The Inconvenience of Abundance

It was while I was putting together a rather lengthy Rap Sheet interview with Iowa fictionist Max Allan Collins, most of which had to do with his new historical crime novel, Too Many Bullets (Hard Case Crime), that I realized just how many book fronts featuring those words “too many” can be found in my computer files.

Too Many Bullets, the cover of which is displayed atop this post (with art by Paul Mann), is the fifth entry* in a sort of mini-series within Collins’ string of 19 novels starring hard-boiled, Chicago-based private investigator Nate Heller, all of them in some way featuring John F. Kennedy and/or his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy. Bullets imagines the ubiquitous Heller on hand at Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Kennedy’s 1968 slaying in Los Angeles, and then follows him as he endeavors to untangle a conspiracy meant to pin that headline-grabbing tragedy on “lone gunman” Sirhan Sirhan.

When I typed “too many” into the search window of my computer’s Picasa image viewer, looking from the jacket of Too Many Bullets—surprise!—more than one cover came up. Not just Collins’, but also the fronts from 10 other novels, none of which I remembered downloading or storing away for future use. There was the 1962 Bantam paperback cover of Rex Stout’s Too Many Clients (with art by Bill Johnson), as well as the fronts from two other Stout works: Too Many Cooks (Dell, 1951; art by Robert Stanley) and Too Many Women (Bantam, 1949; art by Hy Rubin). In addition, I found Too Many Murderers, by Manning Lee Stokes (Graphic Mystery, 1955; illustration by Clyde Ross); One Murder Too Many, by George Harmon Coxe (Pyramid, 1967; artist unidentified); Too Many Beds, by “Tony Calvano,” aka Thomas P. Ramirez (Nightstand, 1961; artwork by Harold W. McCauley); Too Many Sinners, by Sheldon Stark (Ace, 1954; artist unidentified); Too Many Crooks, by Richard S. Prather (Gold Medal, 1956, featuring a Barye Phillips illustration); Too Many Women, by Milton K. Ozaki (Handi-book Mystery, 1950; artist uncredited); and finally the third Too Many Women tucked into in my files, this one by Gerry Martin (News Stand Library, 1950; art by Syd Dyke).

There are probably still more vintage books to be found with such titles. I shall add to this post as I stumble across them.

* The previous four books were Bye Bye, Baby (2011), which found Heller probing “blonde bombshell” Marilyn Monroe’s sexual involvement with both Kennedy siblings, at the same time as he sought to determine whether it was really suicide that sent the actress to her grave in 1962; Target Lancer (2012), which revisited a plot to do away with President Kennedy in Chicago in 1963—even before his tragic public slaying in Dallas, Texas; Ask Not (2013), about a succession of suspicious deaths in 1964, involving witnesses to President Kennedy’s assassination; and Better Dead (2016), in which Heller got better acquainted with Bobby Kennedy, while he investigated the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a New York City couple convicted of espionage for having reportedly leaked U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

A Tale of Paperbacks and Predators

(Above) Assignment—Moon Girl, by Edward S. Aarons (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1972), part of his Sam Durell espionage series.

Roger Kastel, who created the artwork for two of Hollywood’s iconic film posters and painted a variety of collectible paperback book covers, passed away on November 8. He was 92 years old.

In its obituary, Deadline recalls that

Kastel’s best-known work included imagery central to the posters for Jaws and The Empire Strikes Back. He also illustrated vivid book covers for the likes of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Jackie Collins’ Hollywood Wives and H.G Wells’ The Invisible Man.

His Jaws illustration was originally created for Peter Benchley’s novel on which the film was based. Describing the process of its creation, Kastel remembered, “I did a very rough sketch, and [the publisher] said, ‘That’s great, just make the shark realistic and bigger. Make him very much bigger!'”

It worked. Benchley’s book was a bestseller and Universal [Pictures] execs, knowing a good thing when they saw it, used Kastel’s art in the movie poster.

