Striving for MacLeanesque Success

Driscoll’s Diamonds, by “Ian MacAlister,” aka Marvin H. Albert (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1977). Cover art by Gordon Johnson.

By the early 1970s, Scotland-born thriller novelist Alistair MacLean had achieved the status of major best-seller. His books—from The Guns of Navarone, Fear Is the Key, and Ice Station Zebra to Puppet on a Chain, The Way to Dusty Death, and Breakheart Pass—were familiar bookshop fixtures, with several of them having been made into big-screen films or on their way to cinematic refashioning.

Those rapid-clip, suspense-abundant adventures typically pitted resourceful male protagonists against guileful, unscrupulous opponents, the plots designed to both delight and deceive. “Alistair MacLean would always set up his books with a basic foundation in which not a single thing you learned would turn out, in the end, to be true,” author Dennis Lehane once told an interviewer. “After you read a few of his books, you’d start to look for the twists, but you could rarely see them coming.” Journalist Alessandra Stanley characterized them as “romance novels for boys, which means very little romance and lots of danger, complicated weaponry and battle-forged camaraderie. Historical romances are known as ‘bodice-rippers.’ The only silk to be found in an Alistair MacLean novel is on a parachute.”

Given MacLean’s popularity, it’s no wonder other authors sought to emulate his pot-boiling style. One of those was Marvin H. Albert.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 22, 1924, Marvin Hubert Albert would go on to serve as a radio officer with the U.S. Merchant Marine during the Second World War. Afterward, he worked as the director of a Philadelphia children’s theater troupe. Then in 1950, he relocated to New York City and took jobs editing and writing for the magazines Quick and Look. Finding success with the publication of his 1956 western novel, The Law and Jake Wade (which was made into a Robert Taylor/Richard Widmark film two years later), Albert took the big leap to begin writing full-time. In 1965, he moved to Los Angeles, where in addition to writing books, he penned screenplays, adapting more than a few of his own tales for silver-screen audiences.

(Left) The Lady in Cement (Pocket, 1961); cover art by Robert K. Abbett.

Albert proved to be versatile and prolific. Over the course of his 40-year career, and under a surfeit of pseudonyms (Albert Conroy, Al Conroy, Nick Quarry, Anthony Rome, Mike Barone, J.D. Christilian), he produced hard-boiled crime yarns, westerns, and historical mysteries, plus numerous Hollywood film and TV novelizations (including of the original Pink Panther picture and Blake Edwards’ Mr. Lucky) and even biographies of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton and King Henry VIII. Among his notable works of fiction were 1958’s The Hoods Come Calling and 1961’s Some Die Hard (both featuring “tough, no-nonsense” Manhattan private investigator Jake Barrow); three books starring a Miami, Florida, police lieutenant turned gumshoe, Tony Rome (the first two of which—Miami Mayhem and The Lady in Cement—Albert helped translate into Frank Sinatra movies); standalones such as The Road’s End (1952), Nice Guys Finish Dead (1957), The Reformed Gun (1959), and Devil in Dungarees (1960); and The Zig-Zag Man (1991), one of 10 novels about Pierre-Ange “Pete” Sawyer, a French-American shamus living in Paris, who specializes in “higher-end crimes.”

(Right) Devil in Dungaress (Crest, 1960); cover art by Barye Phillips.

In 1973, Albert adopted yet another nom de plume—Ian MacAlister—and set about composing what would ultimately be a quartet of softcover adventure thrillers published by Fawcett Gold Medal. That alias was a calculated nod toward Alistair MacLean, evident not only from the “MacAlister” mash-up of a surname, but also because of the “Ian” forename: As Wikipedia notes, “In the early 1960s, MacLean published two novels under the pseudonym ‘Ian Stuart’ to prove that the popularity of his books was due to their content rather than his name on the cover. These were The Dark Crusader (1961) and The Satan Bug (1962).” The design and typefaces employed on the MacAlister covers, too, bore a striking resemblance to those decorating Fawcett’s 1970s MacLean paperbacks. It’s not a stretch to presume the intention here was that book buyers should either mistake Albert’s MacAlister novels for MacLean’s, or else that they would purchase them knowingly, hoping the packaging portended similarities in pacing and excitement between the two lines.

Like MacLean’s best-sellers, Albert’s skinnier MacAlister novels were action-packed one-offs, each boasting a different but ever-resourceful protagonist, “exotic and inhospitable settings,” do-or-die missions, stunning young women, and bad guys of the plainly reprehensible and minacious sort. His first MacAlister tale, Skylark Mission (1973), is set in World War II’s Pacific theater. It delivers us into the company of Captain Mike Shaw and his partner, Corporal Neal Miller, who launch an assault on a Japanese torpedo base in New Guinea, hoping to free Allied prisoners and open up passage to Allied vessels seeking safer waters around Australia.

Book two, Driscoll’s Diamonds (also released in 1973), is a contemporary story that takes place in the ever-volatile Middle East. It stars American mercenary John Driscoll, who, in the company of his Israeli girlfriend, Shana, is trying—without drawing significant attention to their activities—to recover a dear trove of diamonds that were purloined from smugglers in Africa, only to subsequently be lost during a plane crash in the Red Sea, an accident that nearly cost Driscoll his life. The problem is, that pair aren’t the only ones searching for said gems. Also hot on the trail are the hired guns who originally filched the diamonds, and who have no compunction against killing Driscoll and Shana to retrieve them. Both parties wind up in the Sudan, in what the blog Vintage Pop Fictions calls “the most inhospitable stretch of country on the planet, heavily infested with bandits and with Sudanese troops in hot pursuit.”

Above: Skylark Mission (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1973) and Driscoll’s Diamonds (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1973). Below: Strike Force 7 (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1974)—possibly with actor and ubiquitous paperback cover model Steve Holland featured on the front—and Valley of the Assassins (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1975).



An additional couple of MacAlister thrillers appeared in bookstores and on squeaky spinner racks over the next two years.

