Duped: “Situation—Grave”

The latest installment in Killer Covers’ “haven’t we seen this front someplace before?” series. Previous entries are here.



Spanish painter Joan Beltrán Bofill (1939-2009) isn’t exactly a household name, at least on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. Yet he left behind a handsome and wide-ranging wealth of canvases—plus a quantity of attention-grabbing paperback fronts that aren’t always linked to his portfolio. According to a Web site called Tutt’Art,

[He] was born in Barcelona. Joan attended the prestigious Casa Lonja, where several artists from the Catalan School, including Picasso, had also studied. It was here that Joan studied drawing, painting, composition, and theory of color. Joan also studied at the Sant Jordi Fine Arts School in Barcelona.

Considered by many to be the foremost Spanish contemporary Impressionist of today, Beltrán Bofill paintings evoke memories and feelings of previous centuries. In Bofill’s sensuous, free brushwork and lively colors, as well as his choice of subjects, one is reminded of Renoir, Monet, and Munch. But, although the influences of many artists are brought to mind, Bofill succeeds in creating a very distinctive style and beauty of his own. His work cascades with light, color, and rhythm of movement, which results in creating in the eye of the beholder a sense of beauty and tranquility. Dating back to 1972, Joan Beltrán Bofill has had one-man exhibitions in Palma, Barcelona, Valencia, Madrid, Monaco, Paris, New York, Chicago, Palm Beach, and Tokyo.

Tutt’Art offers various examples of his Impressionist efforts, and they’re well worth scrutinizing. However, it’s the artistic mastery Bofill brought to his work on book fronts for European publishers during the second half of the 20th century—usually under the pseudonym Noiquet (or Portada Noiquet)—that interests us here. In addition to creating jackets for Enid Blyton children’s stories and Zane Grey Westerns, Bofill fashioned striking covers for novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, Agatha Christie, Earl Derr Biggers, and the astonishingly productive Carter Brown (aka Alan Geoffrey Yates).

Bofill/Noiquet was also responsible for the captivating paperback façade embedded at the top of this post, featuring a young brunette in her underwear, kneeling on what appears to be a bed. It comes from UK publisher Roberts & Vinter’s 1962 edition of Situation—Grave. As I understand it, that thriller was first released in 1949 as Sweetheart, Here’s Your Grave, but was retitled when another British house, Alexander Moring, brought out its own softcover edition in 1958. It was one in a plethora of popular works penned by Stephen Daniel Frances, once acclaimed—under the pseudonym Hank Janson—as “England’s best-selling mystery writer.”

I’ve mentioned Frances several times in this blog. That South London-born clerk turned journalist turned author concocted a succession of tough-guy tales—rich in American pulp-fiction vernacular, though Frances himself reportedly never visited the States—starring a Chicago-based newspaperman-cum-detective also named Hank Janson. (As legend has it, Frances selected the forename Hank because it rhymed with Yank.) The earliest of those quickly churned-out crime yarns was When Dames Get Tough, which debuted in 1946. New entries continued to appear until the 1970s, though by then their crafting had been handed over to lesser fictionists, and “the series had become near pornographic in content,” as Lee Server remarks in his Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers.

The books often carried memorable titles, among them Slay-Ride for Cutie (1949), Hotsy You’ll Be Chilled (1951), Blonde on the Spot (1949), Broads Don't Scare Easy (1951), Skirts Bring Me Sorrow (1952), Sugar and Vice (1958), and Hell’s Belles (1961). And a number of them boasted fairly revealing artwork by Reginald Heade, which—combined with the stories’ violence and sexual suggestiveness (there were frequent mentions of “clinging sheer stockings and ripped ‘knickers’”)—eventually landed the Janson books afoul of British obscenity laws, though by then Frances had decamped with his profits for a life of leisure in Spain. (He died of emphysema in 1989.)

