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).

Two-fer Tuesdays: Just Your Hype

A twice-monthly pairing of book covers that just seem to go together. Click on either of these images to open up an enlargement.



“The behind-the-scenes novel of a talent agency … whose tentacles reach world-wide into every phase of show business … fascinating.” That’s what the San Francisco Chronicle said of The Flesh Peddlers, when this Stephen Longstreet novel was originally published (by Simon & Schuster) in 1962. Meanwhile, The Columbus Dispatch said it offered “a liberal education in the know-how of bars, bedrooms, and beds.” Kirkus Reviews summed up the book’s plot this way:

COK (Company of Kings), the petulant, arrogant talent organization run by the King Brothers (“money smelled good at the Kings’ place”) is the labyrinth through which numerous crudely drawn characters live out their half-lives “flesh peddling” big and small talent, locally and internationally. A script-type vernacular and a flood of comment on current authors, “pop” idols, and affairs (the lesbian scene and the guilt-laden adultery sequences are here, typically) relate COK to its human communicators. Our “hero,” Garrison, wends his way through this colorful maze, his fast contemporary ear cocked for the nuances. His demise is an inevitable consequence of COK manipulations, for the organization is loyal to nothing. Here is slick stuff about Storyland, USA, to the tune of flashy cars, willing women, and an insatiate business octopus—all cemented in place with a very obvious, hard-money universe. ...

Such a wealth of flash and sexual frivolity might not seem especially interesting, or even provocative, nowadays. But during his long and varied career, from the 1930s through the ’80s, Longstreet (born Chauncey Weiner) not only churned out scripts for radio, theater, film, and television (he holds credits for both 1946’s The Jolson Story and 1957’s The Helen Morgan Story), but made a prominent name for himself in book-publishing circles. He started out penning detective yarns, two of which—Crime on the Cuff (1936, published under the alias Henri Weiner) and Death Walks on Cat Feet (1938, bylined “Paul Haggard”)—starred John Brass, a one-armed sleuth and ex-Secret Service man, who also happened to be a cartoonist (an avocation Brass shared with his creator). He went on, under the Haggard nom de plume, to produce other mysteries novels, such as Dead Is the Door Nail (1937), featuring “Mike Warlock, sports reporter for the New York Globe, and his faithful companion and cameraman, Abner Gillaway.” But it’s as Stephen Longstreet that he became a bookstore fixture. Among his best-known titles: Stallion Road (1945); Wild Harvest (1955); The Crime (1959); Geisha (1961, written with his wife, Ethel Longstreet); The Golden Runaways (1964); The Divorce (1974); The Kingston Fortune (1975); and The Dream Seekers (1979). In addition, recalls Longstreet’s 2002 obituary in the Los Angeles Times, this author concocted an “extensive list of non-fiction works,” among them A Century on Wheels: The Story of Studebaker (1952), Chicago: An Intimate Portrait of People, Pleasures, and Power, 1860-1919 (1973), and a number of books relating the history of jazz, including 1986’s Storyville to Harlem: Fifty Years in the Jazz Scene.”

The front and back covers of The Flesh Peddlers, shown here, come from the 1963 Dell edition, with artwork by Mort Engel.

I wish I was equally prepared to say who painted the altogether captivating face of this week’s second showcased paperback, Flesh Agents, by Jean C. Bosquet (Avon, 1957). Unfortunately, I’m not. I did, though, manage to track down a fine short critique of that novel in the Reading California Fiction blog:

Paul DeSilva quits his newspaper job to become a publicist for Triumph Studios. His fiancée thinks he's selling out, but he quickly comes to enjoy the work. He focuses his efforts on boosting the career of Darlene Lamont, a young contract player determined to do whatever is necessary to become a star. Paul launches a successful campaign of newspaper stories, public appearances and photo opportunities which gives Darlene the attention she wants. He also becomes deeply smitten with the beautiful actress. But he can’t determine whether she reciprocates his feelings or is just grateful for his loyalty and dedication.