Strike Force 7 (1974) introduced Earl Jarrell, a former British Army officer serving a three-year prison stint for gun running. Through the intervention of his Corsican partner, Jarrell is liberated prematurely in order to take on a specific, high-risk assignment: to secure the release of a wealthy American businessman’s wife and step-daughter, who’ve been abducted by revolutionaries in Morocco. After assembling a cadre of mercenaries, Jarrell and his partner persuade a woman journalist who’s interviewed the head rebel, Bel Zaara, to help them track down the insurgents—a quest that will lead them on a nerve-wracking chase into North Africa’s Atlas Mountains.

The fourth and final MacAlister yarn was called Valley of the Assassins (1975). Albert’s central player this time around is Eric Larson, an American “adventurer” who came to the Middle East to drill oil, but stayed to take on assorted jobs for entrepreneurs visiting from abroad. The plot kicks off with him traveling through the Persian Gulf aboard his cabin cruiser, and there stumbling across three dead men—one of whom isn’t dead after all. He’s a hunchbacked old Persian, who wants Larson’s help getting back to (pre-revolutionary) Iran and in the course of their journey leaves a puzzling map on our hero’s boat. Larson learns that map may point the way to long-lost riches, amassed over centuries by a murderous cult known as the Assassins and secreted somewhere in the Arabian desert. Together with his quondam Kurdish rebel lover, “dark, hard-eyed” Darra, and a company of shady specialists, Larson embarks on a treasure hunt into Saudi Arabia’s Rub-al-Khali, “a massive desert so infamous that even veteran sand-dwellers go out of their way to avoid it,” as Joe Kenney writes in his review of this novel. It won’t ease their going, that freebooking Bedouins lie in wait for them on the way.

Despite their manifestly commercial intentions, the MacAlister books have scored rather intemperate praise, at least in recent years. “Popcorn fiction done right,” enthused one critic. “An absolutely top-notch thriller,” proclaimed another. The blogger known as “dfordoom” extols Albert’s action-sequence restraint: “The violence isn’t particularly graphic. We’re dealing here with an author who doesn’t need to resort to graphic violence in order to make his story exciting.” Of Skylark Mission, Paperback Warrior observes that “In emulating the British style, Albert’s delivery recalls a Jack Higgins novel, complete with a propulsive narrative and just enough variance in characters to keep readers invested in their destiny and fate.”

Other thriller writers might kill for such notices!

As with 1970s editions of Alistair MacLean’s work, the hand-painted fronts of the MacAlister novels did much to promote them as compelling nail-biters worth their retail price of 75 cents to $1.50 (ah, the good old days of cheap softcovers). Rifles or machine guns were conspicuous elements, as were foreign-seeming backdrops. And, inevitably, people—usually the protagonists—in danger.

Regrettably, most of the illustrators responsible for those covers were uncredited, their identities now difficult to ascertain. The exception has to do with the purple-shaded edition of Driscoll’s Diamonds installed atop this post. That seems to be accepted as the work of Gordon Johnson (1924-1989), a flexible and highly productive artist “who was probably based in or near New York City,” according to Jeff Christoffersen, author of the Paperback Palette blog. Johnson’s forte was realism, Christoffersen says, as demonstrated in the “illustrations he produced for various magazines in the mid 1950’s, such as The American Magazine, American Weekly, Outdoor Life and Boys’ Life.” Later, Johnson created artwork for titles by a panoply of name-brand fictionists, including Helen MacInnes, John D. MacDonald, Brian Garfield, Donald Hamilton, Jack Higgins, and of course, Alistair MacLean. He also developed fronts for romance novels, teen tales, and sex romps such as Club Tropique, by Donald Bain.

Four of Gordon Johnson’s covers, clockwise from upper left: The Keys of Hell, by “Jack Higgins,” aka Henry “Harry” Patterson (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1976); Club Tropique, by Donald Bain (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1978); Trial by Fury, by “Jack Lancer,” aka Jim Lawrence (Grosset & Dunlap, 1969); and Bear Island, by Alistair MacLean (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1972).



There’s no consensus on whose hand was behind the other MacAlister fronts displayed here. Tim Hewitt, a former tech writer and “web monkey” turned ardent paperback collector, often cited as an authority on book cover artistry, suggests Skylark Mission and Valley of the Assassins “are reasonable candidates for being Johnson. The style on both of those seems consistent with, if not identical to, other Johnson covers. The only one I’m not sure about,” he says, “is Strike Force 7. That one looks like the cover artist was striving for a Frank Frazetta look (I’ve even known people to, incorrectly, say it’s a Frazetta cover!), but there’s no reason that Johnson couldn’t be that artist.” On the other hand, Hewitt flatly rules out the original, 1973 edition of Driscoll’s Diamonds (the red one, which he calls “rather flat and amateurish”) as belonging in Johnson’s portfolio.

I have a few Marvin H. Albert releases among my hoard of vintage softcovers, but none of his Ian MacAlister thrillers. I haven’t discovered yet why the author abandoned that promising line just four books into it. He lived another two decades after Valley of the Assassins saw print—plenty of time for a speedy scribbler like him to have delivered several further entries. Maybe sales figures didn’t warrant the cash and hype Fawcett was devoting to those books. Maybe his decision to move on to different projects had to do with the fact that Albert relocated to Europe in 1976, the same year his international terrorist thriller, The Gargoyle Conspiracy, became an Edgar Award finalist for Best Mystery Novel. (Maggie Rennert’s Operation Alcestis eventually walked off with that prize.) Maybe he simply lost interest in trying to out-MacLean MacLean.

What we know is that he instead began penning his Stone Angel series starring ex-French resistance fighter and P.I. Pete Sawyer. And in February 1996 he witnessed the publication (under his J.D. Christilian alias) of Scarlet Women, the opening installment in a planned succession of novels about an 1870s New York City detective known as Harp. The author died in France a month later at age 73, leaving behind what’s been reported as 85 pages of notes for a second Harp book, never to be completed.

READ MORE: “The Gold Medal Corner,” by Bill Crider (Mystery*File).

Love and Lust, Lips and Lipsky

Cover art by Robert K. Abbett.

