Another Look: “The Mad Hatter Mystery”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Mad Hatter Mystery, by John Dickson Carr (Dell, 1953). This cover illustration is by Denver Gillen, perhaps best remembered for helping to create the image of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Right: The Mad Hatter Mystery, by John Dickson Carr (Berkley, 1958); cover art by Lu Kimmel. This was the second installment in Carr’s series starring Dr. Gideon Fell.

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.

Front to Back: Wrapping It Up

Part V of a series spotlighting wraparound paperback art.

The Great Silver Bonanza, by Don Martin (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1979). Cover illustration by Ron Lesser.

When, last summer, I set out to exhibit on this page fine examples of wraparound paperback art, I had in mind four categories: historical fiction, science and fantasy fiction, crime/thriller fiction, and western historicals (specifically those penned by A.B. Guthrie). I had plenty of such covers in my computer files, and wasn’t really looking for more. Over the months of my posting on this subject, however, other specimens of the breed have drawn my eye.

Unfortunately, I didn’t find some of those until after I’d put up the original category posts. I could have simply sneaked any and all additions onto the appropriate pages, hoping nobody would notice. But then maybe nobody would notice—and I wanted to be sure Killer Covers readers had the chance to appreciate the stragglers.

So today, I’m posting a cross-genre miscellany of extra wraparound paperback fronts. The art on many of these includes the blank white space that first became popular in the late 1960s; and with the notable exception of 1968’s Corgi release, The Naked Ape (which employs a photograph), all boast painted imagery. Artists represented here range from Sandy Kossin (Cockpit) and Fred Pfeiffer (Tender Fire, The Beggars Are Coming, Soho, and Geisha) to Louis S. Glanzman (Sachem’s Son, Children of the Lion), Lu Kimmel (The Fabulous Finn), Fred Gambino (Ship of Shadows), Bruce Pennington (Startide Rising), and of course, Ron Lesser.

Click on any of the covers below for an enlargement.

Certainly, this does not exhaust the number or variety of outstanding wraparound paperback fronts that have been published over the decades. There are many more that could be presented, and I’m sure I shall take the chance soon to exploit this theme further.

Another Look: “The Bandaged Nude”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Bandaged Nude, by “Robert Finnegan,” aka Paul William Ryan (Signet, 1950); cover illustrator unidentified. Right: The Bandaged Nude, by “Robert Finnergan” (Signet, 1957); cover art by Lu Kimmel. This was the first of three novels starring San Francisco Journal reporter Dan Banion.

Mickey’s Milestone

As I noted in The Rap Sheet, yesterday—March 9—marked the 100th anniversary of author Mickey Spillane’s birth in Brooklyn, New York. (He died in 2006.) In addition to my extensive interview with Max Allan Collins, Spillane’s friend and posthumous collaborator on a trove of novels and short stories (some featuring Manhattan gumshoe Mike Hammer, others not), I had planned to commemorate this occasion with a gallery of Spillane book fronts. However, I ran short of time to post those images on his birthday, so I am doing so today.

Above, you can enjoy two of the most eye-catching covers to come from Spillane’s half-century-long writing career. Those Signet paperback editions of The Last Cop Out (1973) and The Erection Set (1972) both feature photographs of his second wife, actress Sherri Malinou, whom he married in 1965 and divorced in 1983. Other of his paperback releases, though, are equally distinctive. Below, you’ll find covers painted by Robert McGinnis (Killer Mine, Me Hood!, The Consummata), James Avati, Lu Kimmel, James Meese, and several others. There’s also the photo front from Signet’s 1967 issue of The Body Lovers, which has Spillane himself portraying Hammer; two jackets from recent Titan Books editions of Lady, Go Die! and The Will to Kill, their designs credited to Amazing15.com; a pair of Caleb York Western mysteries, co-authored with Collins; two covers from the 1990s Mike Danger comic books Spillane and Collins worked on; and a couple of the variant fronts from Hard Case Crime’s forthcoming, four-issue Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer comic series, created by artists Alex Ronald and Mack Chater. (The primary cover for Issue No. 1 of that series is this McGinnis-painted beauty.)

Of course, there are many more Spillane fronts still in print or available in used copies. If you have other favorites you think really ought to be showcased, I invite you to share links to them in the Comments section at the end of this post.

Click on any of these images to open up an enlargement.

POSTSCRIPT: Book cover-art expert Art Scott points out that the paperback edition of Spillane’s The Erection Set, shown atop this post, is a strategically censored version of the earlier hardcover dust jacket. Take a gander at the 1972 original here.