Mass Execution

As someone who grew up buying and reading mass-market-size paperbacks—and who still has myriad such works lining his shelves—I greet news that the familiar format is rapidly on its way out with regret born more of nostalgia than anything else. Here’s what Publishers Weekly has to say about this development:

The decision made this winter by ReaderLink [“the largest distributor of books to mass merchandisers in United States”] to stop distributing mass market paperback books at the end of 2025 was the latest blow to a format that has seen its popularity decline for years. According to Circana BookScan, mass market unit sales plunged from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024, a drop of about 84%, and sales this year through October were about 15 million units. But for many years, the mass market paperback was “the most popular reading format,” notes Stuart Applebaum, former Penguin Random House EVP of corporate communications. Applebaum was also once a publicist at Bantam Books, one of the publishers credited with turning mass market paperbacks into what he calls “a well-respected format.”

When the heyday of mass market paperbacks was has been debated by industry veterans, but it is generally acknowledged to have run from the late 1960s into the mid-’90s. According to Book Industry Study Group’s Book Industry Trends 1980, mass market paperback sales jumped from $656.5 million in 1975 to nearly $811 million in 1979, easily outselling hardcovers, which had sales of $676.5 million, and the new, upcoming format, trade paperback [first introduced into the U.S. market around 1960], which had sales of about $227 million. And with its much lower price points, mass market paperback unit sales easily dwarfed those of the other two formats, at 387 million in 1979, compared to 82 million for hardcover and about 59 million for trade paperback. Applebaum says mass market drew millions of new readers who were not interested in paying hardcover prices for books. …

Though mass market paperback sales were over $1 billion in 1996, there were warning signs that interest in the format was cooling. According to BISG, mass market sales fell 3.3% in 1996 compared to the previous year, to $1.35 billion, and unit sales dropped 6.2%. Interviews by PW with industry players at the time put the blame for the decline primarily on the rapid drop in the number of [independent distributor] wholesalers that, as [former Bantam executive Esther Margolis] notes, were key to making mass market paperbacks widely accessible. The ID market continued to consolidate under Levy Home Entertainment, and in 2011 Levy was bought by a former executive, Dennis Abboud, who renamed the company ReaderLink.

The consolidation of the wholesaler market coincided with the rapid increase of e-book sales. According to the 2012 StatShot report …, mass market paperback sales were running neck and neck with e-book sales in 2011 at about $1.1 billion, but the two formats were on markedly different trajectories: from the prior year, mass market paperback sales tumbled by about $500 million and e-book sale soared by roughly $1 billion.

Despite the dramatic decline, the format still had some legs. PW reported in 2011 that six mass market titles sold more than one million copies each, but that was down from 10 years earlier, when eight mass market paperbacks sold more than two million copies each and another 39 sold more than one million. As that trend accelerated, the format became impossible to sustain, with rising production costs and a reluctance among publishers to raise prices above $9.99.

“It seems the consumer has spoken,” [Kensington Publishing CEO Steve Zacharius] says. “Year after year, unit sales have steadily declined. It’s puzzling in some ways: with all the concerns around affordability, you might expect readers to gravitate toward a lower-cost option. But that hasn’t been the case with books, at least not in print.”

I’ve ridden these trends just like so many other people. While I snapped up mass-market softcovers in droves during my more impecunious youth, I long ago began plunking down hard-earned dollars for hardcovers and trade-size editions, both of them which are larger and easier to read—though they also take up more room in my cabinets. As a part-time bookseller nowadays, I shy away from ordering mass-market versions because book distributors such as Ingram (the largest U.S. company of its kind) ask that unsold copies be returned not whole, but with their jackets stripped off—a vandalization I find hard to stomach.

The bottom line is that I will mourn losing the mass-market paperback because it has long been part of my life. But it won’t change my purchasing. Nor will those once-popular works be far from my attention, as they are—and will continue to be—the principal focus of this blog.

READ MORE: “Why Are Paperbacks,” by Rebecca Makkai (SubMakk); “The Paperback Explosion: An American Publishing Phenomenon, 1939-1980,” by Michael Scott Barson.

“Army Girl,” by Whit Harrison

Army Girl, by “Whit Harrison,” aka Harry Whittington (Paperback Library, 1962). The Florida-born Whittington (1915-1989) was a prolific author of both crime fiction and western fiction, who wrote under a variety of pseudonyms. A few of his books have been brought back into print by Stark House Press, but not yet Army Girl.

Cover artwork by Harry Schaare. His original artwork for this softcover novel can be enjoyed below. An earlier edition of Army Girl, published by Venus Books (and with a front illustration by Rudolph Belarki) can be seen here.

Another Look: “Branded Woman”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: Branded Woman, by “Wade Miller,” aka Robert Wade and H. Bill Miller (Gold Medal, 1952); cover art by John Floherty Jr. Right: Branded Woman, by Wade Miller (Hard Case Crime, 2005), with a mighty eye-catching cover illustration by Glen Orbik. The Complete Review opined that “Branded Woman is not a good novel, but it's bad in all the right ways.” Damn, I wish I’d written that!