Ten years ago, in search of an appropriate way to celebrate Valentine’s Day here in Killer Covers, I assembled a gallery of 29 books with “kiss” in their titles. With romance abundant in the air again today, I’ve expanded my selection of fronts to 45.

One of my favorites, though, isn’t among those images: Dell’s 1961 cover—shown above—for The Kiss of Death, by Eleazar Lipsky (1911-1993), a onetime assistant district attorney for Manhattan turned novelist and playwright. That novel originally saw print in 1947, the same year it was adapted as a big-screen feature starring Victor Mature, Brian Donlevy, Coleen Gray, and Richard Widmark as a giggling, sadistic killer. In addition to Kiss of Death (also reprinted as The Hoodlum), Lipsky published such works of crime fiction as Murder One (1948) and The People Against O’Hara (1950), the latter of which was turned into a 1951 movie starring Spencer Tracy.

Before you head out to a celebratory dinner with your beloved tonight, flowers in hand, or sit down for the umpteenth showing of Casablanca, When Harry Met Sally, About Time, The Girl Next Door, or some similarly sappy flick, take a glance through Killer Cover’s lip-smacking selection of kiss covers. It may not get you in the mood for love (perhaps a few too many guns are involved?), but it will give you something to discuss over crème brûlée or popcorn.

The Twelve Dames of Christmas, 2021: #3

Celebrating this festive season with brassy bombshells.



Slow Burn, by Jack Ehrlich (Dell, 1961). This is the second of Ehrlich’s crime novels starring a parole officer named Robert Flick. Illustration by Robert K. Abbett.

Because I Needed a Lacy Fix ...

Pity the Honest, by “Ed Lacy,” aka Leonard S. Zinberg (MacFadden, 1965). The art here is not credited, but may be the work of Robert K. Abbett. You can see the back cover here.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Some Skin in the Game

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



Fire in the Flesh, by Jack Sheridan (Dell, 1960), with a cover illustration by Mitchell Hooks; Trouble in the Flesh, by Max Wylie (Dell, 1960), featuring artwork by Robert K. Abbett.

Because I Needed a John Dickson Carr Fix …

The Burning Court, by John Dickson Carr (Bantam, 1963).
Illustration by Robert K. Abbett.

Executive Showdown

(Above) Title page illustration by Joseph R. Veno.

Irving Wallace penned his fourth novel, The Man, at the height of America’s civil-rights movement, as battles were being fought (in the courts and in the streets) to curtail racial prejudice in housing, employment, education, and voting rights. The Man first reached print as a Simon & Schuster hardcover in 1964, the same year President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat from Texas—once part of the slave-holding, breakaway Confederate States of America—signed into law a civil-rights bill that, as Wikipedia explains, “banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in employment practices and ended unequal application of voter registration requirements and racial segregation in schools, at the workplace, and by public accommodations.”

It didn’t seem possible back then, almost half a century ago before the rise of Barack Obama, that an African American could be elected as president of the United States. Few people would have even bothered imagining such a thing. But Wallace was one of them.


Douglass Dilman is sworn in as president.

The Chicago-born Hollywood screenwriter turned author had previously produced novels about a straying husband frustrated by impotence (The Sins of Philip Fleming, 1959), female sexuality (The Chapman Report, 1961), and the annual awarding of Nobel Prizes (The Prize, 1962). He was well on his way to becoming a best-selling author of sex-drenched potboilers, such as 1974’s The Fan Club. As The New York Times remarked in its 1990 obituary of Wallace (who died of pancreatic cancer at 74 years of age), his fiction offered “a judicious sprinkling of adultery, rape, kidnapping, old-fashioned romance, suspense, babbitry, alcoholism, intrigue and assorted examples of venality”—and sold in excess of 120 million copies during his lifetime.

The Man—a 1965 Reader’s Digest condensed version of which supplies the artwork decorating this post—is something different from its predecessors. There isn’t a great deal of carnal cavorting in its 750-plus pages, but plenty of political chicanery; not much romance, but more than enough white-privilege arrogance and vicious bigotry for most anyone’s taste.

(Left) Secretary of State Eaton gets acquainted with Sally Watson.

It begins with an official visit to Frankfurt, West Germany, during which a freak accident takes the lives of both the U.S. president and the speaker of the House. The vice president has recently perished from a “massive coronary,” and in the absence of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution—which in 1967 would set forth procedures by which America’s top political offices were to be filled in the event of death or physical disabilities—the presidency falls to Douglass Dilman, a former college professor and junior senator from a Midwestern state, who also holds the ceremonial post of president pro tempore of the Senate. Dilman has no White House aspirations; as actor James Earl Jones (who portrayed Dilman in a 1972 film based on Wallace’s book and scripted by Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling) observed in his introduction to the 1999 edition of The Man, Dilman is “a quiet, rational man trying his best to do a difficult job in daunting circumstances. Thrown into the center of a political earthquake, he is an apolitical creature, and something of a Milquetoast. He is an intellectual, and a good man with a commitment to principles but no appetite for political battles.” Wallace described his protagonist as someone “who was not white and who was afraid of being black, and who was without armor or grace.” Yet this is the guy who becomes the new president.


White House cronies plot against Dilman.

Unlike Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson, who also acceded to the Oval Office after the untimely deaths of popular 20th-century chief executives, “the country doesn’t rally around” new President Dilman, recalled Florida English professor Ariel Gonzalez in this 2011 review of The Man: “sixty-one percent disapprove of him.

Dillman can’t fault them; he holds a low opinion of himself too. Racial insecurity bedevils him. “I am a black man,” he says, “not yet qualified for human being, let alone for President.” Though a widower, he is reluctant to pursue a relationship with a biracial woman because he fears the lightness of her skin will raise the specter of miscegenation. To calm people’s worries, he agrees to play the role of a figurehead. He doesn’t even veto a clearly unconstitutional bill prohibiting him from removing any member of his predecessor’s Cabinet.

