Duped: “7 Days to Love”

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.



Above: 7 Days to Love, by “Colin Johns,” aka John Bentley and Cornelius J. Collins (Beacon Signal, 1963). You can see the back cover here. Below: What Makes Sherry Love? by John Burton Thompson (Softcover Library, 1970). The front cover illustration used on both books is credited to Victor Olson.



READ MORE: “Boeckman Title Overdrive,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(Killer Covers).

Duped: “Situation—Grave”

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.



Spanish painter Joan Beltrán Bofill (1939-2009) isn’t exactly a household name, at least on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Yet he left behind a handsome and wide-ranging wealth of canvases—plus a quantity of attention-grabbing paperback fronts that aren’t always linked to his portfolio. According to a Web site called Tutt’Art,

[He] was born in Barcelona. Joan attended the prestigious Casa Lonja, where several artists from the Catalan School, including Picasso, had also studied. It was here that Joan studied drawing, painting, composition, and theory of color. Joan also studied at the Sant Jordi Fine Arts School in Barcelona.

Considered by many to be the foremost Spanish contemporary Impressionist of today, Beltrán Bofill paintings evoke memories and feelings of previous centuries. In Bofill’s sensuous, free brushwork and lively colors, as well as his choice of subjects, one is reminded of Renoir, Monet, and Munch. But, although the influences of many artists are brought to mind, Bofill succeeds in creating a very distinctive style and beauty of his own. His work cascades with light, color, and rhythm of movement, which results in creating in the eye of the beholder a sense of beauty and tranquility. Dating back to 1972, Joan Beltrán Bofill has had one-man exhibitions in Palma, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid, Monaco, Paris, New York, Chicago, Palm Beach, and Tokyo.

Tutt’Art offers various examples of his Impressionist efforts, and they’re well worth scrutinizing. However, it’s the artistic mastery Bofill brought to his work on book fronts for European publishers during the second half of the 20th century—usually under the pseudonym Noiquet (or Portada Noiquet)—that interests us here. In addition to creating jackets for Enid Blyton children’s stories and Zane Grey Westerns, Bofill fashioned striking covers for novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, Earl Derr Biggers, and the astonishingly productive Carter Brown (aka Alan Geoffrey Yates).

Bofill/Noiquet was also responsible for the captivating paperback façade embedded at the top of this post, featuring a young brunette in her underwear, kneeling on what appears to be a bed. It comes from UK publisher Roberts & Vinter’s 1962 edition of Situation—Grave. As I understand it, that thriller was first released in 1949 as Sweetheart, Here’s Your Grave, but was retitled when another British house, Alexander Moring, brought out its own softcover edition in 1958. It was one in a plethora of popular works penned by Stephen Daniel Frances, once acclaimed—under the pseudonym Hank Janson—as “England’s best-selling mystery writer.”

I’ve mentioned Frances several times in this blog. That South London-born clerk turned journalist turned author concocted a succession of tough-guy tales—rich in American pulp-fiction vernacular, though Frances himself reportedly never visited the States—starring a Chicago-based newspaperman-cum-detective also named Hank Janson. (As legend has it, Frances selected the forename Hank because it rhymed with Yank.) The earliest of those quickly churned-out crime yarns was When Dames Get Tough, which debuted in 1946. New entries continued to appear until the 1970s, though by then their crafting had been handed over to lesser fictionists, and “the series had become near pornographic in content,” as Lee Server remarks in his Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers.

The books often carried memorable titles, among them Slay-Ride for Cutie (1949), Hotsy You’ll Be Chilled (1951), Blonde on the Spot (1949), Broads Don't Scare Easy (1951), Skirts Bring Me Sorrow (1952), Sugar and Vice (1958), and Hell’s Belles (1961). And a number of them boasted fairly revealing artwork by Reginald Heade, which—combined with the stories’ violence and sexual suggestiveness (there were frequent mentions of “clinging sheer stockings and ripped ‘knickers’”)—eventually landed the Janson books afoul of British obscenity laws, though by then Frances had decamped with his profits for a life of leisure in Spain. (He died of emphysema in 1989.)

