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.

Duck!

Left: The Nine Wrong Answers, by John Dickson Carr (Bantam, 1955). Wikipedia explains that this particularly clever whodunit, “first published in 1952, is a detective story by John Dickson Carr which does not feature any of his series detectives. It is an expansion of Carr's 1942 radio play ‘Will You Make a Bet With Death.” The cover artist is not identified, but betting is heavy that the Mitchell Hooks was behind this one.

Right: Brotherhood of Evil: The Mafia, by Frederic Sondern Jr. (Bantam, 1960). Originally published in 1959, this non-fiction work is described as a history of the well-known criminal organization that had its roots in Italy but extended its reach to the United States in the late 19th century—and of efforts (largely unsuccessful) to rein in both its power and influence. According to his 1966 New York Times obituary, author Sondern was “a roving editor for The Reader’s Digest, a war correspondent and a writer on crime and law-enforcement …” He’s said to have contributed more than 100 articles to Reader’s Digest. Sondern died of cancer in 1966 at age 55.

Unfortunately, I don’t know who painted the Sondern cover.

The Twelve Dames of Christmas, 2021: #12

Celebrating this festive season with brassy bombshells.



Calamity Fair, by “Wade Miller,” aka Robert Wade and Bill Miller (Signet, 1961). This was their fourth entry in a six-part series starring San Diego private eye Max Thursday.

Cover illustration by Mitchell Hooks.

All Alone, with Trouble in Mind

Book titles containing the word “widow” suddenly seem to be everywhere on my radar. March brought the publication of Alma Katsu’s “gripping, authentic spy procedural,” Red Widow (Putnam), and earlier this month saw the re-release (by Cutting Edge Books) of Louis Lorraine’s 1961 sleaze classic, Commuter Widow. Soon after I downloaded the inarguably not-safe-for-work front cover of that new Commuter Widow edition, I had cause to search for it again in my computer files … and came up with a slew of attractive vintage novels also featuring “widow” in their names.

I’m sorry to say that I don’t know the name of the artist whose remarkable work fronts the 1958 Crest printing of Richard Wormser’s The Widow Wore Red, shown above. But I can identify the painters of most of the paperback covers below, from Bill George (Black Widow, 1954) and Harry Barton (both the undated Exciting Widow and the yarn from which it swiped its art, 1963’s That Kind of Widow) to Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka (Self-Made Widow, 1958, and 1963’s The Torrid Widow), Bob Hilbert (1953’s Night at the Mocking Widow), and Robert McGinnis (the undated Suddenly a Widow, by George Harmon Coxe, and 1966’s No Tears from the Widow, by Carter Brown).

Charles Copeland gave us the cover for Rick Holmes’ New Widow (1963), while Weekend Widows (1966) boasts a front painted by Al Rossi, and Paul Rader is credited with creating the image for Wayward Widow (1962). You’re looking at Clark Hulings’ work on 1957’s The Golden Widow, James Meese’s artistry decorating 1957 Pocket release of Ursula Curtiss’ The Widow’s Web, and the talents of Mort Engel showcased on the 1965 Ace version of that same Curtiss tale. Finally, Griffith Foxley was responsible for the painting that introduces the 1954 Dell release of Dolores Hitchens’ Widows Won’t Wait (a singularly Erle Stanley Gardner-ish title); Mitchell Hooks was behind the 1955 Bantam cover of The Widow and the Web, by Robert Martin; and the great Walter Popp imagined the candelabra-wielding redhead on Evelyn Bond’s Widow in White (1973).

Click on any of the images here for an enlargement.

READ MORE: “Review: The Widow,” by Steven J. McDermott (Mostly Old Books and Rust).

Welcome to Summer 2020!

Summer’s advent is always a joyous occasion here at Killer Covers. But it’s especially welcome this year, after we have all been cooped up inside for months as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even though the virus continues to spread, and prudence as well as health guidelines counsel against large outdoor parties or spending time on crowded beaches, we can still enjoy—if only by ourselves or with immediate family members—the arrival of sunnier mornings in the garden and balmier evenings spent on back patios.

With today being the start of summer 2020, I’ve pulled out a paperback front that I have been saving just for this occasion. It comes from the 1960 Popular Library edition of Tell Me, Stranger, by Kentucky author Charles Bracelen Flood. Its cover illustration was painted by Mitchell Hooks, whose artistry we celebrated at length earlier this year—just as the pandemic began, in fact.