Only slowly, with almost painful hesitation, does Dilman grab hold of the reins that have been thrust into his hands, raising the rancor of his opponents on all fronts. There’s an assassination attempt in the White House Rose Garden; African-American radicals protest against Dilman as a “black Judas,” “a Jim Crow president” who refuses to stand up for his race; and the imperious, Ivy League-educated secretary of state, Arthur Eaton—convinced that he deserves the presidency more than Dilman—conspires with his worshipful, younger mistress, White House social secretary Sally Watson, to glean information for use against Dilman. The president’s enemies finally manufacture pretexts on which to commence Congressional impeachment hearings against him; and then, employing some of the most racist verbiage heard outside of a Ku Klux Klan rally, they go on public attack against Dilman’s morality and fitness for office.

(Right) Black students protest Dilman’s sudden rise.

Particularly venomous, during and outside of those hearings, is Congressman Zeke Miller, a newspaper publisher and “Southern redneck mouthpiece,” who denounces Dilman as an “all-fired ignoramus of a nigger … fixing to make [the United States] into another Africa.” Appealing to Eaton for his assistance in bringing down the accidental president, Miller reveals the odious depths of his contempt for Dilman:

“We’re going to put old Sambo on the hot seat good, and we’re going to roast his ass plenty, until he yells enough, and begs us to get him off it. I’m going to force him to resign, to resign because of disability or whatever, but to resign, and if he refuses, I’m going to resign him by force.”

It would be comforting to think that such hidebound attitudes and low-minded hatreds were things of the past, that by the 21st century America had come to realize the value of its population diversity. But as eight years of racially charged and increasingly ludicrous impeachment talk against Democratic President Barack Obama demonstrated, and as Republican Donald Trump’s divisive recent White House campaign confirmed, this is still a country held hostage by ethnic and sexual prejudices, all of them lurking just below the surface, barely held at bay by public norms.


An attempt on Dilman’s life in the Rose Garden.

According to Jones’ introduction, “in 1963, as background for The Man, [Wallace] accepted an invitation from President John F. Kennedy to spend several days observing life in the White House, from the Oval Office to the Cabinet Room to the private family quarters.” The result is a tale redolent of authenticity, with details of the president’s Pennsylvania Avenue residence and business habits tossed off with all the studied casualness one might have found in an episode of The West Wing. While the back-and-forth of Dilman’s impeachment proceedings can be tedious at times, burdened with the turgid declarations of politicians seeking the limelight, Wallace does a fine job of ratcheting up tensions between Dilman’s treacherous accusers and the sharp but shy president. “The writer keeps you angry long enough to make the retribution sweet,” wrote reviewer Gurdas Singh Sandhu in this 2007 post for his blog, Guldasta. “The sheer audacity of lies, the shameless hatred veiled in goodness, and the vocal mudslinging is just perfect to get the reader angry. And angry I was! So much so that while reading the book, there were instances when I had to keep it aside and allow the torrential anger inside me (at the injustice meted out to Doug) to subside.”

Although The Man doesn’t achieve the heights of American political fiction reached by, say, Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, or rival Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird as a literary exploration of racial injustice, it certainly forced readers of the ’60s to confront the possibility of someone other than a white man occupying the Oval Office. Furthermore, it was prescient in envisioning the ugly belligerence that would greet an African American like Douglass Dilman or Barack Obama ascending to the presidency.

I didn’t catch up to The Man until 35 years after its initial publication, purchasing a paperback edition that was released by ibooks in 1999. I didn’t get around to actually reading the novel until 2015. And only last year did I happen across the illustrations peppering the length of this post. As I mentioned earlier, they were featured in a 1965 Reader’s Digest edition of Wallace’s yarn, which was combined in a single volume with condensations of William B. Walsh’s A Ship Called Hope, Joseph Hayes’ The Third Day, and John Ehle’s The Land Breakers. Aside from the title page, shown atop this post, the other paintings were done by Robert K. Abbett, an American artist I’ve mentioned a number of times in Killer Covers. You should find a full set of those illustrations here.

SEE MORE: At least for the time being, you can watch the 90-minute ABC-TV film based on The Man by clicking here.

Friday Finds: “Stiletto”

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



Stiletto, by Harold Robbins (Dell, 1960).
Illustration by Robert K. Abbett.

After novelist Harold Robbins perished in 1997, aged 81, The New York Times published an obituary recalling how he’d “once predicted that he would ultimately be known ‘as the best writer in the world.’” It went on to quote from a 1977 interview in which Robbins, explaining his success, again bragged: “I’m the best around. No one can compare with what I’ve done. [Ernest] Hemingway was a fantastic short-story writer, but as a novelist, he could never put it together.” The Times added, though, that Robbins “did say that he admired some writers, ... among them John Steinbeck, James T. Farrell, and John O’Hara. He said he also appreciated the work of his colleague in popular fiction, Irving Wallace.”

The Jewish, New York City-born Robbins is recorded as having sold more than 750 million copies of his books, counting 25 best-sellers among his half-century-long output. And no wonder: as the Times related, his storytelling followed an appealing formula.

Mr. Robbins’ novels were always gossipy, always offered a mystery of sorts and always seemed to be interminable, much to the delight of readers …

The works also frequently seemed to present a central figure who strongly resembled a famous person, like Aristotle Onassis, Howard Hughes, Porfirio Rubirosa, or Lana Turner, who, as it happens, once starred in a lavish prime-time soap opera based on one of his books.

In a Robbins novel, women were beautiful, wealthy and wanton; men were possessed of all the restraint of college freshmen, and the plots contained accounts of some randy doings, which one critic said he would not have tried to describe to anyone, not even those who had occupied his Army barracks.

Robbins’ star doesn’t sit so high in the sky as it once did, but for years after his demise, ghost-written novels were still being churned out under his brand name. And his original torrid tales, including 79 Park Avenue (1955), The Carpetbaggers (1961), and The Tycoon (1997), continue to find new audiences.

(Right) Stiletto’s back cover. Click to enlarge.