During the middle of the last century, “Hank Janson’s sexy crime thrillers were the hottest thing around,” recalls Colin Dunne in a 2014 piece for the Daily Mail. “The American writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett had elevated the hard-boiled ’tec story into something like poetry, but Hank turned up the violence and the sex and took it back downmarket. Right down.” British crime writer John Harvey, creator of the Charlie Resnick series and a Hank Janson fan in his youth, writes in his introduction to the recent double release of two early novels, Amphetamines and Pearls & The Geranium Kiss, that “The first hard-boiled crime novels I read were written by an Englishman pretending to be American: Stephen Daniel Frances, using the pseudonym Hank Janson, which was also the name of his hero. With titles like Smart Girls Don’t Talk and Sweetheart, Here’s Your Grave, the Janson books, dolled up in suitably tantalizing covers, made their way, hand to hand, around the school playground, falling open at any passage that, to our young minds, seemed sexy and daring. This was a Catholic boys’ grammar school after all, and any reference to parts of the body below the waist, other than foot or knee, was thought to merit, if not excommunication, at least three Our Fathers and a dozen Hail Marys.”

Bofill/Noiquet contributed two cover illustrations that I know of to the Hank Janson line, both of them commissioned by Roberts & Vinter: one for the 1963 edition of Second String (shown above, on the right), and the other for Situation—Grave. I don’t find any full-length reviews of the latter novel online, but a Web page devoted to Janson first editions mentions that its plot is “set in Hollywood—the action switching from studio to marijuana den, and with intimations of the making of a snuff movie.” Classic lurid storytelling.

Apparently, I’m not the only person to have been impressed by Bofill/Noiquet’s Situation—Grave front, with its elegant brushstroke work in gouache. A version of his illustration later graced an issue of a Finnish, digest-style “cheapo paperback series called Max Strong,” named after a fictional Australian detective whose exploits—“excitement of a different kind”—were composed, in large part, by editor-author Frank Sydney Greenop (aka Robert Dudgeon) and designed to capture a readership on the scale of Carter Brown’s. In his write-up on this publication, Finnish blogger Juri Nummelin headlines it as having been distributed in 1954, though the wrapper date says 1965. He goes on to explain that the cover story, Murhat ovat epämiellyttäviä (translated as Murder’s So Unpleasant) was the work of “Frank Struan”—real name Graham Fisher—who was “born in 1920 … [and] used the Frank Struan pseudonym in a series of stories that were published in the legendary British magazine called Tit-Bits in the early ’50s.” As to the tale’s plot, Nummelin calls it “a mock-American hard-boiled crime novel with a private-eye hero called Johnny July.”

In this outing, Johnny July is hired to guard a wealthy business man, but he dies—in a closed room!—before July gets a chance to make out just from whom the man’s supposed to be guarded ... There are two beautiful women involved in the case, the young bride of the deceased and her sister who seems to be after the man’s inheritance. Or some such. … It's an one-hour entertainment, nothing more. There are notable gaps in the plot and Johnny July isn’t a very interesting character, but I didn’t really mind, as the stuff went on with some speed. There are many references to Chandler. The city of the story is Bay City, Chandler’s fictional city, and Johnny July is mugged and taken to a mental institute to be held there just like [Philip] Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely.

You’ll note I wrote that a “version” of Bofill/Noiquet’s art introduced Murder’s So Unpleasant. That’s because, if you look closely at the book front on the left, you’ll realize that the image has been flipped from the way it appeared on Situation—Grave, turning Noiquet’s signature at the bottom of the picture backwards. And the scantily clad brunette is now holding a gun, whereas that same hand—formerly her right, now her left—had previously been clutching her left bicep. I have no idea whether Bofill was commissioned to make this modification to his painting, but I’d guess it was executed by somebody else. It’s well done; however, 20th-century publishers of “cheapo paperback series” rarely coughed up the dough demanded by famous artists to alter their compositions for second use.