Born in White Plains, New York, on June 11, 1931, he went on to graduate from White Plains High School, attend the distinguished Art Students League in New York City, and then serve for four years with the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. His Web site says Kastel had begun drawing cartoons in his teens, but finally “sold his first [paperback cover] illustration in the early 1960s and illustrated paperback book covers and movie posters over the next forty years.” It’s said that during his career, Kastel produced more than 1,000 illustrations for the major book publishers in New York.

But it was his ominous painting for the front of the 1975 Bantam Books paperback reprint of Jaws that earned him international acclaim. When Universal reused that illustration on its movie placard, it reportedly marked “the first time that a poster image became a merchandising product in itself.” The Jaws gig also scored Kastel the commission to create the publicity poster for George Lucas’ 1980 Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back (a creation he based on classic Gone with the Wind artwork). In addition, says The Hollywood Reporter, Kastel “came up with the posters for such other films as Doctor Faustus (1967), starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, and The Great Train Robbery (1978), starring Sean Connery.”

Roger Karl Kastel was a long-standing member of the Society of Illustrators, and his talents were recognized in books such as 200 Years of American Illustration, by Henry Clarence Pitz (1977), and The Illustrator in America: 1860-2000, by Walt Reed (2001). He died of kidney and heart failure at a hospice facility in Massachusetts, leaving behind his wife of 66 years, the former Grace Trowbridge.

I showcased a number of Kastel’s book covers in a piece I wrote some years ago about the 40th anniversary of Jaws’ big-screen debut. But another one (Assignment—Moon Girl) is to be found atop this post, and below are two more I happened across more recently: The Skeleton Coast Contract, by Philip Atlee (Gold Medal, 1968), and A Woman Called Fancy, by Frank Yerby (Pocket, 1966).

You should also enjoy reading this interview Michael Stradford conducted with Kastel while he was researching his 2021 book, Steve Holland: The World's Greatest Illustration Art Model.

Rearguard Action

I remember hearing somewhere about all the hoo-ha that surrounded the release of Johanna Lindsey’s 1985 historical romance, Tender Is the Storm (Avon), but never sought additional information. Fortunately, Tim Hewitt, who I’ve described previously on this page as “a former tech writer and ‘web monkey,’ now an ardent paperback collector” in South Carolina, looked further into the controversy. As he explained in a Facebook post earlier this week:

This one created a storm upon publication with some distributors and bookstores thinking the cover was too much. (“Female nudity good; male nudity bad,” I guess.) Subsequent printings placed a big sticker, proclaiming the book to be a bestseller, over the fellow's nether regions to protect the delicate sensibilities of reader ladies (and puritanical indignation of others) everywhere. There are several variations of the “sticker” (apparently including a printing with a Speedo of sorts superimposed on the hero’s hips). I don't know, but some later shipped copies of the first printing may have gotten an actual sticker slapped on the cover.

The blog Sweet Savage Flame, which specializes in old-school romance novels, offers some further background on this standalone paperback, as well as a couple of examples of stickers used to conceal the buff gentleman’s derrière in later editions.

Oh, and if you think that cover art looks like the work of Robert McGinnis, you’re right! It was just one of the steamy Lindsey novels to which he lent his talents—several others of which likewise featured male subjects in states of dishabille.

Digitizing Dames

Robert Deis, one of the principal editors responsible for getting The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens before the reading public this last summer, tells me that a “Digital Replica Edition” of that beautiful book is now available.

I was privileged to have a long interview I did with renowned paperback-cover art Lesser featured among the work’s contents.

“A Digital Replica Edition like this is not a standard e-book,” Deis explains. “It’s a high-resolution electronic copy that looks great on an iPad or computer screen.” The Kindle version can be purchased from Amazon for $12.99, but it’s apparently free to Kindle Unlimited members. That makes it the least expensive version to be had of Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens; the original, hardcover edition goes for $49.99, with the paperback priced at $39.95.

A Treasury of Templars

The Saint in Miami, by Leslie Charteris (Avon, 1958).
Cover illustration by David Stone.