Stiletto—about a handsome international playboy, Count Cesare Cardinali, and (according to the back of the 1960 edition shown above) Cardinali’s latest lover, a top Manhattan fashion model “swept with a passion so strong it consumed her, so intense it frightened her”—isn’t as familiar as some of this author’s other works. Yet it unquestionably carries his stylistic imprint. As Goodreads explains, “The story of this steamy novel centers on an amoral young Italian aristocrat with a penchant for violence who owes his extravagant lifestyle to the favors of a mafia overlord. So when he is asked to silence four witnesses due to testify against the mob, the aristocrat is more than happy to comply in a most brutal manner. Only he did not figure on a special agent—one who helped build the mountain of evidence against the organization—entering into a lethal game of cat-and-mouse with him. And the special agent is the only one who realizes that it is not loyalty, or honor, or debt that drive the young man to murder—but the thrill of the kill!”

The novel proved popular enough that director Bernard L. Kowalski shot a big-screen film from it. Released in 1969, that version of Stiletto starred Alex Cord (who I remember best from the 1973 Gene Roddenberry TV pilot, Genesis II), along with the then-captivating Swedish actress Britt Eklund, and Patrick O’Neal. Assessing the results, the Times’ Howard Thompson opined: “The surprise of this Avco Embassy release, about a young mob killer-specialist who decides to break with his sponsors, is that it could be so dull and transparent even on the level of a surface gangland narrative. What begins as a hard-knuckled exercise about underworld terror, with the law hot on the scent, finally dissolves into a tame conventional chase yarn rivaling the corniest of shoot-’em-up Westerns.” Ouch! Not exactly the caliber of response “the best writer in the world” probably expected, but there you have it.

READ MORE: “Pulp Friday: ‘The Godfather of the Airport Novel,’”
by Andrew Nette (Pulp Curry).

Rap Party Bonus: “Towards Zero”

Toasting The Rap Sheet’s first decade with a cover countdown.

Yeah, yeah, I know: Our commemoration of The Rap Sheet’s 10th anniversary was supposed to end yesterday—the actual landmark date—when the count reached number one. But I couldn’t resist showcasing an extra paperback front. So here you go!



Towards Zero, by Agatha Christie (Cardinal, 1959).
Illustration by Robert K. Abbett.

For a Few Covers More

Oh, what the heck. I so enjoyed putting together that last group of five vintage paperback book fronts—my way of celebrating Killer Covers’ first 500 posts—that I decided to offer up five more fabulous façades. You can go ahead and thank me later.


The Strange Bedfellow, by Evelyn Berckman (Dell, 1958).
Illustration by James Hill.



The List of Adrian Messenger, by Philip MacDonald (Bantam, 1969). Illustration by Mitchell Hooks.



Crack in the Mirror, by Marcel Haedrich (Dell, 1960).
Illustration by Tom Miller.



The Long Ride, by James McKimmey (Dell, 1961).
Illustration by Robert K. Abbett.




Half Girl, Half Woman, by John Furlough (Beacon, 1962).
Illustration by Clement Micarelli.

Friday Finds: “Murder in the Wind”

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



Murder in the Wind, by John D. MacDonald (Dell, 1956).
Illustration by George Gross.

You should have no difficulty guessing what inspired this week’s “Find.” That’s right, it’s Hurricane Joaquin, the 10th named storm of the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season. As I compose this post, Joaquin has pretty much stalled over the Bahamas, battering those islands with gales and downpours, but it still threatens America’s East Coast with “heavy rain and potential flooding” in days to come.

John D. MacDonald’s Murder in the Wind (1956, also printed as Hurricane) is set in Florida, and it’s one of several novels he wrote about people thrown together by adversity--with dangerous results. Steve Scott, who writes the exceptional MacDonald blog, A Trap of Solid Gold, outlines the book’s plot this way:

Six carloads of people--two driving solo while the rest [come] in cars of twos, threes and fours--are driving north on Florida Route 19 above Tampa, all on business, personal or otherwise, that will take them out of the state. They are a random group who are still strangers to each other, and like MacDonald’s previous novels with a similar structure, all are moving by automobile. The “adversity” here is Hurricane Hilda, which is forming itself into a storm of historic strength far out in the Gulf of Mexico, a fact nearly unknown to all in the pre-weather satellite days of 1956. By the time they have reached the Waccasassa River the bridge there is out and they are directed down a remote bypass road that passes an old, rambling and now deserted house. With the storm increasing in strength and passing directly over them, they can go no further and all seek shelter in the abandoned house. …

In virtually all of MacDonald's multi-character novels there is a criminal element, and Murder in the Wind is no exception. Among the author’s little group of cars heading north is a stolen panel truck containing three young bad guys, two males and a female.

All of the ingredients for reader engagement are here, including murder. But Scott says Macdonald set himself a bigger challenge with this tale than simply driving readers to the edges of their seats.

MacDonald is at pains to prove the plausibility of such a strong storm, years before names like Donna, Andrew and Katrina were written in history, providing a brief “Author’s Note” at the beginning of the book and interspersing the narrative with omniscient updates on the track and power of the storm. And while it is obvious to the reader that the hurricane and the characters will eventually “meet,” Murder in the Wind is primarily a suspense novel, with the tension provided by the deep characterization created by the author. I’ve written endlessly in this blog about how MacDonald’s apprenticeship as a short-story writer made him the perfect author for these kinds of multi-character tales, and nowhere is that more true than in this novel. All of the characters--roughly ten in all--are each given a history and background as interesting and as engaging as any in his best shorter works, and it is through this incredibly detailed characterization that MacDonald drives narrative, that attribute of fiction he held in the highest esteem.

Three years ago, Deep South Magazine, an online publication, posted a list of “books to read during a hurricane.” It included a better-remembered MacDonald work, Cape Fear (originally published in 1957 as The Executioners). The editors could just as well, though, have selected Murder in the Wind, which acclaimed author and critic Ed Gorman has named as one of his “10 Favorite John D. MacDonald Standalone Novels.” (Topping Gorman’s list is 1953’s Dead Low Tide; Murder in the Wind ranks fourth.) And had they been in possession of the 1956 original-edition paperback of Murder in the Wind, MacDonald’s 18th novel--shown at the top of this post--they might have been persuaded to do exactly that. It certainly boasts a striking cover, with an attractive brunette obviously at risk from escalating currents. Responsible for the illustration was George Gross (1909-2003), about whom I have written before on this page, and whose range of paperback artistry can be enjoyed here.