During the middle of the last century, “Hank Janson’s sexy crime thrillers were the hottest thing around,” recalls Colin Dunne in a 2014 piece for the Daily Mail. “The American writers Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett had elevated the hard-boiled ’tec story into something like poetry, but Hank turned up the violence and the sex and took it back downmarket. Right down.” British crime writer John Harvey, creator of the Charlie Resnick series and a Hank Janson fan in his youth, writes in his introduction to the recent double release of two early novels, Amphetamines and Pearls & The Geranium Kiss, that “The first hard-boiled crime novels I read were written by an Englishman pretending to be American: Stephen Daniel Frances, using the pseudonym Hank Janson, which was also the name of his hero. With titles like Smart Girls Don’t Talk and Sweetheart, Here’s Your Grave, the Janson books, dolled up in suitably tantalizing covers, made their way, hand to hand, around the school playground, falling open at any passage that, to our young minds, seemed sexy and daring. This was a Catholic boys’ grammar school after all, and any reference to parts of the body below the waist, other than foot or knee, was thought to merit, if not excommunication, at least three Our Fathers and a dozen Hail Marys.”

Bofill/Noiquet contributed two cover illustrations that I know of to the Hank Janson line, both of them commissioned by Roberts & Vinter: one for the 1963 edition of Second String (shown above, on the right), and the other for Situation—Grave. I don’t find any full-length reviews of the latter novel online, but a Web page devoted to Janson first editions mentions that its plot is “set in Hollywood—the action switching from studio to marijuana den, and with intimations of the making of a snuff movie.” Classic lurid storytelling.

Apparently, I’m not the only person to have been impressed by Bofill/Noiquet’s Situation—Grave front, with its elegant brushstroke work in gouache. A version of his illustration later graced an issue of a Finnish, digest-style “cheapo paperback series called Max Strong,” named after a fictional Australian detective whose exploits—“excitement of a different kind”—were composed, in large part, by editor-author Frank Sydney Greenop (aka Robert Dudgeon) and designed to capture a readership on the scale of Carter Brown’s. In his write-up on this publication, Finnish blogger Juri Nummelin headlines it as having been distributed in 1954, though the wrapper date says 1965. He goes on to explain that the cover story, Murhat ovat epämiellyttäviä (translated as Murder’s So Unpleasant) was the work of “Frank Struan”—real name Graham Fisher—who was “born in 1920 … [and] used the Frank Struan pseudonym in a series of stories that were published in the legendary British magazine called Tit-Bits in the early ’50s.” As to the tale’s plot, Nummelin calls it “a mock-American hard-boiled crime novel with a private-eye hero called Johnny July.”

In this outing, Johnny July is hired to guard a wealthy business man, but he dies—in a closed room!—before July gets a chance to make out just from whom the man’s supposed to be guarded ... There are two beautiful women involved in the case, the young bride of the deceased and her sister who seems to be after the man’s inheritance. Or some such. … It's an one-hour entertainment, nothing more. There are notable gaps in the plot and Johnny July isn’t a very interesting character, but I didn’t really mind, as the stuff went on with some speed. There are many references to Chandler. The city of the story is Bay City, Chandler’s fictional city, and Johnny July is mugged and taken to a mental institute to be held there just like [Philip] Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely.

You’ll note I wrote that a “version” of Bofill/Noiquet’s art introduced Murder’s So Unpleasant. That’s because, if you look closely at the book front on the left, you’ll realize that the image has been flipped from the way it appeared on Situation—Grave, turning Noiquet’s signature at the bottom of the picture backwards. And the scantily clad brunette is now holding a gun, whereas that same hand—formerly her right, now her left—had previously been clutching her left bicep. I have no idea whether Bofill was commissioned to make this modification to his painting, but I’d guess it was executed by somebody else. It’s well done; however, 20th-century publishers of “cheapo paperback series” rarely coughed up the dough demanded by famous artists to alter their compositions for second use.

Joan Beltrán Bofill wasn’t as prolific a book-cover painter as some of his contemporaries (he probably reserved his energy for his Impressionist masterpieces). However, he created a number of excellent specimens of the breed. Below are eight more of my favorites. Click on the images for enlargements.

Filling in the Life of Hank Janson

As you might expect, I must exercise some caution in asking that books be given to me at Christmastime. I have enough trouble finding room in my house for those I already own, much less new ones! But a title sure to appear prominently on my holiday wish list is Steve Holland’s recent biography, The Trials of Hank Janson.