Joan Beltrán Bofill wasn’t as prolific a book-cover painter as some of his contemporaries (he probably reserved his energy for his Impressionist masterpieces). However, he created a number of excellent specimens of the breed. Below are eight more of my favorites. Click on the images for enlargements.

Duped: “The Ivy Trap”

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.



Douglas Angus (1909-2002) was born in the Canadian town of Amherst, Nova Scotia. According to the back-jacket copy on his only suspense novel, 1963’s Death on Jerusalem Road, Angus was “the son of a Canadian fur trapper. He came to the United States in 1936, acquired a Ph.D. from Ohio State University, and has since taught in a number of American colleges in the East and Midwest. … He is currently on the faculty of St. Lawrence University” in northern New York state. That same mini-biography noted that Angus was the author of three novels prior to the publication of Death on the Jerusalem Road: The Green and the Burning (1958), The Lions Fed the Tigers (1958), and The Ivy Trap (1959).

In its plot précis of The Ivy Trap, Kirkus Reviews wrote:

Allan Hazard, 47, an associate professor in a large school, has until now a fine record to which a well-reviewed book has contributed, and a more than reasonably happy marriage with Margaret, as well as two children. His attraction to one of his students, Laurel, a lovely if highly neurotic girl, is not to be resisted and becomes increasingly intense. They are seen by the Dean’s wife and by some students; news travels quickly—to Margaret—who can forgive him the lapse but not the transfer of a ring—hers—to Laurel. And while he finally is given the full professorship coveted by the entire department, it is only a week before his resignation is demanded—and Laurel’s ruin is complete, as well as his own.

A rather short review in the January 3, 1960, edition of Nebraska’s Lincoln Evening Journal called The Ivy Trap “a case-study of how passion can sweep over a man, destroying all of his reasonableness.”

The cover featured atop this post comes from the 1961 Crest Giant paperback version of Angus’ book, featuring what I think is a rather beautiful piece of art by English-American illustrator Charles Binger (despite the fact that the young woman depicted is a brunette, while Laurel in the novel is a blonde). Apparently, my attraction to that painting was shared, for the same painting showed up—also in 1961—on the façade of a British paperback, Alien Virus (Panther). The book is credited to “Alan Caillou,” but that was a pseudonym used by Surrey-born fictionist Alan Lyle-Smythe (1914-2006). Lyle-Smythe—who also wrote as “Alex Webb”—proved to be prolific, turning out more than three dozen novels, including series starring a journalist named Mike Benasque, an Interpol-serving “athletic genius” by the name of Cabot Cain, and a gentleman scholar called Ian Quayle.

Alien Virus was one of Lyle-Smyth’s non-series books, an adventure/espionage tale originally published in 1957, but reissued in 1974 as Cairo Cabal. Since I do not have either edition on my shelves, I was forced onto the Web in search of more information, but could find only a single plot summation of Alien Virus, from the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. It calls the yarn “a thriller set arguably … in an alternate-history Egypt,” involving Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.

READ MORE: “Alan Caillou: Colorful Writer-Actor,” by Bill Koenig
(The Spy Command).

Duped: McGinnis Sure Gets Around

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.



In a post yesterday, the must-watch paperback/magazine-art blog Pulp Covers: The Best of the Worst presented the front (above) from the October 1964 issue of Bluebook, which featured what I presume was an excerpt from Ian Fleming’s 1963 travelogue, Thrilling Cities. Under that image, editors noted, “This looks a lot like a McGinnis cover,” referring to the now 90-year-old artist, Robert McGinnis.

Well, the resemblance is more than coincidental. The cover painting of a blonde in a lavender or pink dress, reclining across the chest of a dark-haired male, originally fronted the 1962 Paperback Library edition of Night Without Sleep (1950), by New York City-born screenwriter and author Elick Moll (1901-1988). That novel—about a composer who awakens from a drunken stupor one morning, fearful that he’d murdered a woman during the previous night—was adapted by Moll and Frank Partos into a 1952 film noir of the same name, starring Gary Merrill, Linda Darnell, and Hildegarde Neff. And McGinnis did, indeed, provide the illustration for the novel’s 1962 paperback release, shown below. Good catch, guys!