Is it mere coincidence that Halloween, which so often celebrates haunting and horrific characters, should be followed by All Saints’ Day, honoring “saints both canonized and unknown”? This Christian solemnity began working its way onto the liturgical calendar in the 9th century A.D., and was pegged to November 1 through the efforts of Pope Gregory III in the early 8th century.

But, of course, we have our own, non-religious interpretation of what sort of saint is really deserving of praise today.

That’s right, we’re talking about Simon Templar, alias “The Saint,” a Robin Hood-like protagonist who was introduced by British author Leslie Charteris in his 1928 novel, Meet the Tiger. Templar went on to star in three dozen more novels and short-story collections by Charteris until 1963. After that, other writers either collaborated with Charteris on Saint works, or—following the author’s death in 1993—penned Saint tales on their own. In addition, the hero featured in big-screen films as well as TV movies, and was portrayed by actor Roger Moore in a 1962-1969 ITV-TV spy thriller series titled simply The Saint. (A subsequent show, Return of the Saint, was broadcast from 1978 until 1972 and found Ian Ogilvy in the lead role.)

Below you will find covers from half a dozen Saint titles published during the 1950s and ’60s. We don’t have identifications of all the artists responsible for these. However, we can tell you that Charles Binger created the front for The Saint to the Rescue (Permabooks, 1961), George Ziel was responsible for Concerning the Saint (Avon, 1958), and Raymond Johnson produced the artwork for the edition shown here of The Saint Steps In (Avon, 1954).

Many more Saint paperback fronts can be enjoyed here.

Just for Halloween: Hex Education

The Witching Night, by “C.S. Cody,” aka Leslie Waller (Dell, 1953). Cover illustration by Tommy Shoemaker.

Another Look: “The Case of the Smoking Chimney”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Case of the Smoking Chimney, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1950), with a cover illustration by Wayne Blickenstaff. Right: The Case of the Smoking Chimney, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1961), with cover art by Charles Binger. Originally published in 1943, this is the second of two novels featuring amateur sleuth “Gramps” Wiggins. It was preceded by The Case of the Turning Tide (1941).

Striving for MacLeanesque Success

Driscoll’s Diamonds, by “Ian MacAlister,” aka Marvin H. Albert (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1977). Cover art by Gordon Johnson.

By the early 1970s, Scotland-born thriller novelist Alistair MacLean had achieved the status of major best-seller. His books—from The Guns of Navarone, Fear Is the Key, and Ice Station Zebra to Puppet on a Chain, The Way to Dusty Death, and Breakheart Pass—were familiar bookshop fixtures, with several of them having been made into big-screen films or on their way to cinematic refashioning.

Those rapid-clip, suspense-abundant adventures typically pitted resourceful male protagonists against guileful, unscrupulous opponents, the plots designed to both delight and deceive. “Alistair MacLean would always set up his books with a basic foundation in which not a single thing you learned would turn out, in the end, to be true,” author Dennis Lehane once told an interviewer. “After you read a few of his books, you’d start to look for the twists, but you could rarely see them coming.” Journalist Alessandra Stanley characterized them as “romance novels for boys, which means very little romance and lots of danger, complicated weaponry and battle-forged camaraderie. Historical romances are known as ‘bodice-rippers.’ The only silk to be found in an Alistair MacLean novel is on a parachute.”

Given MacLean’s popularity, it’s no wonder other authors sought to emulate his pot-boiling style. One of those was Marvin H. Albert.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 22, 1924, Marvin Hubert Albert would go on to serve as a radio officer with the U.S. Merchant Marine during the Second World War. Afterward, he worked as the director of a Philadelphia children’s theater troupe. Then in 1950, he relocated to New York City and took jobs editing and writing for the magazines Quick and Look. Finding success with the publication of his 1956 western novel, The Law and Jake Wade (which was made into a Robert Taylor/Richard Widmark film two years later), Albert took the big leap to begin writing full-time. In 1965, he moved to Los Angeles, where in addition to writing books, he penned screenplays, adapting more than a few of his own tales for silver-screen audiences.