I first got word of this in a post that Australian novelist and pop culture critic Andrew Nette wrote earlier in the month, in which he reviewed a trio of works about vintage books and the art that decorated them (one of those releases being The Art of Ron Lesser Volume 1: Deadly Dames and Sexy Sirens, to which I contributed an extensive interview with the artist). For anyone who doesn’t know, Hank Janson was both a pseudonym employed by English author/publisher Stephen Daniel Frances (1917-1989) and the name of his protagonist, “a tough Chicago reporter who faced down various malevolent criminal threats across the breadth of America,” to quote Nette. Those novels—“gritty gangster tales” with deliberately suggestive covers painted by Reginald Heade, Samuel “Peff” Peffer, Paul Rader, Harry Barton, and Robert Maguire—were wildly successful during the 1940s and early ’50s, despite paper shortages of the time, and continued to be published for years afterward.

But in 1954, Nette recalls, “his work was dubbed obscene by the powers that be, in no small part [due] to their incredibly lurid, sexualised covers. His publisher and distributor were hauled before the courts and a warrant was issue for the author’s arrest. … While Janson was eventually found not guilty of peddling obscene material, he was attacked in the British parliament, banned in Northern Ireland, and newsagents that stocked his books were persecuted by the police. Although it did not stop him writing … the experience left him incredibly bitter.” Frances ceased penning the Janson tales in 1959, and other authors were left to continue the series.

Steve Holland is a UK author and recognized authority on comics as well as pulp fiction. The Trials of Hank Janson—part biography, part study of Frances’ fiction and the changes the Janson scandal brought to laws surrounding supposedly obscene publications—is an expanded version of a book Holland published originally back in 2004. In this half-hour YouTube interview conducted by memorabilia and book collector Jules Burt, Holland looks back on Frances’ history, his enviable ascent to fame, the preposterous censorship he faced, and subsequent efforts to keep the Janson novels in print.

It sounds like a book I should somehow squeeze onto my shelves.

Two-fer Tuesdays: Mirror, Mirror on the Wall ...

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



By this point, I’ve spent so many pleasant hours studying the covers of vintage paperback novels, that a buzzer goes off in my brain whenever I spot one that resembles another. However, the front of Hank Janson’s It’s Bedtime, Baby! (Gold Star, 1964) had been filed away on my computer for some while before I realized what it reminded me of. That goodness I finally got it!

The painter responsible for this most captivating façade of It’s Bedtime, Baby! was Harry Barton (1908-2001), a Seattle, Washington-born artist who--like Rudy Nappi, Sam Cherry, Ernest “Darcy” Chiriacka, and Rafael DeSoto--attended the Art Students League of New York. With the help of those last three individuals, Barton received the training and contacts he needed to break into the worlds of freelance magazine illustration and book-cover creation. He went on to paint covers for novels by Ellery Queen, James Hadley Chase, Day Keene, Gil Brewer, and other crime-fictionists, as well as the fronts for soft-core publishers such as Monarch and Midwood. Later, he specialized in fine-art paintings of the Old West.

It’s Bedtime, Baby! was one of more than a dozen Janson novels published over the years by Gold Star, though by the time it hit the newsstands in ’64, the Brit who had for so long been writing under the Janson pseudonym--Stephen Daniel Frances--had turned the reins of that “pseudo-American” thriller series over to other scribblers. Writing not long ago in his blog, Dispatches from the Last Outlaw, author Thomas McNulty opined:

The Hank Janson paperbacks are part of that forever distant past that so many of us recall with fondness. Those were the days when a spinning rack of paperbacks or comic books offered up treasures beyond comprehension. It was the era of five-and-dime stores and Route 66 and the Sinclair green dinosaur outside of gas stations. Hank Janson originated in England. The set-up being he’s a Chicago reporter and these books are his first-person account of his adventures. There are always beautiful women, usually in dire straits, and Janson, being a man that knows what he likes, decides to get involved. He’s in like Flynn, in the grandest of male traditions, and as hard-boiled as an egg but a lot tougher. In It’s Bedtime, Baby! eleven college women get caught up in a weird sorority called The Virgin Club, and Janson discovers one of these gals is behind a string of brutal kidnappings. In order to unravel the mystery, Janson needs to get close to these ladies, real close. Hot and saucy action ensues, along with murder, punctuated by droll he-man dialogue. It’s fun to read, and the pages flip past rather quickly.