Duped: “The Deadly Reasons”

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.



I’ve been holding onto the cover above for months now, trying to recall why that image of a rather well-endowed young brunette looked so darn familiar. I just couldn’t put my finger on the answer.

I knew that the man responsible for the painting that fronts this 1958 Popular Giant paperback edition of The Deadly Reasons was Owen Kampen (1922-1982), a Madison, Wisconsin-born artist and illustrator who once worked as an instructor with the Famous Artists School. I also knew that The Deadly Reasons was written by Edward D. Radin (1909-1966), an American criminologist and journalist whose best-known work is probably Lizzie Borden: The Untold Story (1961). The Deadly Reasons was the book he published just prior to that Borden history. Nominated for the 1959 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category, it’s a collection of 10 true-crime tales about homicides and the people who commit them. As Radin explains in an Author’s Note, “in each of the cases in this book, a different motive was the cause that led to murder. While there are many motives in the broad range of human emotions, the ten deadly reasons in this book--Love, Fear, Revenge, Pride, Passion, Hate, Lust, Greed, Profit, Jealousy--are the most frequent causes of homicide I have found in a study of more than two thousand different murders.”

Of course, knowing all of that helped me not one iota when it came to pinning down why I recognized the Deadly Reasons cover illustration. But then one day last week, during a mostly frustrating Web search for an entirely unrelated book, I suddenly came across what was described as a “prostitution novel,” Martha Crane, by Charles Gorham (Popular Library, 1954). Imagine my delight at seeing that its cover--displayed on the left--used the original, larger Kampen painting from which the image on The Deadly Reasons was taken.

A short biographical note found on the backside of the 1949 Signet paperback edition of Gorham’s second novel, The Future Mister Dolan (released originally in 1948, following his publication of The Gilded Hearse), says the author “was born in Philadelphia, attended Columbia, [and] saw war service as navigator with the RAF and 8th Air Force. He has worked on newspapers and in publishing houses.” Kirkus Reviews offers this synopsis of Martha Crane’s plot:

An autopsy on Martha Crane omits flowers and provides a case history of a girl whose heart and conscience had been numbed--to refrigerated--by her father. Enlisting at eighteen in the WACS to escape him, Martha now at 24 is still embattled in her emancipation but a chance night on the town finds her pregnant. The attempt made by a home for unwed mothers in St. Louis to contact the father of the child she will bear drives her on to New York and the chance encounter with Farkas, a pimp, who arranges for the care, delivery and disposal of the child. Back in shape again, she goes to work for Farkas as a high-class call girl; her attraction to him has an unhealthy aura which is also a reminder of the father she hates; she submits to every degradation and contributes to the suicide of a client; and finally, with the knowledge that Farkas is using her child as a means of expensive extortion from the family who has adopted it, she kills him. … An anatomy of a driven as well as fallen woman, this is for those who stimulate rather than shock easily and is thoroughly demoralized.

Not exactly the most glowing review, eh? Fortunately for the author, it wasn’t the only one. The Boston Herald was kinder to Martha Crane, saying that “Mr. Gorham has created here a frightening character, one who will repel you and at the same time hit you so hard that her agony will remain with you a long time after you have put the book down.” Gorham went on to pen such works as Trial by Darkness (1952), The Gold in Their Bodies: A Novel About Gaughin (1955), McCaffery (1961), and a biography of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie titled The Lion of Judah (1966).

Duped: “A Fistful of Death”

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.