This is a straightforward Hollywood insider story. By detailing the activities of the book’s savvy but lovelorn protagonist, Bosquet shows what publicists do and why they are an essential part of the movie business. The author doesn’t emphasize the vacuousness of attention-getting. Paul is not a noble figure—he treats most women in his life callously, for example—but the nature of his work is not one of his shortcomings. Actors, directors and studio honchos, on the other hand, are treated with profound cynicism. As in most plot-driven novels, the characters are delineated rather than developed. Bosquet, however, delivers (if just barely) on the promise that Paul’s story will have an arc of some sort. The book is an fast read and a pretty entertaining one.

If anybody out there can identify the party responsible for this Flesh Agents artwork, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with me.

Death Has a Small Voice, by Frances and Richard Lockridge

I think of Richard and Frances Lockridge as having written intelligent and often intriguing, but generally pretty soft amateur detective tales in the S.S. Van Dine tradition. However, this week’s cover--taken from the 1960 Avon Books edition of Death Has a Small Voice, the Lockridges’ 17th Mr. and Mrs. North novel--suggests something considerably more sinister. The illustration shows a well-endowed young blonde who has either stumbled or been pushed to the ground (that mishap having loosened one spaghetti strap of her dress), and who’s now being menaced by a shadowy male figure clutching a handgun and a flashlight. The image supports the jacket blurb from The New York Times, which describes Death Has a Small Voice as an “unusually suspenseful thriller.”

I don’t own this particular edition of Death Has a Small Voice. But looking to the flap copy of the original, 1953 J.B. Lippincott Company hardcover version, I can see why the Times would make such an assertion. Its description of the story reads:

When Pam North receives a dictating machine record in her mail, she thinks it is a message from her husband, Jerry, who is in San Francisco on business. She goes to his office to play back the record and hears an ear-witness account of a murder actually taking place!

Harry Eaton, a small-time burglar, is found dead and the police discover in his apartment a dictating machine that has been stolen from the home of the missing Hilda Godwin, young poet and novelist. Pam is reported missing and Jerry hurries back to join Captain [Bill] Weigand in an effort to find her and to locate Hilda Godwin as well.

The manuscript of Miss Godwin’s first novel is stolen from her publisher’s office under mysterious circumstances. A number of her friends, all of whom are characterized in the novel under different guises, could be guilty. Captain Weigand and Jerry manage to get on the trail of Pam, and a fast three-way race back to New York ensues.

By the time they penned Death Has a Small Voice, the Lockridges were well practiced at crafting fair-play puzzle mysteries. Fellow newspaper reporters, Richard Lockridge and Frances Louise Davies married in the early 1920s and moved from the American Midwest to Manhattan. Their novel-writing premiere came with The Norths Meet Murder (1940), which grafted characters he had used in a succession of comic vignettes for The New Yorker onto a plot she’d been toying with, mostly to her frustration. That collaboration led the pair to compose 25 more novels featuring New York City book publisher Jerry North and his curious and often clever wife, Pamela.

Crime and crime-solving among upper-middle-class Manhattanites--mostly portrayed as sophisticated folk, often intellectuals--and the witty conversation between the Norths (and between them and some of the more doltish members of the Gotham constabulary) were all principal focuses of this series. In addition, Charles L.P. Silet observes in an essay for MysteryNet.com that “the books contain a good deal of political and social commentary, a richly detailed look at the changing life in New York City, as well as glimpses of the outlying suburban counties. Also, the Norths’ stable marriage relationship presents a marked contrast--and a welcome one--to the traditions of the lone detective characteristic of much other American mystery fiction.” Film and crime-fiction enthusiast Mike Grost adds that “The biggest strength of the North novels are the people in them. Pam and Jerry North are appealing human beings, and so are most of the suspects in the story. Unlike some detective authors, who mainly write about nasty characters, the denizens of a North tale tend to be civilized, intelligent, decent people. They are people whom one would love to know in real life.”

