The Fifteen Years Later Affair

I love the above illustration, based on artwork by Barye Phillips. It’s appropriate to post in honor of Killer Covers’ 15th anniversary.

When I launched this blog on January 19, 2009, the first illustration I posted was the front from a 1960 Bantam paperback edition of The Three Roads, the fourth novel by author Kenneth Millar, who would soon begin publishing crime fiction under the pseudonym Ross Macdonald. The quote installed over that Phillips painting, however, comes from Macdonald’s The Wycherly Woman (1961), his ninth book starring Los Angeles private detective Lew Archer.

Writing three decades ago in Reason magazine, Wisconin academics Lester and Deborah Hunt observed that “Macdonald's concern with trouble is conscious and pervasive. ...

“Trouble” is his name for the destructive consequences that follow from human irrationality and viciousness (usually the former). The real trouble begins when we can no longer control the destruction we cause. A blackmailer appears in the aftermath of what seemed a perfect crime; or an illegitimate child shows up, bringing home to his lost father the consequences he has never faced. Things get out of hand.

Once a mistake is made, trouble follows with a logic as intricate and ruthless as algebra. It resembles the “justice” (dike) in Greek tragedy, a cosmic force that the ancients believed restores an imbalance in nature created by wrongdoing. But trouble is not justice in our sense of the word, because it harms the innocent and the guilty alike. Trouble therefore must be stopped, and that is Archer’s task. He discovers who is criminally responsible for it, not so that retribution can be exacted for what they have done, but simply in order to have them locked up someplace where they can no longer harm others or themselves. The point is to bring the tragedy to an end before trouble has expended itself.

There are certainly ample troubles—of the individual, familial, and societal sort—in all of Macdonald’s two dozen novels, which is of course one reason they’re so memorable. Fortunately, fewer tribulations have beset Killer Covers and your humble host, which has made it possible to carry on so long and why we will continue to showcase vintage (and occasionally new) book fronts into the future.

Thank you all for joining us over these last 15 years!

Smatterings From All Over

• This was such a splendid idea, it was inevitable that somebody would turn it into reality. And that somebody is British designer David Pearson, who recently launched The Book Cover Review, a Web site devoted to 500-or-so-word critiques of “beloved covers,” both old and new. Insightful early observations are made of the 1975 Pan Books edition of Jaws, by Peter Benchley; the 2012 Vintage front of Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison; and the distinctly quirky, 1958 Bodley Head cover of Agatha Christie’s The Secret of Chimneys.

• In The Passing Tramp, Curtis Evans revisits the surrealistic, 1980s Bantam paperback fronts UK painter James Marsh created for Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer private-eye novels. I’m particularly fond of his imagery for the short-story collection The Name Is Archer.

• I’d completely forgotten about the 1970s-1980s Ballantine Books (later Del Ray Books) “Classic Science Fiction” line, which showcased what were promoted as the best works by authors ranging from Stanley G. Weinbaum and Cordwainer Smith to L. Sprague de Camp and James Blish. So I was pleased to be reminded of its virtues by this well-illustrated feature in The Paperback Palette.

• When it comes to distinctive typographic identities, the font family publisher Berkley employed on Frank Herbert’s science-fiction releases during the 1960s and ’70s is especially memorable—even though, as the blog Fonts in Use points out, “the name of this typeface is barely known even among die-hard fans.”

• Sigh ... One of the many things I had hoped to put together last month for my other blog, The Rap Sheet, was a line-up of my favorite crime novel fronts of 2022. I never quite got around to that—though I still might. Meanwhile, Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine editor George Easter produced a post with the same intent, though he has made some choices that are different from my own.

• Before the calendar flips much farther, let me draw your attention to a few other “best book covers of 2022” features: The Washington Post selected its 15 favorites; Literary Hub consulted its “favorite book cover designers” to develop a list almost seven times as long; and The Casual Optimist’s Dan Wagstaff showcases what he calls “notable” young-adult book covers from last year.

Giving Ross Macdonald His Due

This last week was a big one for me at CrimeReads, the Literary Hub-connected site to which I have been contributing for the last year.

First off, I celebrated the 70th anniversary of the release of Ross Macdonald’s first private-eye novel, The Moving Target, by collecting 25 of the best and worst covers that book has worn around the world. My gallery does not include all the Moving Target fronts, but it’s certainly a representative—and very diverse—sampling.