Alias Endris

Thank goodness C.J. Thomas reinvigorated his blog, The Stiletto Gumshoe, a few months ago, after letting it lie dormant for almost four years. He has since posted frequently about the painters responsible for artwork on vintage pulp magazines and paperback covers, whether it be Frank Kalan, Ron Johnson, Karel Thole, or others.

And just recently he drew attention to Emilie Irene Zimmermann (1907-1967), who often signed her creations as “Endris.” Thomas notes that “‘Endris’ covers are often mistaken as the work of her better-known contemporary, Rafael DeSoto. To be fair, if you compare some side by side, it’s easy to understand the confusion.”

Check out proof of Zimmerman’s considerable talents here.

And a Happy Halloween to You, Too

Invisible Men, edited by Basil Davenport (Ballantine, 1960).

With a title that immediately brings to mind H.G. Wells’ haunting science-fiction classic, The Invisible Man (1897), this 158-page paperback anthology features 11 fantastical tales from the likes of Jack London, Ray Bradbury, L. Sprague de Camp, Maurice Leblanc, Wells himself, and others. Fantasy and horror writer Jeff Baker, who posted a four-part review of Invisible Men in his blog (see here, here, here, and here), says this volume covers “variant themes of invisibility” and was originally “marketed for young adults with a preface for students and teachers which did not talk down and was spoiler-free.”

Cover artwork by Richard M. Powers.

“We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” by Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson (Popular Library, 1963). This mystery yarn was first published in hardcover in 1962, and was Jackson’s sixth and final novel. As Wikipedia explains, it’s “written in the voice of eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine ‘Merricat’ Blackwood, who lives with her agoraphobic sister and ailing uncle on an estate. Six years before the events of the novel, the Blackwood family experienced a tragedy that left the three survivors isolated from their small village.” The book has been described as one of the most famous examples of “Southern Gothic,” and unlike Jackson’s better-known ghost story, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), carries only a whiff of the supernatural.

Cover artwork by William Teason.

Celebrating Quarry’s Half-Century Career

Crime novelist Max Allan Collins has unveiled the cover of Quarry’s Reunion, his 18th book starring the killer-for-hire known only as Quarry. The book is due out in late 2026, with artwork by Paul Mann, whose talents we have celebrated before on this page.

This is being promoted as the 50th-anniversary Quarry novel, the first installment in that series being The Broker (later retitled Quarry), which was published in 1976. Collins explains in his blog that he “wrestled with the plot [of Quarry’s Reunion], which is an unusual one for Quarry as it’s a more traditional murder mystery than a crime novel, and has lots of moving parts, more Christie than Spillane. Right now I don’t know how my editor and agent will react to a change of pace like this; but I can really only write the novel that wants to be written. This one, appropriately given the 50th anniversary aspect, delves into Quarry’s past in a way I never have before.

“The story that presented itself to me was almost something out of Grace Metalious. If that reference doesn’t mean anything to you, or even if it does, I’ll just say she was the underrated author of Peyton Place, one of the best-selling (and most scandalous) novels of the ’50s and early ’60s. I had to develop a whole cast, even generations thereof, the residents of a town in Ohio about the same size of my own smallish Muscatine, Iowa. I literally (not figuratively) wrote half a dozen breakdowns of the characters and their relationships, both familial and romantic, detailing a trust fund that would be the engine of the mystery, i.e., who would/could benefit financially from the death of a character or two.”

Complicating matters further were Collins’ ongoing health concerns. He says he’d completed several chapters only of Reunion before he was sent into care “for an ablation procedure to deal with my a-fib [abnormal heart rhythm]. This turned into a nightmarish month of emergency room visits, ambulance rides, and three hospital stays, the middle one of which found me hallucinating about where I was and whether or not I was investigating a murder.”

All of this certainly makes us look forward to a finished copy of Quarry’s Reunion, with its Natalie Wood cover lookalike. But we’d also be interested in a novel about a writer hallucinating that he’s investigating a murder. Have you got time to pen that one too, Max?

“Tight Squeeze,” by William Fuller

Tight Squeeze, by William Fuller (Dell, 1960). This is the last of half a dozen novels to feature Brad Dolan, Bill Fuller’s “hard-boiled adventurer, smuggler and wanderer,” described by The Thrilling Detective Web Site as “a sort of pre-Travis McGee Travis McGee and certainly no stranger to trouble. Or violence. Or babes.”

Cover artwork by Victor Kalin.

“Willa,” by Gilbert Terrell

Willa, by “Gilbert Terrell,” aka Evans B. Harrington (Dell, 1961).