Now shift your attention to the cover above and on the right, taken from the 1962 Signet edition of Murder Wears a Mantilla, by Carter Brown (aka Alan G. Yates). It’s immediately recognizable as the work of Robert McGinnis, whose artistry I have showcased many times on this page. As with the fetching blonde in Barton’s cover, the raven-tressed lovely in McGinnis’ painting is nude, playing with her hair, and seated before a mirror (only McGinnis’ subject is actually looking at herself). In keeping with the novel’s title, she’s wearing a mantilla--a lace veil worn by women in Spain and Central America.

Murder Wears a Mantilla, first published in 1957, was the fourth novel in Yates/Brown’s series starring Mavis Seidlitz, the “ravishingly beautiful” Los Angeles private eye “who plays hard and fast with men … money … and murder.” The Nick Carter & Carter Brown blog offers this brief about the story told between its covers:

Mavis Seidlitz … is the dizziest blonde who ever ended up in the Tunnel of Love after buying tickets for the Big Dipper. When she is not trying to fix her clothing, either a brazier, stockings, or chemise, she is a partner in Rio Investigations. As the story goes, Mavis is South of the border on vacation. She meets one bull fighter who she thinks is the dreamiest. The next bullfighter has a knife stuck in his back. So she starts investigating up until things get out of hand. The Black Death, 40 million pesos, The Golden Inca, people with guns. So she sends a cable to her boss, Johnny Rio. HELP.

Mavis Seidlitz (what a moniker!) wasn’t the brightest bulb on the streets of L.A. As chemist-turned-book-art collector Art Scott recalls, she was pretty much a “burlesque caricature with a semi-plausible character voice.” It’s been said as well that her “pulchritudinous assets far outweigh[ed] her mental equipment.” Yet from her first appearance, in Honey, Here’s Your Hearse (1955), until her last, in And the Undead Sing (1974), Mavis somehow managed to solve crimes and not lose her life with the same casualness that she lost her clothes. “At least once in each book,” notes Kathleen Gregory Klein in The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre (1995), “she inhales too deeply and breaks a bra strap with predictable results. … Her body and her tight clothes, peekaboo blouses, or see-through nighties fill her narration and the [male readers’] imaginations.”

Although this is supposed to be only a “two-fer” post, I can’t help offering a bonus of sorts, for in the course of my research earlier today I ran across a third beautiful cover that’s very much in keeping with those previous two. So on the left, I present the front from the 1961 Crest paperback edition of False Scent, New Zealand wordsmith Ngaio Marsh’s 21st novel featuring her familiar “gentleman detective,” Roderick Alleyn. Again, the illustration comes from Robert McGinnis. And once more it presents a woman ensconced comfortably before a mirror, fussing with her hair. In this case, though, the shadow of a threatening hand reaches into the image from the left. In a cover line, Erle Stanley Gardner promised that this novel was “a superb chiller.” Maybe so, but it’s the cover art that really sells this edition of False Scent for me.

My Kind of Book: “Expectant Nymph”

Expectant Nymph, by “Hank Janson,” aka Stephen D. Frances (Gold Star, 1964). Cover illustration by Robert Maguire.

Amazingly, eight years ago I compiled a good-size post for this page about novels featuring “nymph” in their titles, but I missed including Expectant Nymph. It was one of the later books featuring Chicago-based newspaperman-cum-detective Hank Janson. The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog offers the following plot synopsis:

When Hank Jason is given a routine assignment to interview a retired gangster, he doesn’t expect to be de-panted by a mysterious young woman. And neither does he expect to go swimming in the raw with a beautiful international stripper who has been seen au naturel by an estimated 10 million men. But it’s all in a day’s and night’s work to the Chicago Chronicle’s ace reporter.

A curious thing: I have long understood that Stephen D. Frances (1917-1989), an English clerk turned journalist turned prolific author, created the Janson character and wrote the books in this once-popular series that were published between 1946 and 1953, making only occasional additional contributions from then until 1959. After 1953, I was told, others writers—among them D.F. Crawley, Harry Hobson, Victor Norwood, and James Moffatt—had continued Frances’ efforts, also under the Janson pseudonym.

