We Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen

I absolutely love the paperback artistry of Ernest Chiriacka, aka “Darcy” (1913-2010), so I’ll employ pretty much any excuse to post more of his work on this page. But today is a special occasion—Killer Covers’ 16th birthday! To celebrate that, I am finally displaying (above) his front from the 1960 Pyramid Books edition of Roadside Night, by Erwin N. Nistler and Gerry P. Broderick.

Alas and alack, this is not a novel from my collection. But I’ve heard favorable comments about it over the years. The excellent blog Reading California Fiction—which was written by Don Napoli, before his death at age 79 in early 2021—offers this synopsis of its plot:

Ex-Marine Buck Randall is settled into a comfortable life. He owns and manages a small bar and motel up the coast from San Diego. The business keeps him solvent. His assistant Dom reliably helps out around the place. Joyce, an attractive eighteen-year-old who’s had a crush on him for years, is eager to become a serious girlfriend. His steady customers are also his friends. Then one day a stunning redhead, Sylvia Landon, comes into the bar. She exudes a sex appeal that Buck hasn’t felt before. Even after she leaves he can’t stop thinking about her. She returns; they talk briefly. She returns again; he cooks dinner for her. They spend the night together. He’s hooked.

The general outline of this story is apparent from the first few sentences. Sylvia is going to lure Buck into trouble to fulfill some nefarious purpose of her own. That’s not an original premise. So the question is how effectively Nistler and Broderick work it out. And here the authors deserve kudos all around. Buck, the first-person narrator, not only describes events but relays his feelings as well. These change with each plot twist. Longing, satisfaction, doubt, curiosity, guilt, anxiety all run through his mind. The writing is spare almost (but not quite) to the point of parody: short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, and of course a short book. The terseness keeps the story moving quickly and generates tension until the very end. Fans of the femme fatale are bound to enjoy this book.

The pair behind that slender example of “motel noir” are hardly household names. Novelist James Reasoner wrote in a 2009 critique of Roadside Night that “As far as I’ve been able to discover, this is the only book [Nistler and Broderick] ever published.” Nonetheless, he agrees with Napoli that it’s a better-than-average crime yarn. “What makes it worth reading is the prose,” Reasoner opines, “which is bleak and fast-paced, and the sweaty air of doom and desperation that hangs over the book like fog rolling in from the sea. … This isn’t some lost masterpiece of crime fiction, but it’s well worth reading and would make a good candidate for reprinting.”



There have already been several editions of Roadside Night produced, all by Pyramid. The one presented just above and on the left is the original printing from 1951, boasting an illustration by Canada-born Hunter Barker. To its right sits a still more captivating version, released in 1955. I regret not knowing the identity of that one’s cover artist. Does anybody reading this recognize the style?

When I launched this blog in 2009, I never imagined I’d still be writing it more than a decade and a half later. Yet here we are. I have a multitude of covers just as interesting as these stored away in my computer files. All I need is the energy, free time, and—in cases such as this—the proper occasion to retrieve and post them. Thank you for sticking with me during this long and oft-surprising ride!

(And yes, a classic song inspired the title of this piece.)

Another Look: “The Future Mister Dolan”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Future Mister Dolan, by Charles Gorham (Signet, 1949), with a cover illustration credited to James Avati. Right: The Future Mister Dolan, by Charles Gorham (Pyramid, 1959); cover art by Ernest Chiriacka, aka Darcy.

Charles Orson Gorham (1911-1975) saw his first novel, The Gilded Hearse, published in 1948 (and later reissued as Make Me an Offer). He quickly followed that up with The Future Mister Dolan, a tale that has been variously praised as brutal and uncompromising, and damned (by Kirkus Reviews) as “unprintable,” “unforgivable,” and “censor bait.” Gorham went on to pen the no-less-controversial McCaffery (1961), an early gay-themed novel.

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.