All the Rage

Literary Hub believes it has finally identified this year’s hottest book-cover design trend. Writes Drew Broussard:

The reign of the color-blob book cover has slowly come to an end over the last several years, and various pretenders to the throne have taken their best shot at being the next trend—sans-serif minimalism (The “Cusk”); brightly-colored paper-cut-out illustrations, usually involving women (The “Bernadette”); and of course, the perennial text-over-full-jacket-evocative-photograph (The “Prestige White Author”).

We’re here to report that a new contestant is entering the field in 2024 (or at least Knopf is really trying to make fetch happen). Folks, allow me to introduce … the Pastel Sky.

Click here to enjoy a small gallery of examples.

Meanwhile, The Book Designer cites its own 2023 dust-jacket art consistencies, including head shots of authors, “colorful vector illustrations,” water and river symbolism, and “busy backgrounds with bold typography.” That Web site’s editors somehow missed spotting the whole pastel sky thing, though.

Another Look: “Naked Fury”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Naked Fury, by “Day Keene,” aka Gunnar Hjerstedt (Phantom, 1952), with a cover illustration by Jack Rickard. Right: Naked Fury (Berkley, 1959); cover art by Milo.

Manipulating Reality

Stock photography has become so ubiquitous on book fronts in recent years, that few people give it more than passing notice. But recently, while gathering info about forthcoming crime and mystery novels, I happened across a January release titled The Clinic, by Cate Quinn, that caused me to do a double-take. Not because the cover was anything special, but because part of the art used was so recognizable, it distracted me from caring about the story to be found inside.

Publisher Sourcebooks Landmark describes this book as “a thriller set in a remote rehab clinic on the Pacific Northwest coast, in which the death of a woman inside prompts her sister to enter the clinic as a patient in order to find the truth.” Its synopsis goes on to explain:

Meg works for a casino in L.A., catching cheaters and popping a few too many pain pills to cope, following a far different path than her sister Haley, a famous actress. But suddenly reports surface of Haley dying at the ... facility where she had been forced to go to get her addictions under control.

There are whispers of suicide, but Meg can’t believe it. She decides that the best way to find out what happened to her sister is to check in herself—to investigate what really happened from the inside.

Battling her own addictions and figuring out the truth will be much more difficult than she imagined, far away from friends, family—and anyone who could help her.

The Clinic’s dust jacket, with its wave-battered cliffs, recumbent fog layer, and towered Victorian edifice, certainly supports this yarn’s eerie intent. But its cover image combines at least two stock photos. And if you’re like me, it’s impossible to look past the fact that the supposedly threatening coastal institution is actually a Eureka, California, landmark that once seen, is not soon forgotten.


(Above) The Carson Mansion is far from the Pacific Northwest.

Located at the eastern extreme of Eureka’s historic quarter, the Carson Mansion was completed in 1886 for William Coleman Carson. A native of New Brunswick, Canada, Carson had ventured west in the early 1850s, hoping—like so many other young men—to get rich quick in the California Gold Rush. He stayed afterward to become one of Northern California’s first lumber barons. In the early 1880s, he commissioned San Francisco architect-brothers Samuel and Joseph Cather Newsom, who Wikipedia says “specialized in designing Queen Anne-style … homes with extravagant details,” to create a showplace residence for his family in the busy coastal town of Eureka. North Coast Journal, an alternative newsweekly serving California’s Humboldt County, says Carson allowed his architects “a free hand with the design. Redwood—the wood that had made Carson wealthy—was the obvious choice for the exterior, due to its ability to resist weathering and decay. But Carson also arranged to have quantities of tropical hardwoods imported from all over for the internal construction and decoration. … Carson arranged for a schooner to bring nearly 100,000 feet of white mahogany (primavera) from Central America. In addition, shiploads of Philippine mahogany and Indian teak complimented the exterior redwood.”

Carson died in February 1912, leaving what was reportedly a substantial legacy to his five children. In 1950, his elegant four-story, 18-room home with its very distinctive tower became the headquarters of the private Ingomar Club, its membership open then—as now—only to men. Although this structure was included in 1964 on the Historic American Buildings Survey, its club owners have chosen not to apply for its placement on the better-recognized National Register of Historic Places.

While it’s located not far from Eureka’s Arcata Bay, the mansion—labeled “a baronial castle in Redwood” by one national architecture critic—doesn’t perch on an ocean-fronting precipice, as The Clinic’s jacket suggests. Nor is it occupied by a facility for patients in desperate need of physical or mental rehabilitation, though I’m sure many Ingomar regulars find succor within its grand walls.