A day later, I posted my latest interview with Tom Nolan, the author of Ross Macdonald: A Biography. I had previously spoken with that Los Angeles-area writer on behalf of Kirkus Reviews and The Rap Sheet, and two decades ago as part of a project for January Magazine that celebrated the then-50th birthday of The Moving Target.

Macdonald has long numbered among my favorite crime novelists, and it was a real joy to again celebrate his 30-year career and, I hope, incite a new generation of readers to pick up his novels.

Establishing the Look of Lew

In the 1970s, when he painted brand-new covers for Bantam paperback editions of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer detective series, Mitchell Hooks imagined the protagonist as a rather youthful man, boasting wavy dark hair, a calm but serious bearing, and sometimes a cleft chin. That wasn’t always how he had imagined Macdonald’s Los Angeles private investigator, though. His portrayals of the same character for the two 1955 Bantam releases shown here—The Name Is Archer and Find a Victim—present Archer as a more hard-boiled figure, appropriate for those times.


READ MORE: “Secret Dead Blog Interview: Jeff Wong,” by Duane Swierczynski (Secret Dead Blog).

Getting Hooks into Archer

During the 1970s, American artist Mitchell Hooks painted fresh covers for Bantam paperback editions of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer detective novels. This rubbed some readers—including me—the wrong way, as we had come to love that same publisher’s previous, near-iconic versions of the Archer yarns. It would be many years before I, for one, would learn to accept, appreciate, and even grow to love Hooks’ vision for the series—his usually central portraits of a youngish Archer packing a pistol, surrounded by smaller images of secondary characters and events from the stories. Regrettably, that early resistance meant I missed purchasing new copies of the Hooks editions when they first hit bookstores; I have since had to resort to tracking down used copies at higher prices.

Since I recently showcased, in Killer Covers, UK publisher Fontana’s rather sexually exploitative, 1970s fronts for the Archer series, I thought it would be a good idea to also assemble a gallery of Hooks’ handsome books. Leading off with the detail image above, from Bantam’s 1978 version of The Wycherly Woman, you can see below all 14 of the Macdonald paperbacks definitely painted by Hooks.

Notice I made a point of saying those paperback fronts were “definitely painted by Hooks.” I did that to separate them from half a dozen other Bantam editions of Archer novels, released during that same era and with the identical cover format, but boasting illustrations I believe were painted by someone else.

All 14 of the books shown above clearly feature the artist’s signature—either “Mitchell Hooks” or “M. Hooks.” However, that’s not true of these final four covers. I can’t find a signature anywhere on the artwork, and at least to my eye, the illustrations appear stylistically different and somewhat less polished than those clearly credited to Hooks, though I can’t tell whether the same artist was responsible for all four. Perhaps there are additional clues to be found in the two Archer works from this same line that I don’t yet own—The Barbarous Coast and The Name Is Archer—and that I am also convinced were created by a hand other than Hooks’. But I won’t bet on it.

If anyone reading this post can help me to identify the artist or artists who were responsible for the paperback fronts displayed below, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you.

By the way, the front shown here of Meet Me at the Morgue indicates it’s “A Lew Archer Novel.” Anyone who’s read the book knows that’s incorrect; the first-person protagonist in this standalone yarn is instead a probation officer named Howard Cross.

A Worthy Coupling of Talents

If it seems I’ve spent a lot of time here recently writing about the works of Ross Macdonald … well, there’s a good reason, as will become clear soon enough. Meanwhile, I want to draw your attention to the cover above, from Bantam Books’ 1968 edition of The Three Roads, by Ross Macdonald. This standalone novel was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1948 under Macdonald’s real name, Kenneth Millar. It was his fourth book, after 1947’s Blue City.

Would you be surprised to learn that the cover painting on this edition of The Three Roads was done by Robert McGinnis? I certainly was, when informed of that fact by McGinnis biographer Art Scott. He records this as the only book front McGinnis created specifically for a Macdonald work (though other McGinnis paintings, especially those he did for M.E. Chaber’s Milo March series in the early 1970s, found their way onto European editions of Macdonald’s work). Scott tells me that The Three Roads was “one of my early triumphs as a McGinnis spotter. No signature, no credit, and certainly not a typical McGinnis design or look, but I felt a McGinnis vibe nevertheless.”

The rear cover of this paperback can be enjoyed here. Click here and here to see earlier editions of The Three Roads.

READ MORE: “A Mystery Review by Tony Baer: Kenneth Millar—The Three Roads” (Mystery*File).