The beautiful Expectant Nymph first saw print in August 1964, well after Frances is said to have retired. Yet all the online sources I find credit him with actually penning the novel. Is this simply a case of laziness, applying Frances’ name to books even after he had nothing to do with them? If anyone reading this can clear up the actual authorship of Expectant Nymph, please drop a note into the Comments section at the bottom of this post.

The Twelve Dames of Christmas, 2018: #2

Celebrating this festive season with brassy bombshells.



When Dames Get Tough: With Scarred Faces & Other Rarities, by “Hank Janson,” aka Stephen Daniel Frances (Telos, 2017). This volume collects three novellas starring a Chicago-based newspaperman-cum-detective who was also named Hank Janson. Illustration by Reginald Heade.

Janson (the pseudonym under which the prolific Frances, as well as several subsequent writers, published) seemed to be very fond of using the term “dame” in book titles. When Dames Get Tough was originally released in 1946 by British publisher Ward & Hitchon. It was followed by This Dame Dies Soon (1951), Hell of a Dame (1960—shown below, with uncredited artwork), and Destination Dames (1961).

Playing the Links

Yeah, yeah, I know: Things have been pretty darn quiet on this page ever since Christmas Day. But hey, I was exhausted after putting together year-end wrap-ups for The Rap Sheet (see here, here, and here) as well as Kirkus Reviews (here and here), and I needed a break. I am back on the beat now, though, bringing you first some links to design-related stories elsewhere on the Web.

• I’ve written infrequently in the past about 1950s British “girlie” paperback cover artist Reginald Heade, both in The Rap Sheet and in Killer Covers. Those efforts pale in comparison, though, to the gallery Rob Baker has assembled for the blog Flashbak. As he explains,

Heade’s lurid covers adorned pulp paperbacks of authors such as Hank Janson, Roland Vane, Michael Storme, Paul Renin, Gene Ross and Spike Morelli. The artwork often pushed to the absolute limits of what was legally allowed for the time. Heade also worked in comics and drew “The Saga of the Red”, “The Captain from Castille”, “Sexton Blake versus the Astounding John Plague” and “Robin Hood” in Knock-Out (1949), and “The Sky Explorers” in Comet (1952-53).

After [World War II] Heade had moved to Barons Court in Westminster and this was where he died in 1957 aged just 56. There were no obituaries in the press and to this day not much is known about the English pulp-fiction cover artist.

Flashbak’s entertaining array of Heade works includes the fronts from such intriguingly titled books as White Slaves of New Orleans, Dame in My Bed, Plaything of Passion, and Me and My Goul.

• Fragments of Noir offers collections of covers by artist Lou Marchett (about whom you can learn more here) and those taken from the novels of James Ellroy.

• In his blog, Illustrated 007, Peter Lorenz showcases a new set of James Bond audiobook fronts from Audible UK (more on those here). He also presents a new interview with Brian Bysouth, who, he explains, “has created adverts, storyboards, covers and hundreds of iconic film posters in his 40-year career,” though “007 collectors probably know him best for his work on the posters for For Your Eyes Only, A View to Kill, and The Living Daylights.”

• If you’re interested in the history of paperbacks, check out this splendid piece by Louis Menand in a recent edition of The New Yorker, looking back at the history of those cheaper editions and how they “transformed the culture of reading.”

• Finally, the Classic Film and TV Café’s Rick29 has dug up some of the much-prized comic-book tie-ins to vintage American television programs, including The Wild Wild West and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. You can enjoy those right here.

Seating Arrangements

Just over a year ago, and with the backing of paperback-art expert Art Scott, I put together a post for this page about classic Butterfly chairs appearing on book fronts. At the time, I had in hand half a dozen examples. Since then, however, I’ve happened across four more, which I am pleased to share with you below.

Click on any of these images to open an enlargement.

(Above, left to right) All the Way Home, by Walter Freeman (Signet, 1955), with cover art by Clark Hulings; On the Make, by John D. MacDonald (Dell, 1960), with cover art by Mitchell Hooks.