The Norths’ relationship bears a resemblance to that of Nick and Nora Charles, the alternately imbibing and investigating couple from Dashiell Hammett’s last, 1934 novel, The Thin Man, and the series of witty William Powell/Myrna Loy films it spawned. (The fact that the cat-loving Norths named at least three of their sly felines in honor of alcohols--Gin, Sherry, and Martini--only strengthens the North-Charles connection.) It may remind you as well of another pair of husband and wife sleuths: Stewart and Sally McMillan from McMillan & Wife. That 1971-1977 NBC Mystery Movie series starred Rock Hudson as a San Francisco police commissioner and Susan Saint James as his much younger spouse, the two of whom often became embroiled in nefarious doings.

However, ABC-TV’s Hart to Hart (1979-1984) might owe a still greater debt to Pam and Jerry North of Greenwich Village. That’s because, like the Norths, neither of the principals in that series--businessman Jonathan Hart (Robert Wagner) and his journalist wife, Jennifer (Stefanie Powers)--had a professional snooping background. As Ivan G. Shreve Jr. wrote in his original Thrilling Days of Yesterday blog,

One might be tempted to compare the Norths with that other famous literary sleuthing couple, Nick and Nora Charles ... But Nick Charles was a retired detective, and knew a little about the science of detection--Jerry North, on the other hand, was strictly an amateur; a run-of-the-mill book publisher aided and abetted in his investigations by his irrepressible wife, Pam. This could explain why their adventures had such a tremendous appeal for audiences--the Norths were an average couple who just happened to have a knack for stumbling onto murders.

Long before McMillan & Wife and Hart to Hart debuted, the Norths were familiar to TV and movie audiences in their own right. In 1942, Gracie Allen (yes, the same Gracie Allen who was married to comedian George Burns) starred alongside William Post Jr. in Mr. and Mrs. North, a big-screen adaptation of a stage play written by Owen Davis. CBS Radio listeners were treated to yet another interpretation of the Norths’ adventures from 1942 to 1954. And in 1952, television’s Mr. & Mrs. North debuted, with Richard Denning playing Gerald North (though he was now an “ex-private eye turned publisher”) and Barbara Britton as his “vivacious, attractive, somewhat addlebrained [wife] whose main occupation was stumbling over corpses,” to quote Richard Meyers from his 1981 book, TV Detectives. That series remained on the air (switching from CBS to NBC) until 1954, appealing to viewers with its blend of suspense, romance, and whimsical crime-solving.

The jacket of Avon’s 1960 paperback edition of Death Has a Small Voice was obviously designed to exploit that novel’s suspense and thriller elements. Its illustration is credited to Mort Engel. It’s said that Engel was still a very green art student in New York City when he beat out all other competitors to win Pocket Books’ fourth annual design contest, held in 1955. He went on to create the fronts for a number of western novels (including Powder Burn, by Bradford Scott, and Mulvane’s War, by William Heuman), as well as for mystery yarns and some racier offerings from Monarch Books, such as The Promiscuous Doll, by Clayton Matthews.

In addition to their Mr. and Mrs. North novels, the Lockridges penned non-fiction books about cats, plus three more mystery-fiction series. The best remembered of those--running to more than 20 installments--starred Inspector Merton Heimrich of the New York State Board of Criminal Identification (or, in later books, the Bureau of Criminal Investigation). Heimrich had appeared as a secondary player in a couple of North novels before being spun off as a separate series lead in Think of Death (1947). The Lockridges’ other series protagonists were both New York City police detectives: Nathan Shapiro (The Faceless Adversary, 1956) and Paul Lane (Night of the Shadows, 1962).

The North stories concluded with Murder by the Book, which was published in the same year--1963--that Frances Lockridge died. But Richard Lockridge continued to write the Heimrich books and others, finishing his career not too long before his own passing in 1982.

It would be pleasant to think that somewhere, in some phantasmal Manhattan, the Lockridges are tipping glasses--and tackling villainy--in company with Mr. and Mrs. North. But I’m not sure even they could keep up with their intuitive creations.

READ MORE: “Mr. & Mrs. North,” by Bill Crider (Bill Crider’s
Pop Culture Magazine).