Crime novelist Henry Kane (1908-1988) has always pissed me off. Just a wee bit. While the rest of the 20th-century fiction-writing world easily adopted terms such as “private eye” (inspired, presumably, by the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency’s original logo, featuring an unblinking human eye above the slogan “We Never Sleep”), “private investigator” (aka P.I.), and “gumshoe” when referring to those myriad determined, frequently down-on-their luck, and sometimes intoxicated freelance sleuths assigned to solve imaginary mysteries and rescue comely dames in danger, Kane habitually referred to them as “private richards.” I assume this was intended as a witty twist on “private dick,” but it comes off as a silly affectation. Whether Kane was the sole detective-fictionist to employ this cognomen, I don’t know (he may simply have been the only one to not deliver it with a broad wink), but I’m always stopped cold when I stumble across the term in one of his stories, be it a Peter Chambers mystery or his 1960 TV tie-in novel, Peter Gunn. (It has been said--by no less than Lawrence Block--that Chambers was actually the inspiration for Blake Edwards’ jazz-loving shamus.)

The fashionable, swinging Mr. Chambers made his debut in 1947’s A Halo for Nobody, and managed to keep up his popular run (as well as his pursuit of curvaceous women) through dozens of short stories, a 1954 radio series titled Crime and Peter Chambers (starring Dane Clark), and at least 29 novels, including A Corpse for Christmas (1951), Too French and Too Deadly (1955), Death of a Flack (1961), and Nobody Loves a Loser (1963). “Chambers’ adventures are usually set in New York,” explains Prologue Books, which has re-released a number of them in print and e-book versions. “His secretary, Miranda Foxworth, is ‘built like an old-fashioned icebox but colder.’ Pete frequents Trennan’s Dark Morning Tavern, a local bar. Chambers characterizes himself as, ‘A wiseguy private eye. Talks hard with the tough guys, purrs with the ladies. All the girls fall for him. You know, like what you read about.’ Needless to say, one of Chambers’ distinguishing traits is his sense of humor and love for word play. … In 1969, with the sexual revolution beginning and censorship regulations loosening, Peter Chambers joined right in, and became one of the first X-rated private eyes. These novels were published by Lancer books, a soft-core publishing house, and began with Don’t Call Me Madame (1969). Later titles include The Shack Job (1969), The Glow Job (1971), and The Tail Job (1971).”

Fistful of Death was the ninth entry in Kane’s Chambers series. I don’t own a copy, but Prologue offers this brief plot synopsis:

The proposition sounded like a pushover. All Peter Chambers had to do was find out where a teen-aged chorine had been for the past month and why. And for that information the girl's father, a prosperous banker, would pay Chambers a cool thousand dollars. It was a quick way to earn some easy money. So Chambers thought … until he found out that the fistful of cash carried a little something extra along with it--A FISTFUL OF DEATH.

The cover shown at the top of this post was taken from the apparently original, 1958 Avon Books version of Fistful of Death. It features an illustration by Raymond Johnson, whose artwork I have periodically showcased in Killer Covers, but about whom I can find little background information on the Web. (If anyone out there knows more about his life or career, please drop me a line).

That same Johnson painting was employed--only in reverse--a year later by UK publisher Panther Books on its paperback edition of The Deadly Miss Ashley, a novel that had first been brought out by Doubleday & Company in 1950. When it debuted, The Deadly Miss Ashley carried the byline of Frederick C. Davis (1902-1977), a pulp writer who, being quite prolific, also wrote as “Murdo Coombs,” “Curtis Steele,” and “Stephen Ransome.” Panther’s version of the novel, displayed on the right, carries the Ransome pseudonym.

The Deadly Miss Ashley was the opening entry in Davis/Ransome’s series starring Luke Speare, the brains behind the New York City-based Cole Detective Agency, and his boss, Schyler Cole. In this one, notes the blog Pulp International, “Miss Ashley is actually a missing person who Cole and Speare need to locate.” The pair went on to lead five more novels, among them Another Morgue Heard From (1954). Not bad for a couple of fly-by-the-seat-of-their-britches private eyes. Or should I say, private richards?

Duped: “Campus Sex Club”

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.



Although he’s known today as a prolific and award-winning science-fiction novelist, Robert Silverberg spent some of his early years concocting soft-porn tales. He did this under pseudonyms such as David Challon, John Dexter, Don Elliott, and Loren Beauchamp, the last of which he applied to “classics” on the order of Nurse Carolyn (1960), Sin on Wheels (1961), Campus Sex Club (1962).