A Man Called Sex, by Peter Kanto (Brandon House, 1964), with cover art by Fred Fixler; Cold Dead Coed, by Hank Janson
(Gold Star, 1964).

Now Vixens!

I remember when I was a child at Christmastime, listening to my mother read Clement C. Moore’s famous 1823 poem, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (better known as “The Night Before Christmas” or “’Twas the Night Before Christmas”). Slightly less than halfway through Moore’s work can be found these verses:

When, what to my wondering eyes should appear,
But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny rein-deer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick,
I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick.

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
“Now, Dasher! Now, Dancer! Now, Prancer, and Vixen!
“On, Comet! On, Cupid! On, Donner and Blitzen!

“To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
“Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”

Well, after I’d heard those lines a few dozen times (or more), I started to wonder about the names of jolly old St. Nicholas’ eight high-flying reindeer. Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and Comet all seemed suggestive of the creatures’ career-making fleet-footedness. Cupid, I conjectured, was the lover-not-a-fighter among the group. Donner and Blitzen never made a whole lot of sense to me. The former I could associate solely with California’s 19th-century Donner Party (though that pioneering group’s disastrous mountain crossing didn’t take place until two decades after Moore sat down to pen his poem); the latter moniker seemed even less connectable, for surely it could have nothing to do with Nazi Germany’s World War II Blitz attacks on Great Britain, yet I had no other ideas on its source. Only in recent years has “blitzen” become synonymous with “amazing” or “cool,” and also been linked with drug culture (“blitzen” meaning “getting high,” usually via marijuana). To learn that Donner and Blitzen weren’t even those reindeers’ original names further confuses the matter.

So what about Vixen? The name has been applied to ships and computer games, sports teams, films, and even an all-female rock band, though all of those date from many years past Clement Moore’s time. Vixen is the term, as well, for a female fox. And in the same way that “fox” has come to mean an unusually attractive woman, so “vixen” has been applied to women who are sexy and flirtatious, or those with fiery tempers. It’s impossible to guess what Moore’s inspiration might have been, but it seems more likely that he had a female fox (of the canine sort) in mind when he christened his reindeer than some observably curvaceous lass.

The other day, while browsing through the amazing Pulp Covers site, I happened across the front from the 1959 Crest Books edition of The Vanishing Vixen (shown atop this post). Composed by Roy B. Sparkia (1924-1992), who also produced such works of fiction as 1956’s Build My Gallows High (not to be confused with Geoffrey Homes’ 1946 book of the same title) and Paradise County (1974), The Vanishing Vixen is described as “a power-packed novel of suspense, sex, and sabotage.” I can’t attest to those contents, but this volume certainly offers an eye-catching cover, painted by Barye Phillips, that’s complete with an inviting young blonde and a rocket that’s busy blasting past its gantry.

This reminded me that there are other novels out there bearing “vixen” in their titles. Above and on the left, for instance, is Not I, Said the Vixen, Bill S. Ballinger’s 1965 legal thriller, with cover art by Bill Johnson. I don’t have information about all of the illustrators represented below, but I do know that Robert McGinnis created the artwork for The Velvet Vixen (Signet, 1964), by Carter Brown; Michael Koelsch was responsible for the cover of The Frost-Haired Vixen (DAW, 2006); Frank Yerby’s The Vixens (Pocket, 1950), like The Vanishing Vixen, boasts a Phillips graphic; Robert Bonfils gave us the front for Vice Ring Vixen, by J. X. Williams (Greenleaf/Pleasure Reader, 1969); and it’s Carl Stricker’s talents being displayed on that 1948 Avon edition of Valley Vixen, by Ben Ames Williams.

Click on any of these images to open an enlargement.









Furthermore, there are a number of novels with cover lines that contain “vixen.” The 1963 U.S. edition of Hank Janson’s Kill Her with Passion (with cover art by Harry Barton) being one example; John Pleasant McCoy’s Big As Life (Pocket, 1951) being another.



Something tells me that Clement C. Moore, a onetime president of New York City’s Columbia College (later Columbia University) and the developer of the General Theological Seminary, would not have approved of any of these works. No, not at all.

READ MORE: “The New York Christmas Tradition in an Uptown Cemetery” (The Bowery Boys).