BONUS: Over the last several decades some other noteworthy illustrators have taken cracks at creating captivating covers for Murder in the Wind. The front on the left, for instance, was painted by Robert K. Abbett and appeared on the 1960 Dell edition, while the one shown on the right, from the 1965 Fawcett edition of MacDonald’s novel, features an illustration by Robert McGinnis.

Two-fer Tuesdays: What Was Your Name Again?

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



If your eyes were glued to American television back in the 1960s, chances are the name Robert Bloomfield crossed your vision at some point. His page on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) credits him with having penned episodes of Perry Mason, Mannix, The Wild Wild West, Checkmate, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and Bonanza, among many other shows. He’s also listed as a writer on the 1964 German crime drama Dog Eat Dog! (Einer frisst den anderen), though his involvement with that cheaply produced picture--about three thieves in Europe who steal $1 million in obsolete U.S. currency, only to end up under threat at a remote Adriatic island hotel--might have extended little further than his having produced the book on which it was loosely based, 1956’s When Strangers Meet. I say “loosely,” because the plot of Dog Eat Dog!--which starred Jayne Mansfield and Cameron Mitchell--sounds nothing like that of Bloomfield’s book. Here’s Kirkus Reviews’ take on When Strangers Meet:

A California ghost mining town harbors three [people] involved in a bank robbery, [along with a] Hungarian who is [guilty of] illegal entry, a storekeeper, an old and a young miner, and the decrepit descendant of the original wealthy family, [as well as] the runaway wife of a tennis player turned pro. The three bandits hold the rest prisoners for six days; there are four deaths, an earthquake and rock slides; rescue brings retribution.

The rear cover of Pocket Books’ 1957 paperback edition of When Strangers Meet, shown on the right, supplies a bit more detail about the dramatis personae in Bloomfield’s story--everyone from Dolph Tierney (“a thug who murdered a bank guard for kicks’) to Darlene Hagan (“former burlesque hoofer and B-girl who likes men and money, in that order”) and Wade Mercer (“a man soured by failure and desperate for cash”). As the paperback’s final teaser attests, “More than one of them would kill!” Certainly it’s that fear of violence erupting in an unpredictable situation that artist Robert K. Abbett sought to capture in his cover illustration for Pocket’s version of When Strangers Meet, embedded atop this post.

By the mid-1950s, Bloomfield had been laboring as a writer for more than a decade, though not under that name. He was born in 1912 as Leslie Edgley, and looks to have published his first book, No Birds Sing, in 1940. Six years later he released a crime novel, Fear No More (subsequently also adapted for the big screen), that he followed up with other such genre efforts as The Angry Heart (1947), The Judas Goat (1952), The Runaway Pigeon (1953), and A Dirty Business (1969, which brought the sole outing for Los Angeles private eye Charles Galahad). Edgley also broke into movie scripting, though sometime after June 1950 he ran afoul of paranoid government and motion-picture company officials who sought to purge the U.S. entertainment industry of alleged Communist Party sympathizers. He wound up on the notorious Hollywood blacklist with writers Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Dalton Trumbo, and Langston Hughes, and performers on the order of Lee J. Cobb, Edward G. Robinson, Lee Grant, Ossie Davis, and Kim Hunter. I’m unable to confirm whether his adoption of the Robert Bloomfield pseudonym was inspired by that blacklisting, but it is interesting to see his film and TV credits as Edgley drop away after 1953, just before his Bloomfield résumé begins to build.

As Bloomfield, Edgley published--at least--The Shadow of Guilt (1947), From This Death Forward (1952), Vengeance Street (1952), and Kill with Kindness (1962). Other works he produced under noms de plume such as Michael Gillian, Lawrence E. Pivak, and Brook Hastings (the last of which he used in collaboration with his wife, Mary). Reports say Leslie Edgley died in California in 2002.

Far easier to pin down than Edgley’s biography is that of Evan Hunter, the man behind the other novel showcased at the top of this post, Strangers When We Meet. Hunter, born Salvatore Alberto Lombino in New York City in 1926 (he legally changed his name to Evan Hunter in 1952) went on to create--under the pseudonym Ed McBain--one of America’s most beloved series of police procedurals, featuring the oft-eccentric cops of the 87th Precinct. But his first adult novel to see print was The Evil Sleep! (1952), which was recently resurrected by Hard Case Crime under its alternative title, So Nude, So Dead. Not until 1958, after he’d ushered into print five 87th Precinct tales plus a succession of standalones (some of which boasted the byline “Richard Marsten”), did Strangers When We Meet reach bookstores.

The New York Times called that new work “a very moral book about some mildly immoral people,” and provided this plot synopsis:

[Larry Cole] is a successful architect living in one of those familiar post-war subdivisions when he meets Margaret Gault. Both are happily married--though Mr. Hunter rather more than suggests that Margaret’s husband has Oedipus trouble, which makes him a less-than-perfect lover. From the first encounter (at the school bus stop) they are plunged into a torrid pattern of deceit which leads to tragedy. In the end, rather than lose Margaret (and their weekly meetings in carefully selected motels), Larry passes up an opportunity to remodel the island of Puerto Rico, without, of course, telling his wife [Eve] that he has done so. Finally, on his way to another assignation, a hurricane from the Caribbean (is there a symbol here?) blows his car off the bridge. You might say that Larry, having sowed the wind, is spared the real whirlwind of his mistakes.

Kirkus added, in its own assessment of the novel:

Over and above the read-on compulsion here (will Larry leave Eve?, will Eve find out? etc., etc.), sex is the kick and there are many untamed scenes. It is definitely not literature--but it may well be commercial and the publishers will help it along; just as probably, the critics will send it to the shower rooms to cool off.

I’ve never watched the 1960 film made from Hunter’s tale (and scripted by the author himself), but it starred Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak as the two lovers, and was shot amid some of Southern California’s most beautiful scenery. Variety, though, is quoted by Wikipedia as calling Strangers When We Meet “easy on the eyes but hard on the intellect … an old-fashioned soap opera.” And the Turner Classic Movies Web site says it “heralded the end of [Novak’s] reign as a major star. She never again experienced the earlier career heights of such films as Picnic (1955) or Vertigo (1958).”