(Left) The Lady in Cement (Pocket, 1961); cover art by Robert K. Abbett.

Albert proved to be versatile and prolific. Over the course of his 40-year career, and under a surfeit of pseudonyms (Albert Conroy, Al Conroy, Nick Quarry, Anthony Rome, Mike Barone, J.D. Christilian), he produced hard-boiled crime yarns, westerns, and historical mysteries, plus numerous Hollywood film and TV novelizations (including of the original Pink Panther picture and Blake Edwards’ Mr. Lucky) and even biographies of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and King Henry VIII. Among his notable works of fiction were 1958’s The Hoods Come Calling and 1961’s Some Die Hard (both featuring “tough, no-nonsense” Manhattan private investigator Jake Barrow); three books starring a Miami, Florida, police lieutenant turned gumshoe, Tony Rome (the first two of which—Miami Mayhem and The Lady in Cement—Albert helped translate into Frank Sinatra movies); standalones such as The Road’s End (1952), Nice Guys Finish Dead (1957), The Reformed Gun (1959), and Devil in Dungarees (1960); and The Zig-Zag Man (1991), one of 10 novels about Pierre-Ange “Pete” Sawyer, a French-American shamus living in Paris, who specializes in “higher-end crimes.”

(Right) Devil in Dungaress (Crest, 1960); cover art by Barye Phillips.

In 1973, Albert adopted yet another nom de plume—Ian MacAlister—and set about composing what would ultimately be a quartet of softcover adventure thrillers published by Fawcett Gold Medal. That alias was a calculated nod toward Alistair MacLean, evident not only from the “MacAlister” mash-up of a surname, but also because of the “Ian” forename: As Wikipedia notes, “In the early 1960s, MacLean published two novels under the pseudonym ‘Ian Stuart’ to prove that the popularity of his books was due to their content rather than his name on the cover. These were The Dark Crusader (1961) and The Satan Bug (1962).” The design and typefaces employed on the MacAlister covers, too, bore a striking resemblance to those decorating Fawcett’s 1970s MacLean paperbacks. It’s not a stretch to presume the intention here was that book buyers should either mistake Albert’s MacAlister novels for MacLean’s, or else that they would purchase them knowingly, hoping the packaging portended similarities in pacing and excitement between the two lines.

Like MacLean’s best-sellers, Albert’s skinnier MacAlister novels were action-packed one-offs, each boasting a different but ever-resourceful protagonist, “exotic and inhospitable settings,” do-or-die missions, stunning young women, and bad guys of the plainly reprehensible and minacious sort. His first MacAlister tale, Skylark Mission (1973), is set in World War II’s Pacific theater. It delivers us into the company of Captain Mike Shaw and his partner, Corporal Neal Miller, who launch an assault on a Japanese torpedo base in New Guinea, hoping to free Allied prisoners and open up passage to Allied vessels seeking safer waters around Australia.

Book two, Driscoll’s Diamonds (also released in 1973), is a contemporary story that takes place in the ever-volatile Middle East. It stars American mercenary John Driscoll, who, in the company of his Israeli girlfriend, Shana, is trying—without drawing significant attention to their activities—to recover a dear trove of diamonds that were purloined from smugglers in Africa, only to subsequently be lost during a plane crash in the Red Sea, an accident that nearly cost Driscoll his life. The problem is, that pair aren’t the only ones searching for said gems. Also hot on the trail are the hired guns who originally filched the diamonds, and who have no compunction against killing Driscoll and Shana to retrieve them. Both parties wind up in the Sudan, in what the blog Vintage Pop Fictions calls “the most inhospitable stretch of country on the planet, heavily infested with bandits and with Sudanese troops in hot pursuit.”

Above: Skylark Mission (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1973) and Driscoll’s Diamonds (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1973). Below: Strike Force 7 (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1974)—possibly with actor and ubiquitous paperback cover model Steve Holland featured on the front—and Valley of the Assassins (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1975).



An additional couple of MacAlister thrillers appeared in bookstores and on squeaky spinner racks over the next two years.