That’s What I Call a Body of Work

While doing some research recently on American private-eye novelist Ross Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar), I realized that among the scans housed in my computer was a profusion of semi-provocative covers produced during the 1970s by British publisher Fontana, the paperback imprint of William Collins, Sons.

The ’70s was not necessarily a great period of UK book-cover design. Photographs—many of them featuring carefully arranged props such as guns, opened file folders, knives, skulls, and apparent corpses—were rapidly replacing more classic but expensive painted illustrations on crime, mystery and thriller novels, giving the lot a largely disappointing homogeneity. Because those books were then still marketed primarily to male readers, negligibly clothed women were also a recurring feature.

Fontana’s Macdonald line—all of the books starring his series protagonist, Los Angeles gumshoe Lew Archer—employed lovely young females, too, though its focus was tighter than usual. As Nick Jones explained several years ago in his blog, Existential Ennui, most of those Archer books boasted “variations on the same titillating theme of a close-up of part of a woman’s body in conjunction with a target or a gun or a badge or somesuch.” The props were clearly identifiable; occasionally, the anatomical backdrop was less so.

I own a good-sized collection of Bantam Books’ Ross Macdonald paperbacks from the 1970s, but none of the Fontana editions shown above and below are in my possession. At least not yet.

Stanley’s Style: “The Three Roads”

Part of a 100th-birthday tribute to artist Robert Stanley.


The Three Roads, by Kenneth Millar (Dell, 1951). Millar would eventually become much better known under his pseudonym, Ross Macdonald. The Three Roads, released originally in 1948, was the fourth and final mystery published under his real name.

A Fistful of “Dollar”

One of the most rewarding results of my participation in Saturday’s long, second annual Independent Bookstore Day “Champion Challenge,” was that along the way I snagged this 1977 paperback copy of Ross Macdonald’s The Far Side of the Dollar, boasting cover artwork by Mitchell Hooks, from the Seattle Mystery Bookshop. I’m now on the hunt for more Hooks-illustrated Lew Archer novels.

Two New Lews

Just a few weeks back, I lamented on this page that I was missing the early 1970s Bantam paperback editions of only two of Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels, The Wycherly Woman and Black Money. Since then, I have managed to find a like-formatted copy of the former work (thank you, Powell’s Books!). I also located an edition of Black Money from 1978 that features beautiful cover art by Mitchell Hooks. A good start to 2016!

Facing Up to Macdonald’s Fiction

As I already noted in The Rap Sheet, today marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kenneth Millar, who—using the byline “Ross Macdonald”—would write two dozen crime novels between the 1940s and the 1970s. Eighteen of those would star an especially compassionate Los Angeles private eye named Lew Archer.

My introduction to Macdonald came during high school, when I devoured the first book in the Archer series, The Moving Target (later to be adapted into the Paul Newman film Harper.) Although that novel was originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1949, I had access only to a much later edition, a paperback version released by Bantam Books in the 1970s. It was part of a series of Macdonald works, all using the same cover-design format, which featured bold and shadowed serif type, with narrow panels at the bottom through which could be glimpsed portions of photographs, most often featuring women. (That format was also used in the main opening titles for the 1974 NBC-TV pilot film The Underground Man, starring Peter Graves and based on Macdonald’s 1971 novel of the same name.)

I wound up collecting most of those Bantam editions, though I missed two—The Wycherly Woman and Black Money—probably because I began buying them all at a time when they were being replaced by newer editions. Those paperbacks have traveled with me from apartment to apartment, house to house over the years, and they still make up a prized part of my crime-fiction library. Earlier today, as I was writing about Macdonald for The Rap Sheet, I pulled those handsome Bantam editions off my shelves and scanned them. You can see the results above and below (click for enlargements).













My recollection is that The Goodbye Look was the final Macdonald novel to follow that familiar Bantam format. In the late ’70s, new cover illustrations were commissioned from American artist Mitchell Hooks. Being young at the time, I didn’t realize how interesting those revised paperback editions looked, so failed to pick up any but the last installment in the Archer series: The Blue Hammer.

Incidentally, it wasn’t only Macdonald’s Archer tales that were uniformly formatted by Bantam during the 1970s. So were his less-well-remembered, non-Archer novels, including Trouble Follows Me, Blue City, Meet Me at the Morgue, and The Ferguson Affair.





Finally, let me pose a question: How many of you out there still have some of these Bantam Macdonald editions decorating your tall bookcases? They used to be everywhere!

READ MORE: “Two New Lews” and “Getting Hooks into Archer,”
by J. Kingston Pierce (Killer Covers).