Someday I shall have to rent the film Strangers When We Meet. Meanwhile, I’m toying with the idea of ordering the paperback edition of Hunter’s novel that appears above. Released in 1959, with cover art by the prolific Barye Phillips (1924-1969), it can be picked up cheaply from the online marketplace AbeBooks.

Friday Finds: “The Saint Maker”

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



The Saint Maker (Dell, 1961), by Leonard Holton.
Illustration by Robert K. Abbett.

This was the premiere entry in an 11-book series featuring Father Joseph Bredder, a “Los Angeles Franciscan priest detective, who had been a professional boxer then seen service as a decorated sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps.” “Leonard Holton” was actually prolific Irish-born author Leonard Wibberley (1915-1983) perhaps best remembered for having written that satirical 1955 novel, The Mouse that Roared. In a 1992 study titled Mysterium and Mystery: The Clerical Crime Novel, Massachusetts theology professor William David Spencer wrote that “In the Father Bredder mystery tales, [Wibberley attempted to lift] the meek Father Brownish cleric up from the supposedly slumbering irrelevancy of a local parish convent chaplaincy to astound the police with his uncanny ability to track elusive murderers across the complex spiritual landscape of fraud, dissemblance, and self-deception to the lair of the guilty soul.” He adds that the short-lived, 1971-1972 NBC-TV program Sarge, starring George Kennedy as a San Diego police detective sergeant turned priest, was inspired by the Father Bredder books.

Here’s a synopsis of The Saint Maker (originally published in 1959), quoted from Philip Grosset’s Clerical Detectives Web site:

The Father Bredder novels are short, fast-moving and full of action. The first book, The Saint Maker, begins promisingly with Father Bredder trying to make peace with the rather cold, disapproving Reverend Mother of the convent (to which he is chaplain) by sending her a present of a melon. Unfortunately, though, she discovers that what the bag actually contains is a woman's head. “An older priest of gentler upbringing than (40-year-old) Father Bredder, Reverend Mother thought, would never have become mixed up with a murder.” But, for Father Bredder, “Murder is a crime that cries, not merely for vengeance, but far more important, it cries for repentance. And I must do what I can to find the murderer and bring him or her to repentance for the salvation of his soul.” There's plenty of humor too, as when the police start making enquiries about Father Bredder with the result that an assortment of small-time crooks whom he has helped in one way or another, all come sidling up to him to offer to help him flee the country.

The last Father Bredder novel was A Corner of Paradise (1977).

Two-fer Tuesdays: Shared Confidences

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



I actually had the chance once to meet and converse with Carolyn Heilbrun, the Columbia University English professor who, from the 1960s through the early 2000s, penned 14 mysteries under the pseudonym Amanda Cross. All of those novels starred a woman who wasn’t so very different from her creator: Kate Fansler, a literature professor at a prominent New York university who “is called upon to solve mysteries set in an academic context, usually involving the murder of a professor or student.”

Unfortunately, at the time--this would have been in the 1980s--I barely knew who Heilbrun was. As a founding member of Friends of Mystery, a Portland, Oregon-based crime-fiction appreciation society, I’d agreed to help organize a small convention in that city to celebrate the genre. By some legerdemain, we managed to attract several noteworthy crime-fictionists as speakers, including Joseph Hansen (author of the Dave Brandstetter private-eye tales), Richard Hoyt (then producing his yarns about soft-boiled Seattle P.I. John Denson), and Heilbrun. It was my job to publicize this event and take part in an onstage presentation with Hoyt, who I’d gotten to know quite well when he was my journalism professor in college. Another volunteer had charge of Heilbrun, though I did my best to welcome her to our gathering and later listen attentively to her talk. She seemed a formidable woman, confident in her skin as well as with her areas of expertise (which included author Virginia Woolf and “women’s issues”). Years later, in 2003, when I heard that she’d committed suicide at age 77, I thought how appropriate it was that this longtime professor should have ended her life on her own terms. As Heilbrun reportedly told her son, she felt her life was “completed.”

Only long after that convention did I read any of Heilbrun/Cross’ novels, among them In the Last Analysis (1964), which introduced Fansler and was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America. The novel’s plot is described by this online review: “One of Kate’s former students [Janet Harrison] asks for a referral to a good psychiatrist. When the student is found murdered on the couch of the psychiatrist, Kate’s close friend Emanuel Bauer, suspicion falls on Emanuel, on his wife, and even on Kate herself.” The amateur sleuth ultimately uses Freudian analysis to solve the crime.

That scene the author offers of Ms. Harrison stabbed to death on the shrink’s couch wound up inspiring artist Robert K. Abbett to create the paperback cover of In the Last Analysis that’s shown above, on the left. It was published in 1966 by Avon.

Now train your eyes on the book immediately to the right of Cross’. It shows the front from Girl on a Couch, by Manning (Lee) Stokes, a prolific American writer who produced novels under several noms de plume and in a variety of genres, including spy fiction, detective fiction, Western fiction, science fiction, and adult fiction. It’s from that final category that Girl on a Couch (Softcover Library, 1966) comes. You can tell immediately, because of the cover teaser line: “Her analyst tried to cure Gay Horton, but fell victim to her instead … for she was a woman both disturbed and extremely disturbing.” Further, the back-jacket copy from the 1961 Beacon edition of this book (shown on the left, with cover art by Al Rossi) provides a deliberately titillating story synopsis:

What was wrong with young and wondrously attractive Gay Horton? It wasn’t just that she had no morals, no restraint. The queer thing was that night after night she haunted low dives, tenement houses, cheap bars, looking for the grimiest, worst-mannered, most-uncouth men she could find. Obviously Gay was sick. But her voluptuous beauty tempted even Paul Gray, the psychiatrist trying to help her. When Gay threw herself at him, he yielded--leaving his own sweetheart, pretty Pat Morley, to fall victim to the unnatural needs of other women. As for Gay, she pushed Paul still further into the pit. He found himself confronted by aberration more revolting than the love-mania with which she had first come to him …

Was Gay deliberately trying to punish herself by squandering her blonde beauty on low, vice-ridden brutes? Did her guilt concern her relations with a member of her own family …?