Strike Force 7 (1974) introduced Earl Jarrell, a former British Army officer serving a three-year prison stint for gun running. Through the intervention of his Corsican partner, Jarrell is liberated prematurely in order to take on a specific, high-risk assignment: to secure the release of a wealthy American businessman’s wife and step-daughter, who’ve been abducted by revolutionaries in Morocco. After assembling a cadre of mercenaries, Jarrell and his partner persuade a woman journalist who’s interviewed the head rebel, Bel Zaara, to help them track down the insurgents—a quest that will lead them on a nerve-wracking chase into North Africa’s Atlas Mountains.

The fourth and final MacAlister yarn was called Valley of the Assassins (1975). Albert’s central player this time around is Eric Larson, an American “adventurer” who came to the Middle East to drill oil, but stayed to take on assorted jobs for entrepreneurs visiting from abroad. The plot kicks off with him traveling through the Persian Gulf aboard his cabin cruiser, and there stumbling across three dead men—one of whom isn’t dead after all. He’s a hunchbacked old Persian, who wants Larson’s help getting back to (pre-revolutionary) Iran and in the course of their journey leaves a puzzling map on our hero’s boat. Larson learns that map may point the way to long-lost riches, amassed over centuries by a murderous cult known as the Assassins and secreted somewhere in the Arabian desert. Together with his quondam Kurdish rebel lover, “dark, hard-eyed” Darra, and a company of shady specialists, Larson embarks on a treasure hunt into Saudi Arabia’s Rub-al-Khali, “a massive desert so infamous that even veteran sand-dwellers go out of their way to avoid it,” as Joe Kenney writes in his review of this novel. It won’t ease their going, that freebooking Bedouins lie in wait for them on the way.

Despite their manifestly commercial intentions, the MacAlister books have scored rather intemperate praise, at least in recent years. “Popcorn fiction done right,” enthused one critic. “An absolutely top-notch thriller,” proclaimed another. The blogger known as “dfordoom” extols Albert’s action-sequence restraint: “The violence isn’t particularly graphic. We’re dealing here with an author who doesn’t need to resort to graphic violence in order to make his story exciting.” Of Skylark Mission, Paperback Warrior observes that “In emulating the British style, Albert’s delivery recalls a Jack Higgins novel, complete with a propulsive narrative and just enough variance in characters to keep readers invested in their destiny and fate.”

Other thriller writers might kill for such notices!

As with 1970s editions of Alistair MacLean’s work, the hand-painted fronts of the MacAlister novels did much to promote them as compelling nail-biters worth their retail price of 75 cents to $1.50 (ah, the good old days of cheap softcovers). Rifles or machine guns were conspicuous elements, as were foreign-seeming backdrops. And, inevitably, people—usually the protagonists—in danger.

Regrettably, most of the illustrators responsible for those covers were uncredited, their identities now difficult to ascertain. The exception has to do with the purple-shaded edition of Driscoll’s Diamonds installed atop this post. That seems to be accepted as the work of Gordon Johnson (1924-1989), a flexible and highly productive artist “who was probably based in or near New York City,” according to Jeff Christoffersen, author of the Paperback Palette blog. Johnson’s forte was realism, Christoffersen says, as demonstrated in the “illustrations he produced for various magazines in the mid 1950’s, such as The American Magazine, American Weekly, Outdoor Life and Boys’ Life.” Later, Johnson created artwork for titles by a panoply of name-brand fictionists, including Helen MacInnes, John D. MacDonald, Brian Garfield, Donald Hamilton, Jack Higgins, and of course, Alistair MacLean. He also developed fronts for romance novels, teen tales, and sex romps such as Club Tropique, by Donald Bain.

Four of Gordon Johnson’s covers, clockwise from upper left: The Keys of Hell, by “Jack Higgins,” aka Henry “Harry” Patterson (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1976); Club Tropique, by Donald Bain (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1978); Trial by Fury, by “Jack Lancer,” aka Jim Lawrence (Grosset & Dunlap, 1969); and Bear Island, by Alistair MacLean (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1972).



