Friday Finds: “The Girl in the Black Chemise”

Another in our growing line of vintage book covers we love.




The Girl in the Black Chemise, by Les Scott (Beacon, 1952).
Illustration by Owen Kampen.

And so we come to the end of another week. But not without enjoying a final morsel of eye candy, courtesy of Wisconsin-born artist Kampen. This paperback front might have been included in our gallery of brass bed covers, but instead it’s been reserved for individual treatment. Largely because its author provides a good story.

“Les Scott,” you see, was one of a number of bylines employed by Alexander Leslie Scott (1893-1974), an American writer best remembered for penning Western fiction. In an introduction to Prologue Books’ line of Western e-novels, fictionist James Reasoner explains that “Alexander Leslie Scott was one of the most prolific authors in the Western pulps, his work appearing in hundreds

Alexander Leslie Scott

of issues of various titles from the 1920s to the 1950s. He’s best known for two series featuring heroic, iconic Texas Rangers, Jim Hatfield [Killer Country, 1961] and Walt Slade, both of which he created. The Jim Hatfield stories originally appeared in the pulp Texas Rangers under the house-name Jackson Cole. A number of different authors contributed Hatfield novels during the magazine’s run, but Scott was the first. Meanwhile, over in the pages of Thrilling Western, under the name Bradford Scott, he was also chronicling the adventures of Texas Ranger Walt Slade. But as if that wasn’t enough to establish Leslie Scott’s reputation as a leading Western author, as paperbacks came to dominance in the ’50s he moved his talents to that arena, penning original Jim Hatfield novels for newly established Pyramid Books … Following a successful run of Hatfield paperbacks, Scott also revived Walt Slade in an even longer, more successful series of full-length novels that were bestsellers for the next 15 years. … In all of his novels, Scott was known for his vivid descriptions of the Western landscape, his larger-than-life heroes, and his fast-moving action scenes.”

It wasn’t only tales of saddle jockeys, cattle drives, and main street shootouts, though, that attracted Scott’s attention. As the blog Booktryst observes, he gained a bit of notoriety penning a more titillating brand of fiction, including such works as Lady of the Evening and Twilight Women, both apparently released in 1952. And then, of course, there’s The Girl in the Black Chemise, with its abundantly sultry front and suggestive back-cover plot brief:

Is three a crowd?

The girl in the black chemise, Iris, was not housewife material. She was a woman of the twilight. Besides, she was convinced that Tom Grant still loved the utterly beautiful, utterly alluring, utterly wicked Bertha, to whom he had been wed many years.

So Iris let Tom love her, love her all he wanted to. But she refused to marry him. Inevitably, Tom sought solace in the arms of other twilight women; a step which proved fatal. For it threw him once again into the company of his irresistible ex-wife. By all indications, Bertha again was making him her love slave …

But Iris, Iris of the back chemise, suddenly decided to fight for her man and rejoined the fray. Her charms, already too much for Tom, proved just as devastating to Bertha!

Interestingly, Alexander Scott was the father of another big-producing author, Manhattan-born Justin Scott. The latter’s books include those published under his own name, such as The Shipkiller (1978) and Mausoleum (2007), and several he’s co-written with Clive Cussler, among them The Striker (2013) and this year’s The Gangster.

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).