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.

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).

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.

“The Cockeyed Corpse,” by Richard S. Prather

The Cockeyed Corpse, by Richard S. Prather (Gold Medal, 1964). This is one Prather’s once-bestselling novels starring wise-cracking Hollywood private investigator Shell Scott. Kevin Burton Smith, editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site says, “the Scott stories were smirky, outlandish, innuendo-laden, occasionally alcohol-fueled, off-the-wall tours-de-farce that, depending on your point of view, were either a laugh riot, or a lot of adolescent, sexist swill and hackwork. The latter viewpoint seems to be the dominant one today, and Shell Scott seems to have slipped out of the public consciousness. Too bad.”

Cover illustration by Barye Phillips.

We’re 14 Today. Wanna Make Something of It?

(Above) Rebels in the Streets, by Kitty Hanson (Midwood Tower, 1965); art by Mitchell Hooks. As one commenter on Flickr wrote of this cover, “Nothing says ‘evil’ like capri pants and ballet flats.”

Every January, in anticipation of yet another birthday for Killer Covers, I try to come up with some appropriate way to celebrate. Last year, for instance, when the blog turned 13—a number with a very bad reputation—I decided the most fun thing to do was showcase vintage crime novels with the words “luck” or “lucky” in their titles.

This year was a bit more challenging. While looking around for things synonymous with the numeral 14, I discovered the following on an online information source called The Fact Site: “The number 14 is, unfortunately, associated with white supremacy. This is because one of the more popular white-power slogans, ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,’ has fourteen words. While known as the ‘14 Words,’ it is commonly shortened to just ‘14.’” The very last thing I want to do is validate hateful racist ideas, so spinning a post off from that connection to the number was a non-starter. Instead, I mused on various ways young people were portrayed during the American heyday of paperbacks. And I realized that they were too often shown negatively. During the mid-20th century, authors and book artists were prone to define teenagers as aborning gangsters, arrant delinquents, drug addicts, experimenters with wild sex, trouble-bound runaways, youths neglected by their parents and left—as the cover text on a 1958 book titled Bad Girls reads—to “prowl the fringe of the underworld for kicks.”

(Right) Bad Girls, by Leo Margulies (Crest, 1958).

Amid such alarming propaganda (no doubt circulated in part simply to goose book sales), it’s a wonder that children of the era—especially those who claimed residence in large cities, where lawbreaking was well-recorded—were allowed to stray beyond sight of their homes. Not that adults could prevent them from leaving and making mistakes. As The Fact Site also informs me, “In the U.S., the youngest age at which you can be legally emancipated from your parents or guardians is 14. Known as the emancipation of minors, it essentially frees a child of fourteen or older from control by their legal guardians and freeing the guardians of any responsibility towards the minor.”

For better or worse.

It happens that my computer files contain a wide variety of vintage paperbacks focused on delinquents and other teenagers gone wrong, which I’ve picked up over the years. Since today’s 14th Killer Covers birthday finds me in a feisty mood anyway, I’ve decided to commemorate the occasion with 50-odd examples of that genre, displaying parents’ worst nightmares of what their children (not all of whom are 14) could get up to if left unsupervised for long.

Within this gallery you’ll find multiple novels named Gang Girl(s), several with the ominous word “jailbait” in their titles, and others suggesting that “cool” and “criminal” are altogether synonymous. The most represented author is probably Wenzell Brown, but there are works, too, by Vin Packer (aka the recently deceased Marijane Meaker), Harlan Ellison (who once joined a Brooklyn street gang for research purposes), Harry Whittington and Whit Harrison (one and the same writer), Orrie Hitt, Hal Ellson, Joan Ellis (one of several pen names employed by the prolific Julie Ellis), Evan Hunter, Henry Gregor Felsen, and screenwriter Irving Shulman.

Click on any of the images below for an enlargement.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found credits for all of these paperback fronts. But among the artists whose work is included here are James Meese (Bad Girls, Teen-age Terror, The Young and Violent, Cry Kill), Robert Maguire (Jailbait Jungle, Tomboy), Tom Miller (The Gang Girls), Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka (Digit’s Hate Alley, Cry Tough!), Raymond Johnson (1952’s Juvenile Delinquents, Jailbait Street, I’ll Fix You, and Cry, Brother, Cry), Samson Pollen (D for Delinquent, Ace’s Hate Alley), Paul Rader (1964’s Gang Girl), Barye Phillips (Teen-age Mafia, The Beat Generation, Strike Heaven on the Face), Mitchell Hooks (End of a J.D., Rag Top), Rudolph Belarski (Jailbait, Rapture Alley), George Ziel (The Little Caesars), Rafael DeSoto (Teen-age Gangs, The Lolita Lovers), Clark Hulings (The Blackboard Jungle), Robert Schulz (Hell to Pay), Gilbert A. Fullington (1954’s Gang Girl), Lou Marchetti (The Long Night), Victor Kalin (Young and Wild), Robert Bonfils (The Delinquents), and Raymond Pease (Runaway Girl).

If you’re interested in finding additional juvenile delinquent-related covers, check out a pair of previous Killer Covers posts, the first focused on James Bama’s contributions to this breed, the second showcasing the myriad risks young people might face by going to school. Or go to the blog Pulp Covers, where I found many of the images shown above, and which has still more to admire.