There’s no consensus on whose hand was behind the other MacAlister fronts displayed here. Tim Hewitt, a former tech writer and “web monkey” turned ardent paperback collector, often cited as an authority on book cover artistry, suggests Skylark Mission and Valley of the Assassins “are reasonable candidates for being Johnson. The style on both of those seems consistent with, if not identical to, other Johnson covers. The only one I’m not sure about,” he says, “is Strike Force 7. That one looks like the cover artist was striving for a Frank Frazetta look (I’ve even known people to, incorrectly, say it’s a Frazetta cover!), but there’s no reason that Johnson couldn’t be that artist.” On the other hand, Hewitt flatly rules out the original, 1973 edition of Driscoll’s Diamonds (the red one, which he calls “rather flat and amateurish”) as belonging in Johnson’s portfolio.

I have a few Marvin H. Albert releases among my hoard of vintage softcovers, but none of his Ian MacAlister thrillers. I haven’t discovered yet why the author abandoned that promising line just four books into it. He lived another two decades after Valley of the Assassins saw print—plenty of time for a speedy scribbler like him to have delivered several further entries. Maybe sales figures didn’t warrant the cash and hype Fawcett was devoting to those books. Maybe his decision to move on to different projects had to do with the fact that Albert relocated to Europe in 1976, the same year his international terrorist thriller, The Gargoyle Conspiracy, became an Edgar Award finalist for Best Mystery Novel. (Maggie Rennert’s Operation Alcestis eventually walked off with that prize.) Maybe he simply lost interest in trying to out-MacLean MacLean.

What we know is that he instead began penning his Stone Angel series starring ex-French resistance fighter and P.I. Pete Sawyer. And in February 1996 he witnessed the publication (under his J.D. Christilian alias) of Scarlet Women, the opening installment in a planned succession of novels about an 1870s New York City detective known as Harp. The author died in France a month later at age 73, leaving behind what’s been reported as 85 pages of notes for a second Harp book, never to be completed.

READ MORE: “The Gold Medal Corner,” by Bill Crider (Mystery*File).

Filling in the Life of Hank Janson

As you might expect, I must exercise some caution in asking that books be given to me at Christmastime. I have enough trouble finding room in my house for those I already own, much less new ones! But a title sure to appear prominently on my holiday wish list is Steve Holland’s recent biography, The Trials of Hank Janson.

I first got word of this in a post that Australian novelist and pop culture critic Andrew Nette wrote earlier in the month, in which he reviewed a trio of works about vintage books and the art that decorated them (one of those releases being The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens, to which I contributed an extensive interview with the artist). For anyone who doesn’t know, Hank Janson was both a pseudonym employed by English author/publisher Stephen Daniel Frances (1917-1989) and the name of his protagonist, “a tough Chicago reporter who faced down various malevolent criminal threats across the breadth of America,” to quote Nette. Those novels—“gritty gangster tales” with deliberately suggestive covers painted by Reginald Heade, Samuel “Peff” Peffer, Paul Rader, Harry Barton, and Robert Maguire—were wildly successful during the 1940s and early ’50s, despite paper shortages of the time, and continued to be published for years afterward.

But in 1954, Nette recalls, “his work was dubbed obscene by the powers that be, in no small part [due] to their incredibly lurid, sexualised covers. His publisher and distributor were hauled before the courts and a warrant was issue for the author’s arrest. … While Janson was eventually found not guilty of peddling obscene material, he was attacked in the British parliament, banned in Northern Ireland, and newsagents that stocked his books were persecuted by the police. Although it did not stop him writing … the experience left him incredibly bitter.” Frances ceased penning the Janson tales in 1959, and other authors were left to continue the series.

Steve Holland is a UK author and recognized authority on comics as well as pulp fiction. The Trials of Hank Janson—part biography, part study of Frances’ fiction and the changes the Janson scandal brought to laws surrounding supposedly obscene publications—is an expanded version of a book Holland published originally back in 2004. In this half-hour YouTube interview conducted by memorabilia and book collector Jules Burt, Holland looks back on Frances’ history, his enviable ascent to fame, the preposterous censorship he faced, and subsequent efforts to keep the Janson novels in print.