As the enticingly named Web site, Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books, explains it, Campus Sex Club was originally published in 1960 by Bedside Books as Campus Love Club. It’s described as a “light, humorous” yarn “told in first-person by Metropolitan College sophomore Jeff Burnside, who starts off as an awkward virgin and soon becomes a master of ‘making’ the girls on campus.” I won’t go into all of the plotting particulars, since they’re quite well described at the Vintage Sleaze Books link provided above, but suffice to say that much of Beauchamp’s novel has to do with a secret fraternity and corresponding sorority that provide their members with guaranteed “sex and companionship--insuring [sic] that everyone has a new partner every night. On Saturdays, they get together for naked orgy parties, where they watch each other have sex with ‘Bolero’ playing on the hi-fi (this long before the movie 10).”

I wouldn’t care a jot about Campus Sex Club, were it not for the fact that its paperback front, displayed above, features artwork by Robert Maguire (1921-2005), who in addition to creating memorable fronts for 20th-century crime novels, also contributed his talents to “adult fiction” works published by Midwood, Monarch, and other such imprints. His painting for Campus Sex Club--showing an oddly unruffled young man in a college letterman sweater looking on as a topless redhead zips up the back of her skirt on a nearby bed--can hardly help but stimulate “improper” thoughts in the viewer.

Which is why I’m so surprised to see it was changed four years later when the illustration was reused on a Midwood “giant” release of two eminently forgettable tales, Norman A. King’s Goodbye Innocence and Linda Michaels’ Big City Campus. If you look closely at the cover below you’ll see the two college pennants that had previously hung on the wall behind the man have disappeared, and the slender redhead’s butt crack (that anatomical feature formerly known as the intergluteal cleft) has been covered up by what appears to be the back of a pair of black panties. One must ask, why bother? Seriously! We’re talking soft porn here, not high literature. Did somebody actually complain to Midwood about the explicitness of its cover art? Was it really necessary to give Maguire’s young miss more modesty?



READ MORE: “A Brief History of Robert Silverberg,” by Claude Lalumière (Locus Online).

Duped: “The Forbidden Room”

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.

It wasn’t uncommon in the 20th century for American, British, and even Australian publishers to “borrow” each other’s paperback artwork. Since there was less travel between countries back then, readers might not realize that the handsome illustration they found on a Mickey Spillane, Carter Brown, or Ross Macdonald book in the States was also decorating a different work overseas. The talents of Robert Maguire, Robert McGinnis, Mitchell Hooks, and others were in particularly high demand. And if the original artwork couldn’t be had, some publishers commissioned look-alike illustrations.

Below we have a prime example of such imitation. The first cover comes from The Forbidden Room, a 1952 Gold Medal paperback written by Jaclen Steele (the joint pseudonym adopted by husband-wife authors Jack and Helen Steele). Touted as “a powerful novel of haunting fears,” it features a most appealing, slightly suggestive illustration by Barye Phillips, showing a woman in what’s either a short dress or a clingy slip--I’m no expert on such matters.



Now compare that with this next front, taken from a later 1950s edition of Whisper His Sin, Vin Packer’s novel of homosexuality and homicide. Released by the UK imprint Red Seal, its art was obviously inspired by Phillips’, though the woman is now clearly in her underwear. No illustration credit is given … probably because the painter was too ashamed to ’fess up to his theft.

Duped: “The Lash”

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.



I knew I’d spotted the byline “John Burton Thompson” before, and sure enough, that same moniker appears on the cover of Nude in the Sand, a 1959 Beacon Books release that I showcased a couple of years ago. There isn’t much information on the Web about Thompson, beyond the fact that his name appears on other such “literary gems” as Lakeside Love Nest, The Couch Cure, and The Ravished. However, the professional responsible for the seductive front of The Lash (Softcover Library), a “lesbian pulp” novel from 1965, is extremely familiar: Charles Copeland (1924-1979), a prolific Missouri-born artist of the mid-20th century who, in addition to churning out pin-up-style illustrations for men’s magazines, did a great deal of work for paperback book publishers such as Ace, Popular Library, and of course Softcover (an imprint of Beacon, one of the last century’s most successful soft-core paperback publishers)