Over the years Killer Covers has posted numerous other summer-related book fronts. Click here to enjoy them all.

Hooks Hits: All Good Things …

Part of a series saluting artist-illustrator Mitchell Hooks.

Angel’s Flight, by Lou Cameron (Gold Medal, 1960)

Today ends a full month of Killer Covers’ tribute to Detroit, Michigan-born artist Mitchell Hooks (1923-2013)—twice as long as I had originally intended to let it run.

The series began on Wednesday, March 18, which—in addition to being the seventh anniversary of Hooks’ demise, at age 89—also happened to be the day that Washington Governor Jay Inslee required all “non-essential businesses” in my hometown of Seattle to be shuttered because of the COVID-19 crisis. I extended this series because there were just so many excellent examples of Hooks’ work to consider. Through yesterday, 57 paperback fronts painted by Hooks had been displayed as part of this venture, plus a couple of movie posters. That’s in addition to dozens of Hooks creations Killer Covers has showcased before, including his 1970s line of covers for Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels and the façades he crafted during that same decade for Paperback Library’s Superspade novels by “B.B. Johnson,” aka songwriter-composer Joseph Perkins Greene.

(Right) Artist Mitchell Hooks, photo by Tom Halloway

Although the novel coronavirus is still with us (and will likely remain a long-term cause for social isolation, despite Donald Trump’s pixie-dust wishes to the contrary), it’s finally time to call this project done. But not before I share another 40 of my favorite Hooks works. Below you will find covers from mainstream novels as well as entries in a wide variety of genres, from crime fiction and science fiction to westerns and tales of espionage. Especially notable among this bunch: Ugo Pirro’s The Camp Followers (Dell, 1959), which was made into a 1965 film of that same name; two thrillers by Georgette Heyer, Death in the Stocks (Bantam, 1971) and Duplicate Death (Bantam, 1970); the haunting 1956 Gold Medal cover from Geoffrey Homes’ Build My Gallows High; That Darn Cat (Bantam, 1965) and its sequel, Undercover Cat Prowls Again (Bantam, 1967), by Gordon and Mildred Gordon, which enjoyed popularity because of a Disney adaptation of the former comedy-thriller; the 1961 Gold Medal edition of Fredric Brown’s carnival-themed mystery, Madball; the hilariously named Lionel White novel, Death Takes the Bus (Gold Medal, 1957); and The Dark Arena, the 1956 Dell release of Mario Puzo’s debut novel, originally published in 1955.

Click on any paperback cover here for an enlargement.

Although Hooks’ art is occasionally confused with that of Ernest Chiriacka or Robert McGinnis, there are signature elements to it that make clear who was holding the paintbrush.

Throughout much of the late 20th century, Hooks perfected a sketch-like linear style. “It was looser, more spontaneous, more designy, a slightly impressionistic way of working,” as the artist told Gary Lovisi of Gryphon Books during an interview in 1988. “It was what I felt good doing then.” Hooks’ women—and there were lots of them in his images; paperback publishers wanted them emphasized on covers—tended to be sensuous, but “not cheap or sleazy at all, they have class and elegance,” as Lovisi put it.

Some early illustrations show how much Hooks’ style evolved. Glancing over the half-dozen books below, all released between 1950 and 1953, you can see he was using a more realistic, painterly approach, similar to what many others offered at the time.

He would eventually return to a more realistic style of painting, as he worked increasingly with oils and as the market changed.

Finally, let’s gaze fondly at one of Hooks’ few wraparound covers, for the 1951 Lion Books release The Ranch Cat, by William Hopson.

As the Vintage Paperback & Book Covers Facebook page explains, Hopson “wrote westerns for the pulps, contributing to West, Exciting [Western], Popular [Western], and Mammoth Western, but he did do some work for Thrilling [Detective], Popular [Detective], and Mammoth Detective as well. He managed to leverage his pulp career into paperback success postwar.” Most of Hopson’s books (Trouble Rides Tall, Yucca City Outlaw, etc.) were issued in the ’50s.

Needless to say, there are dozens more Mitchell Hooks covers in my computer files. I’ll try to find uses for others in the future. Meanwhile, check out the collections in The Rap Sheet and on Flickr.