Mann, Oh Mann!

I’ve had the opportunity over my years as a journalist and book critic to interview a great many people. They’ve ranged from relative unknowns to prominent figures such as actor James Garner, Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau, Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, jazz singer Sarah Vaughn, and architect-futurist Buckminster Fuller, as well as crime novelists on the order of Ross Macdonald, Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, and Philip Kerr.

Not all encounters of this sort have gone smoothly, and scheduling difficulties have sometimes arisen. However, I don’t recall ever being so challenged in seeking to arrange an interview as I was when I tried to connect with Salt Lake City-area artist-illustrator Paul Mann (shown at right).

You may recognize Mann’s moniker from an article I posted last week about his work on the front of Too Many Bullets, the new, 19th Nate Heller private-eye novel by Max Allan Collins. Over the last half-dozen years, Mann has become a regular contributor to publisher Hard Case Crime’s cracking line of hard-boiled yarns. His mastery of retro-style imagery has made him a go-to HCC cover artist, along with Robert McGinnis, Ron Lesser, Claudia Caranfa, Mark Eastbrook, Laurel Blechman, and others. Having long been interested in book illustration, I wished to ask him about his four decades spent perfecting his craft, his creative techniques, his favorite book covers, his Hard Case assignments, and his extensive portfolio of cinema-related spec pieces.

When repeated efforts to make contact via e-mail failed, I asked Hard Case editor Charles Ardai for help in reaching Mann. Ardai said he was happy to pass along my message “with a note encouraging him to reply to you. He still might not—he’s a very nice fellow, but may not like doing interviews or might just be dealing with a lot of other commitments. But I’m glad to give it a try.”

In the end, I never heard so much as a whisper from Mann.

So I moved on. There were other people to speak with, other artists to showcase in Killer Covers, other book reviews to write. But recently Ardai mentioned on the social networking service formerly known as Twitter (sorry, I’m never going to call it “X”—that’s just too moronic a name) that Hard Case is planning next year to issue a trade paperback version of Lemons Never Lie, a 1971 novel that Donald E. Westlake released under his pseudonym Richard Stark. In 2006 HCC had published Lemons in mass-market size (with cover art by Richard B. Farrell), but copies of that ran out long ago, and as Ardai explained, Westlake’s widow “agreed we should reprint in the larger format to match all our recent editions of Don’s books.” Said forthcoming reprint will boast a new and captivating cover—exhibited atop this post—by none other than Paul Mann.

That finally kicked it over the edge. I was going to have to go ahead and exhibit Mann’s remarkable talents on this page without interviewing the man himself. Below you’ll find what I believe is his entire Hard Case oeuvre—so far. Among the titles are several by Westlake, including Forever and a Death (2017), which is said to have started out as a James Bond film treatment; Collins’ 18th Nate Heller historical tale, The Big Bundle (2022); Ardai’s Death Comes Too Late, a short-story collection due out in March of next year; and a 2019 illustrated edition of Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid (originally published in 2005 with a cover by Glen Orbik).

I look forward to seeing many more of Mann’s sexy, traditionally fashioned Hard Case Crime fronts in the near future.

Coffin, Coffee — What’s the Diff?

Back in March I posted (here) a Dime Detective magazine cover from 1943, promoting a story inside titled “You’re the Crime in My Coffee,” by D.L. Champion. More recently, I found the image below (from the March 1946 edition of Black Mask) in Pulp Covers, and at first glance thought its featured tale carried the same name. That was my mistake, but one that I’d argue was easy to make.

In fact, whoever wrote the original headline on Pulp Covers’ item about this issue front committed that same misreading!

(Above) Black Mask, March 1946; art by Rafael DeSoto.

The Thrilling Detective Web Site says that H.H. (Herbert Hunter) Stinson, the Illinois-born author of “You’re the Cream in My Coffin,” “was a Los Angeles police reporter and playwright, as well writing for the pulps. He was one of the original ‘Black Mask Boys’ (he’s actually one of the writers in the legendary 1936 photo), as well as one of the members of The Fictioneers.” Stinson wrote two main series of stories for the pulps: one for Black Mask, starring Ken O’Hara, “a hard-boiled reporter for the Los Angeles Tribune”; the other for Dime Detective, headlined by L.A. private eye Pete Rousseau. “You’re the Crime in My Coffin” isn’t listed as featuring either of those protagonists, so it may have been a standalone.

Mystery*File reports that Stinson was born on April 27, 1896, and died on October 9, 1969. He published at least one book, a 1925 Henry Holt & Company volume titled Fingerprints.

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).