The Inconvenience of Abundance

It was while I was putting together a rather lengthy Rap Sheet interview with Iowa fictionist Max Allan Collins, most of which had to do with his new historical crime novel, Too Many Bullets (Hard Case Crime), that I realized just how many book fronts featuring those words “too many” can be found in my computer files.

Too Many Bullets, the cover of which is displayed atop this post (with art by Paul Mann), is the fifth entry* in a sort of mini-series within Collins’ string of 19 novels starring hard-boiled, Chicago-based private investigator Nate Heller, all of them in some way featuring John F. Kennedy and/or his younger brother Robert F. Kennedy. Bullets imagines the ubiquitous Heller on hand at Democratic U.S. Senator Bob Kennedy’s 1968 slaying in Los Angeles, and then follows him as he endeavors to untangle a conspiracy meant to pin that headline-grabbing tragedy on “lone gunman” Sirhan Sirhan.

When I typed “too many” into the search window of my computer’s Picasa image viewer, looking from the jacket of Too Many Bullets—surprise!—more than one cover came up. Not just Collins’, but also the fronts from 10 other novels, none of which I remembered downloading or storing away for future use. There was the 1962 Bantam paperback cover of Rex Stout’s Too Many Clients (with art by Bill Johnson), as well as the fronts from two other Stout works: Too Many Cooks (Dell, 1951; art by Robert Stanley) and Too Many Women (Bantam, 1949; art by Hy Rubin). In addition, I found Too Many Murderers, by Manning Lee Stokes (Graphic Mystery, 1955; illustration by Clyde Ross); One Murder Too Many, by George Harmon Coxe (Pyramid, 1967; artist unidentified); Too Many Beds, by “Tony Calvano,” aka Thomas P. Ramirez (Nightstand, 1961; artwork by Harold W. McCauley); Too Many Sinners, by Sheldon Stark (Ace, 1954; artist unidentified); Too Many Crooks, by Richard S. Prather (Gold Medal, 1956, featuring a Barye Phillips illustration); Too Many Women, by Milton K. Ozaki (Handi-book Mystery, 1950; artist uncredited); and finally the third Too Many Women tucked into in my files, this one by Gerry Martin (News Stand Library, 1950; art by Syd Dyke).

There are probably still more vintage books to be found with such titles. I shall add to this post as I stumble across them.

* The previous four books were Bye Bye, Baby (2011), which found Heller probing “blonde bombshell” Marilyn Monroe’s sexual involvement with both Kennedy siblings, at the same time as he sought to determine whether it was really suicide that sent the actress to her grave in 1962; Target Lancer (2012), which revisited a plot to do away with President Kennedy in Chicago in 1963—even before his tragic public slaying in Dallas, Texas; Ask Not (2013), about a succession of suspicious deaths in 1964, involving witnesses to President Kennedy’s assassination; and Better Dead (2016), in which Heller got better acquainted with Bobby Kennedy, while he investigated the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a New York City couple convicted of espionage for having reportedly leaked U.S. nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union.

Peril Makes an Entrance

(Above) Murder Is the Pay-Off, by “Leslie Ford,” aka Zenith Jones Brown (Dell, 1954). Cover illustration by Carl Bobertz.

Last year, while preparing to write a piece for CrimeReads about “colorful [paperback] cover themes from crime fiction’s past,” I put together a dozen or so sets of vintage examples that I found interesting and upon which I could cleverly comment. I wound up narrowing those down to just seven, including book fronts featuring threatening vehicles, oversized heads, women’s legs, and disembodied hands. Among the discards were covers on which men of a suspicious character either hid behind or sought to break through doors in order to menace women on the other side.

I figured at the time that those might be useful later, in some way or other. But I hadn’t given any further thought to them until last month, when I happened across the 1953 Dell edition of George Harmon Coxe’s Venturous Lady and decided to blog about it as part of this page’s “book fixes” series. Artist Griffith Foxley painted the front of that 80-year-old paperback, which shows a woman hiding in a bedroom, as a man pushes open the door, gun in hand.

This seems like as good a time as any to dust off the remainder of the door-danger covers in my collection, and display them here. Among the illustrators whose work graces the following 14 paperback covers are Ed Grant (The Fabulous Clipjoint), Clyde Ross (They Came to Baghdad), Barye Phillips (Knock Three-One-Two), Mitchell Hooks (Stranger at the Door), Frank McCarthy (The House Without a Door), Lu Kimmel (Runaway Black, written by Ed McBain under the pseudonym Richard Marsten), Victor Kalin (Killer with a Key), and Robert Stanley (The Glass Triangle). I already wrote several years ago about The Crooked Man and There Was a Crooked Man, but added them to this gallery too, because they so well fit the theme.