So prized were Copeland’s paintings, that Beacon editors decided the one employed on The Lash--displaying a slender, half-dressed brunette curled up a couch, with expectation in her eyes (presumably focused on the bare-midriffed woman whose reflection can be seen in the mirror behind her)--would be wasted were it used just once. In fact, the same artwork had already graced a 1963 Beacon novel titled The Sexecutives, by Lee Richards. (Shown on the right--click for an enlargement.) There’s a difference, though: Rather than a woman in the mirror, The Sexecutives shows the reflection of a power-suited blond manager type lighting a cigarette. As that book’s cover lines attest, Richards’ yarn was about “high-powered executives who tried everything for kicks. Now they went on a new one--wife-trading.” It seems “the mark of their success was the key to the right apartment.” Should anyone miss the suggestion in all of this that The Sexecutives was not the sort of story to be left lying around on a coffee table when company calls, the novel’s concluding come-on line reads, “A novel of big business that makes The Carpetbaggers look simon-pure.”

Apparently Beacon knew its primarily male readership well, for The Sexecutives satisfied not only its audience in America, but also book-buyers in Australia, where--under the title “See Me Tonight!”--this novel was one of many about “high-flying corporate execs behaving badly.”

Duped: “Awake to Love”

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.

Given all the attention being paid recently by the media to sex--and especially the incidence of rape--on American college and university campuses, thanks to Rolling Stone magazine’s dubious report on such assaults at the University of Virginia, it’s only natural that the vintage paperback cover below should have attracted my attention. The artwork comes, of course, from the brush of Paul Rader (1906-1986), who created some of the sexiest novel fronts of the 20th century, primarily for publisher Midwood Books. But this is only one version of his eye-catching illustration.



For Awake to Love (All Star, 1967), Rader gives us the image of two youthful sweethearts, secreted behind a barrier of bushes and locked in passionate embrace on the grounds of what evidence suggests is a venerable institution of higher learning. The gent’s dress shirt is unbuttoned, but that is nothing compared with the woman’s dishabille; her skirt has been pushed up to reveal plenty of leg and a delicate garter, and her sweater looks to have popped its buttons, loosing at least one bare breast for her paramour’s appraisal. “Scandal rocks a quiet university campus …,” reads the novel’s cover teaser, “forbidden passion behind ivy-covered walls.”

This is a rather more explicit version of Rader’s illustration than appeared five years earlier on the Midwood release Campus Jungle, by Joan Ellis. That original image still showed the woman being kissed without abandon … but with her sweater fully covering her bust. It seems we have here one of a number of cases in which Rader reworked art he’d executed to Midwood’s specifications for a later publishing client. (He did that not only for All-Star, but also for Bee-Line, Edka and Private Edition titles).

We can only guess that the art director for Awake to Love thought the American reading public was more open-minded in 1967, a year before the famous “Summer of Love,” than it had been in 1962, when Marilyn Monroe was found dead at age 36 and The Beatles recorded their first single, “Love Me Do.”

Duped: “The Sweetheart of the Razors”

This is the first installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Later entries are here.

The illustration below shows the front of Peter Cheyney’s non-series novel, The Sweetheart of the Razors (originally titled The Curiosity of Etienne MacGregor, 1947). This 1962 paperback edition from UK publisher Four Square carries art by Robert Maguire ... which also just happened to appear on the façade of Thomas B. Dewey’s Dame in Danger (Signet, 1949). Check it out here.

Encore for a Kiss

Five years ago, in a post that collected numerous “Peeping Tom” covers, I highlighted a 1955 Beacon Books paperback titled Keyhole Peeper, by Stewart Sterling (a pseudonym used by Prentice Winchell). What I didn’t know at the time was that its captivating but uncredited artwork wasn’t original to that book. It was, in fact, taken from an earlier, 1953 novel, Runaway Blonde, written by the prolific Daoma Winston. You can compare both of those fronts below.