out about her savings account which he can only disengage through marriage. His next victim, a man, he is forced to kill. He marries again, for a dowry in jewels, but returns to Grace until he disposes of her with greater finality. But when his last enterprise, marriage to a wealthy woman whom he removes from an asylum, ends in suicide, his innocence of the crime is invalidated by the past. An unsavory study which is precise in pathology and cold in ridicule.

A couple of Smith’s works were adapted as screen dramas: The Party at No. 5 became an episode of the series Climax! in 1957, and barrister-author John Mortimer—later famous for his Horace Rumpole stories—turned The Running Man into a 1963 film of the same name. In addition, Smith contributed a couple of scripts to TV anthology series in the UK, and she co-wrote (with John Hawkesworth) the screenplay for Tiger Bay, a 1959 crime drama—“the story of a girl, a gun, and a killer,” to quote blogger John “J.F.” Norris—that featured the first major role for young actress Hayley Mills. However, The Crooked Man appears never to have been launched past its early print existence. The author reportedly passed away on April 15, 1998, at the Carisbrook Lodge Nursing Home in Sussex, England.

Now let us shift our focus over to this week’s second featured work, the similarly titled There Was a Crooked Man (Gold Medal, 1954), by Day Keene. As any regular reader of this blog should know, Keene was a nom de plume employed by Gunnar Hjerstedt (1904-1969), described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as “one of the leading paperback mystery writers of the 1950s.” Just looking down the lengthy list of his published titles is enough to make any aspiring fictionist go green with envy. Keene created only a single recurring protagonist—half-Irish, half-Hawaiian L.A. private eye Johnny Aloha, the star of Dead in Bed (1959) and Payola (1960); the rest of his books were standalones—“some crap,” opines The Thrilling Detective Web Site’s Kevin Burton Smith, “but what’s amazing is how much of it was good stuff.”

There Was a Crooked Man was brought to the public marketplace early in Keene’s book-writing career, which had begun with Framed in Guilt (1949) and would conclude with Acapulco G.P.O. (1967). Perhaps not surprisingly, Texas author-blogger Bill Crider, who has repeatedly expressed his “affection” for Keene’s prodigious output, composed a “forgotten books” post about There Was a Crooked Man in 2011. It described the novel’s plot thusly:

The “crooked man” of the title is Clay Burgess, a good cop in a corrupt town, who goes along to get along and soon finds himself liking the money that comes with being bent. Eventually he’s as bad as anybody, but then his daughter gets polio. He steals a bundle and disappears, but it’s too late for his daughter. I’m not spoiling anything here, by the way. We learn all this in the first chapter, which sets up a flashback in which we find out all about the decline and fall of Clay Burgess. Okay, maybe not all about him, but nobody who reads this blog is going to be surprised by the big reveal at the end. I doubt that Keene expected anyone to be. He does throw a nice curve in the ending, though. A little sentimental? Sure. But I don’t mind.

Even if you know where things are going, Keene’s propulsive writing carries the day. You keep right on reading to find out about Burgess and what drives him and how low he’s going to go. At 144 pages, the perfect Gold Medal length, the story covers a heck of a lot of ground, and it’s just right for a few hours of good reading.

The artist responsible for illustrating the Gold Medal façade of There Was a Crooked Man was Raymond Johnson, whose fine work I’ve showcased on several occasions in the past.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Meeooowwww!

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 I’ve never actually referred to anyone as a “hellcat,” I had to look up the definition. It apparently means “a spiteful, violent woman.” That certainly comports with Barye Phillips’ illustration above and on the left, decorating the 1951 Dell edition of Hell Cat, a novel by Idabel Williams. And it fits the protagonist who’s described in this short critique of Williams’ novel, from the April 29, 1934, issue of The Pittsburgh Press:

Wherever “Scoots” Frazier went, trouble, torture and scandal seemed to follow. From Springvale, a Missouri valley hamlet where her father was mayor, “Scoots” left a trail of wrecked marriages and disillusioned husbands and wives. …

From high school days until the climax of her madcap career, “Scoots” dominated men, stole them from their mistresses, sweethearts and wives, but she could hold none of them for long because of her violent temper, unscrupulous methods and near-fiendishness.

And, strange as it may seem, this wanton, who was loved by many men, never fell in love herself. She could run the gamut of human emotions and come away from her escapades bearing their scars, but pre-natal marks had doomed her to immunity from Cupid’s darts.

Reviewer Thomas C. Langdon goes on in that piece to describe Hell Cat as “enchanting and easy to read because of its racy dialogue,” and “an indictment of small-town society as well as the corrupt-but-satisfied metropolis. It lays bear the inner rottenness of a certain Younger Married Set in this hangover era of the Jazz Age.”

Being unfamiliar with Idabel Williams, I did some research and found that “Williams” was either a nom de plume or the author’s maiden surname. Her married name was Isabel Overlease, and in addition to writing at least a couple of pulpy novels (both Hell Cat and 1933’s The Hussy—an “exciting story of the escapades of a wayward actress”—are commonly mentioned in reference to her fiction), she penned a column for the old El Monte Press, a weekly newspaper in Southern California’s East San Gabriel Valley, and taught creative-writing classes in the area. In addition, during the 1950s she composed scripts for a weekly TV series called Before Your Eyes, one of which imagined the results of Communists taking over the Los Angeles County town of Temple City.

The young, pillowy-lipped brunette pictured on this week’s other spotlighted paperback—Hellcat, by Barbara Brooks (Midwood Tower, 1964)—looks considerably less threatening than the blonde fronting Williams’ work. However, according to the cover blurb, she was “a girl from the wrong side of the tracks who’d do ANYTHING for money.” The back-cover copy elucidates the hazards of such a goal:

They taught her the facts of life

Dale … the rich boy, who Franny made pay for the privilege of taking her into the woods at night.

Johnny … the poor boy, who couldn’t afford to compete with the men who treated Franny like trash.

Jason … the noble judge, who took Franny into his custody and home for the most ignoble of reasons.

Quentin … the judge’s son, who exploited Franny’s body and corrupted her soul and made her beg for more.

Calvin … the muscle man, who more than met his match when he challenged Franny to a test of endurance.

And finally

Rita … the judge’s wife, who instructed Franny in a different brand of love, as delicate and exciting as the sensuous silk of her baby-doll nightie.

By the time they finished with her, there was only one way for her to go, one life for her to lead!!!

Ah, so this particular Hellcat fits into the genre of lesbian fiction, being one of many such paperback novels published between the end of World War II and the early 1970s. Its cover (illustrated by a sadly uncredited artist) offers none of the usual clues—no use of signal words such as “strange,” “shadows,” or “twilight,” for instance—yet that reference to “a different brand of love” is hardly ambiguous. Would it surprise you to discover that “Barbara Brooks” was a pseudonym, behind which lurked one William Coons? A prolific soft-core fictionist of the mid-20th century, whose yarns often appeared under publisher “house names” such as “Andrew Shaw” and “John Dexter,” Coons also brought the reading public “masterpieces” on the order of Army Sin Girls (1961), Ponytail Tramp (1961), The House of Seven Sins (1961), and The Carnal Crowd (1973).

Interestingly, Coons/Brooks’ Hellcat preceded, by just one year, the release of a perhaps better remembered work of the same title, that one by Carter Brown, starring his “hard-drinking and womanizing homicide detective,” Al Wheeler.

(Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

FOLLOW-UP: Art Scott, the co-author of The Art of Robert E. McGinnis, has sent me the cover from the original, 1962 Australian edition of Carter Brown’s Hellcat. Check it out here.