Sensitive, tender, yet almost frightening in its implications, the story of Gay Horton explores the therapist’s world … and the dark places of a woman’s soul.

All of that may sound pretty cheesy nowadays, but during the mid-20th-century, there was a substantial market for such soft-porn fiction--stories about lustful female nymphomaniacs, wife swappers, group gropes, shameless secretaries, naughty nurses, sex-crazed students, and of course licentious lesbians. Girl on a Couch might be one of the tamer works among that illicit breed.

I’m very fond of this particular cover of Stokes’ novel, with its illustration of a shapely, deep-cleavaged Gay Horton, reclining on her psychiatrist’s furniture. It’s easy to see how the conservatively attired Paul Gray might be seduced by her presence. I wish I was also able to see some signature on the artwork, but I don’t. Nor do I find any credit for this book front in the usual online sources.

READ MORE: “The Professor and the Mystery Writer,” by Paula Span (The Washington Post).

Two-fer Tuesdays: One-Two Punch

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



People who ask too many questions have a habit of paying for their inquisitiveness with bruises and broken bones. Or worse. That seems especially true in crime and mystery fiction, where protagonists often sustain injuries far more numerous and serious than those of us in the real world might be willing to endure. Just consider these two covers as cautions against being too nosy in the presence of suspects or lawbreakers. Likewise the paperbacks showcased above.

The first novel façade under consideration--from the 1953 Dell Books edition of The Big Fist, by Clyde B. Ragsdale--was painted by Carl Bobertz (1899-1974), whose résumé also included fronts for paperbacks by Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, Helen Nielsen, Frank Kane, A.A. Fair (aka Erle Stanley Gardner), and others. (You can enjoy more of Bobertz’s covers here.) It provides a rather, uh, punchy introduction to a tale that a review in Ohio’s Toledo Blade said “exemplifies a novel written in the undergrowth of the jungle of American life in a chaotic era.” That critique, by Robert A. Brainerd, appeared in print on July 16, 1950, and goes on to explain that The Big Fist focuses around Hosy Whittle, a guy who follows his father’s simple philosophy (“A good pair of dukes is a man’s best friend. You can’t go wrong with a good fist to back you up.”) as he

stomps boldly and mercilessly through a life of murder and cruelty, against law and against men who become obstacles along the way to Easy Street. Easy Street is the dominating and propelling force of Hosy Whittle’s existence. … From an Oklahoma city, to the oil lands of Texas, to the cotton fields of Southern California, Hosy Whittle bootlegs in the days of the Volstead Act and lives the way of “the big fist.” His aliases are changes of name only.

The steel and muscle of the boom in a Texas oil town, uncertain and shadily flamboyant, provides Hosy Whittle with a setting that heightens the drama of his character. Those elements in other men that are similar to his own, he can understand. Battles are won for him by preying on the weaknesses of his opponents and forcing their like strengths into physical combat. … Hosy Whittle’s saga of big fists and Easy Street unwinds in the manner of the ballad, a ballad of rambling proportion, of many climaxes, of erratic pitch.

“The Big Fist” is the kind of novel a reader would expect of Clyde Ragsdale, once he is familiar with his background of riding freights and sleeping in grain fields through the boom and bust of the ’20s and ’30s.

Pulp International has more to say about the author’s history:

Ragsdale was editor of the Texas City Sun newspaper. He took a disliking to the gambling dens that had sprung up around Galveston County, because, in his view, tolerance for gambling would soon lead to prostitution, drugs, and worse. So he published editorials, had reporters write stories on the evils of gambling, publicly questioned the sheriff’s abilities, and even once led Texas Rangers to a hidden cache of 320 slot machines. To our knowledge, he was never beaten up in front of his girl like the unlucky fella on the cover of 1950’s The Big Fist, but he was targeted by threats serious enough to finally convince him to stick to writing.

Now let’s switch our focus to the second of today’s highlighted book fronts, from the 1960 Pocket edition of The Big Blackout, by Don Tracy (originally released in hardcover a year before that). An online biography of Tracy (1905-1976) explains that the author’s first novel, Round Trip (1934) “was an unblinking and unflattering look at a tough reporter, a drunkard whose vices leave him in the gutter more often than not,” but it was Tracy’s second work of fiction, Criss-Cross, that earned him special recognition--and even comparisons to James M. Cain. (Criss-Cross later became the basis of Burt Lancaster’s 1949 film noir of the same name.) August West, writing in Vintage Hardboiled Reads, offers these remarks about the plot of The Big Blackout, which he calls a “well-written and sharp” novel:

The story is about Johnny Thompson, who struggles to earn a decent buck during the 1930s Depression era. Right now he’s an ex-boxer with a flat nose working as an armored car delivery guard. His biggest problem is coming up with enough cash to take out the girl he is obsessed with, Anna. Anna loves money and the cushion[ed] life it brings. Johnny can’t compete with Slim, an acquaintance of his who has plenty of dough usually obtained by shady dealings. Anna ends up marrying Slim for his money, which tears the guts out of Johnny. But the trio continues a “friendly” relationship, and Slim takes a liking to Johnny. Eventually Anna and Johnny play around behind Slim’s back. Johnny knows he is being used by Anna, but he doesn’t care just as long he can spend time with her. Slim offers Johnny a chance to make some big money, by being the inside man in robbing a payroll carried by his delivery truck. Johnny takes the offer and it changes his life, and the lives of Anna and Slim, forever.

Credit for the artwork on this edition of The Big Blackout goes to Robert K. Abbett, whose efforts have been noted several times before on this page. Tracy’s yarn was adapted (very loosely) in 1960 as an episode of Thriller, Boris Karloff’s anthology TV series.

Don Tracy went on to compose a variety of other novels, including a nine-book series starring Giff Speer, “a master sergeant and undercover agent in the U.S. Army Military Police.” Among the Speer installments is the engagingly titled Naked She Died, which was featured in Killer Covers’ fifth-anniversary celebration.