It sounds like a book I should somehow squeeze onto my shelves.

Because I Needed a Henry Kane Fix …

Dead in Bed, by Henry Kane (Lancer, 1961). This was an entry in Kane’s series starring New York City “private richard” Pete Chambers. Cover illustration by Oscar Liebman.

(Not to be confused with this other novel by Day Keene.)

Another Look: “And Then There Were None”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie (Pocket, 1944), with a cover illustration by Leo Manso. Right: And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie (Cardinal, 1959); cover art by Sanford “Sandy” Kossin.

Today would have been Agatha Christie’s 133rd birthday, had she not so inconveniently died in early 1976. By way of celebration, LitReactor’s Christopher Shultz declares her the inventor of ... modern slasher fiction. “Whether intentional or not,” he writes, “the horror subgenre owes a huge debt of gratitude to Christie and her 1939 novel And Then There Were None.” Read his entire piece here.

These’ll Get You Sent to the Principal’s Office

With a new school year having kicked off this month, it’s time to revisit Killer Covers’ extensive collection of vintage paperback fronts associated with classes, campuses, and curvaceous coeds. Grade them for yourself right here.

Because I Needed a McCloy Fix …

Do Not Disturb, by Helen McCloy (Dell, 1948). Published originally in hardcover by William Morrow back in 1945, this mystery’s 1948 paperback edition was part of Dell Books’ famous “mapback” line. Cover artist unidentified.

Another Look: “Savage Bride”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Savage Bride, by Cornell Woolrich (Gold Medal, 1950. Right: Savage Bride, by Cornell Woolrich (Gold Medal, 1957). The cover illustrations for both books were created by Barye Phillips.

READ MORE: “Do People Really Know What They Think They Know about Cornell Woolrich?” by Curtis Evans (CrimeReads).

Peril Makes an Entrance

(Above) Murder Is the Pay-Off, by “Leslie Ford,” aka Zenith Jones Brown (Dell, 1954). Cover illustration by Carl Bobertz.

Last year, while preparing to write a piece for CrimeReads about “colorful [paperback] cover themes from crime fiction’s past,” I put together a dozen or so sets of vintage examples that I found interesting and upon which I could cleverly comment. I wound up narrowing those down to just seven, including book fronts featuring threatening vehicles, oversized heads, women’s legs, and disembodied hands. Among the discards were covers on which men of a suspicious character either hid behind or sought to break through doors in order to menace women on the other side.

I figured at the time that those might be useful later, in some way or other. But I hadn’t given any further thought to them until last month, when I happened across the 1953 Dell edition of George Harmon Coxe’s Venturous Lady and decided to blog about it as part of this page’s “book fixes” series. Artist Griffith Foxley painted the front of that 80-year-old paperback, which shows a woman hiding in a bedroom, as a man pushes open the door, gun in hand.

This seems like as good a time as any to dust off the remainder of the door-danger covers in my collection, and display them here. Among the illustrators whose work graces the following 14 paperback covers are Ed Grant (The Fabulous Clipjoint), Clyde Ross (They Came to Baghdad), Barye Phillips (Knock Three-One-Two), Mitchell Hooks (Stranger at the Door), Frank McCarthy (The House Without a Door), Lu Kimmel (Runaway Black, written by Ed McBain under the pseudonym Richard Marsten), Victor Kalin (Killer with a Key), and Robert Stanley (The Glass Triangle). I already wrote several years ago about The Crooked Man and There Was a Crooked Man, but added them to this gallery too, because they so well fit the theme.

Women confronted by dangerous gents at doors weren’t only seen on softcover novels of old. They served equally well on crime-fiction magazines, as evidenced by the July 1946 issue of Detective Tales and the March 1957 number of True Detective. Unfortunately, I do not know who painted either of those fronts.