Lynn Munroe / Tom Miller

TOM MILLER

By Lynn Munroe

Paperback cover artist and painter Thomas John Miller was born in Midland, Ontario in Canada on July 26, 1913. He remained a Canadian citizen for most of his life. Tom's parents died when he was still a young man and he was raised by two aunts who lived down near the American border. The aunts left Tom alone, free to roam and experience the world, and he crisscrossed back and forth over the border as he grew up. Tom realized he had absolutely no one to rely on except himself. As a result, he became fiercely independent. He took care of himself. This independent nature remained with him all his life and he grew up to become a meticulous and independent artist, answering only to his own very high standards.  He never had an agent or manager, always represented himself.

Lynn Munroe / Tom Miller and Me

 

 

Tom Miller and Me

My love affair with the paperback cover art of Tom Miller is such that I can still recall exactly where I was the first time I ever noticed Tom Miller's artist credit on a vintage paperback. I was standing in one of the meeting rooms of the Grosnevor Hotel, adjoining Victoria Station in London. I was there attending the First British Paperback Fair as the guest of Mr. Peter Chapman, who in those days put on the show with Mr. Maurice Flanagan of Zardoz Books. One of the young Brits there shared my love of flashy and outrageous American paperback cover art, and he handed me a copy of Monarch 189, CAMPUS DOLL by Edwin West. And I still remember seeing that book 24 years later. In the mail order book catalog I was sending out in those pre-internet days, I later wrote that my first glimpse of CAMPUS DOLL had caused me to fall to the floor and spin about like Curly of the Three Stooges. And while that was not actually literally true, I did feel something like that inside.

Erle Stanley Gardner / Cool and Lam

Cool and Lam

  

Erle Stanley Gardner was a prolific dynamo. In addition to writing 85 best-selling Perry Mason books over five decades, he also wrote hundreds of great pulp magazine stories and – under the pen name A.A. Fair - a series of hardboiled crime stories about the Cool & Lam Detective Agency. Big Bertha Cool figures most men will never call a woman for a private eye job, so she lists her business as B. Cool Detective Agency. When disbarred lawyer / wunderkind Donald Lam comes to work for her, nothing is ever the same again. It has been suggested that Gardner wrote the Cool & Lam books as a break from the more laid back respectable world of his slick serialized Perry Mason stories. Cool & Lam mysteries are down and dirty, great fun to read, filled with lots of humor. They have their loyal fans, and I am one of them.