Women confronted by dangerous gents at doors weren’t only seen on softcover novels of old. They served equally well on crime-fiction magazines, as evidenced by the July 1946 issue of Detective Tales and the March 1957 number of True Detective. Unfortunately, I do not know who painted either of those fronts.

Front to Back: Making History

Part I of a series spotlighting wraparound paperback art.

The Hell-Fire Club, by Daniel P. Mannix (Ballantine, 1969).
Cover illustration by Shannon Stirnweis.

Book covers are such confined surfaces on which to work, it’s no wonder artists sometimes try to continue their creativity across the spine and onto the back, too. Although there are exceptions, this was really more a practice of the past than the present, since today’s jackets are designed for easy, clear shrinkage into JPEG images. As a result, those classic wraparound fronts are even more admired now than they were previously.

If you think about it, extending artwork from the front of a book to its rear was pretty hard to justify. After all, most readers only ever pay much attention to the side where the title and author credits appear. So commissioning a wider painting (or, later, a wide-angle photograph) may not have been money well spent. But it certainly had the potential to give a book—whether issued in hardcover or paperback—some additional distinction.

Over the last decade, I’ve quietly built up computer files filled with these wraparound covers, and have learned several things about them. While it seems every field of fiction has spawned such fronts, the greatest number—by far—have come from the science fiction/fantasy genre. Not all well-known book artists have had equal opportunity to lend their talents to this field, but some familiar names pop up frequently; indeed, a few painters (Ian Miller, Richard Powers, and Tom Adams among them) have made part of their reputations with memorable crossover art of this sort.

There are scans of more than 100 wraparound covers stored on my hard drive (which is probably a modest sampling of the total in existence). To share the lot with you, I’ve divided them according to genre and then grouped titles by the same wordsmiths. I shall roll out those beauties over the next month or so, in irregular posts—beginning today with a gallery of historical novels.

The covers below, mostly from paperbacks, feature art by John Richards (The Golden Exile, Bridal Journey), Art Sussman (Sword in His Hand), John Floherty Jr. (Seminole, Beautiful Humbug), Barye Phillips (Trek East), Shannon Stirnweis (The Sea Witch), Tom Adams (The Rich Are With You Always), James Bama (The Admiral), Robert McGinnis (The Journeyer), and Charles Gehm (Gentlemen of Adventure). Other illustrators are unidentified.

Click on any of the images below to open an enlargement.

As we go along through this series, please let me know if there are any wraparound fronts that should be added to the collections.

FOLLOW-UP: In the early weeks of 2023, I came upon a couple more examples of historical-fiction wraparounds that I just couldn’t ignore. Forbidden City (Fawcett Crest, 1978) and My Enemy the Queen (Fawcett Crest, 1979) both carry artwork by Ted CoConis.

Bringing Up the Rear

Back in my college days, when I was editing the weekly student newspaper, our faculty adviser, Richard Hoyt, would regularly chide staff photographers for (accidentally or sometimes on purpose) taking shots of people’s backsides. “Get their faces, not their asses,” he’d dictate, to the amusement of everyone except whichever aspiring shutterbug was responsible for the latest “butt shot.”

Modern book designers, however, seem to harbor no qualms about turning to posterior pictures for their front covers. I don’t know exactly when this trend toward using photographs or illustrations of figures as seen from behind began, but it’s spread far and wide. Sometimes the central subjects—either men and women—are stationary, but on other occasions, they’re walking or seemingly fleeing for the lives. The people in these images are often heavily shadowed, or they’re silhouettes only; yet almost as frequently, their dress and hair and other features are clearly visible. We’re just denied a peek at the subjects’ foreparts.

This may, in a way, be a good thing. It maintains some mystery as to what characters in books look like, leaving our imaginations to fill in physiognomic details. Yet the ubiquity of such imagery leaves us doubting the creativity of book designers, and may cause us to become cynical about how marketing demands dictate the range of artwork considered acceptable by today’s principal publishers.

I haven’t made an effort to collect every possible example of this contemporary trend; there are simply too many such covers. But the 67 fronts corralled here, all from novels released within the last two or three years, should give you a sense of how art directors have sought to wring some drama and novelty from this terribly overworked—and, I hope, passing—fad.

Click on any of these images to open an enlargement.

POSTSCRIPT: Evidently, this trend toward rearview artwork will not abate soon. The covers below come from books debuting in 2022.