As book collector Tim Hewitt wrote on Facebook earlier this year, Harrington (1925-1977) was an English professor at the University of Mississippi. Willa, which followed this author’s 1961 novel, Missy, “is the second of three racy eponymous novels of ‘sensual’ and ‘shocking’ women in pursuit of ‘passion’ and ‘desire’ that Harrington published under the pen name ‘Gilbert Terrell.’ (I can only speculate, but I assume that as the Chair of the University of Mississippi English Department he didn’t want to call attention to himself in the early ’60s as a purveyor of trashy pulp fiction.) The third book, Lily, was published three years later with a routine (but not unappealing) photo cover.”

Cover artwork by Ernest Chiriaka (“Darcy”).

Had I known four years back that Harrington had penned this trio of works, I would have included them all in Killer Covers’ gallery of paperback novels titled simply with women’s first names.

“The Smugglers,” by Timothy Green

The Smugglers, by Timothy Green (Pocket, 1970).

Published in hardcover in 1969, The Smugglers is a non-fiction book about how “smuggling is a booming industry in an age when a man can carry $1,000,000 worth of LSD in his shaving lotion bottle,” to quote Kirkus Reviews. A quick Web check on author Green doesn’t turn up much, other than the information that he published at least two other works: The World of Gold (1968) and The Adventurers (1970).

Cover artwork by Jack Thurston.

Another Look: “The Sailcloth Shroud”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Sailcloth Shroud, by Charles Williams (Dell, 1961); cover artist Robert K. Abbett. Right: The Sailcloth Shroud, by Charles Williams (Pocket, 1972), with a cover illustration by Stanley Borack. (His original artwork can be seen here.)

READ MORE: “The Lost Classics of One of the 20th Century’s Great Hard-boiled Writers,” by Andrew Cartmel (CrimeReads).

McGinnis’ Original Visions

(Above) Murder Is My Business, by Brett Halliday (Dell, 1963).

I hadn’t expected to be writing again about Ohio-born artist and illustrator Robert McGinnis so soon after we celebrated his 99th birthday on this page in February. But the news, broadcast two weeks ago, that he’d died on March 10 left me wanting to make another visit to his impressive portfolio of work, amassed over six decades.

Originally, I thought about creating a gallery of my favorite McGinnis paperback covers—something along the lines of what vintage book collector Tim Hewitt posted in Killer Covers two months ago. But I found it hard to narrow down my choices. An initial list included everything from John Trinian’s North Beach Girl and George Bagby’s Dead Wrong to M.E. Chaber’s A Lonely Walk, A.S. Fleishman’s The Venetian Blonde, and David Lodge’s Angel’s Ransom. By the time my picks exceeded 50 in number, I knew I could not match Hewitt’s half-dozen limit.

(Right) Never Kill a Client, by Brett Halliday (Dell, 1963).

Another option was to look back at the James Bond movie posters McGinnis painted over the years—some of which took liberties with the films’ contents. But this artist’s demise was already followed by new attention paid to those gorgeous one-sheets.

In the end, I realized that I’d drawn much attention in Killer Covers to how his artwork was incorporated into paperback fronts—together with title type, bylines, and publisher identifications—yet had rarely showcased his original pieces. So let me rectify that imbalance a bit today. This post features 22 of the best paintings he produced for books during the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. Most focus on what have been labeled “McGinnis Women,” lithe and luscious lovelies who simultaneously seduce ... and express unapproachability. The artist frequently manipulated human proportions on his canvasses, making figures taller than the 7.5 heads high they usually are, pushing them to eight or nine heads tall and extending legs beyond what one would expect. The results were captivating and made his women, especially, distinctive.

With each painting here, I have provided a link to show how it was eventually presented in book form. If there are other excellent examples you think should have been added to this gallery, please drop a note about them into the Comments section below.

A Murderer Among Us, by Carter Brown (Signet, 1969).

Kill the Clown, by Richard S. Prather (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1973).

Assignment: Peking, by Edward S. Aarons (Gold Medal, 1969).

Assignment—Sorrento Siren, by Edward S. Aarons (Gold Medal, 1963).

Murder Me for Nickels, by Peter Rabe (Gold Medal, 1960).

A Peak in Darien, by Roswell G. Ham Jr. (Avon, 1960).

The Aseptic Murders, by Carter Brown (Signet, 1972).

Charlie Sent Me! by Carter Brown (Signet, 1963).

Exit Dying, by Harry Olesker (Dell, 1959).

False Scent, by Ngaio Marsh (Crest, 1961).

Death Comes Early, by William R. Cox (Dell, 1961).

Trouble—Texas Style, by John Bramlett (Gold Medal, 1964).

Nymph to the Slaughter, by Carter Brown (Signet, 1971).

The Eighth Circle, by Stanley Ellin (Dell, 1959). This is the first of four different covers shown here that employ McGinnis’ signature One Shoe Off motif. Can you find the other three?

Mum’s the Word for Murder, by Brett Halliday (Dell, 1964).

The Man Inside, by M.E. Chaber (Paperback Library, 1970).

As Old as Cain, by M.E. Chaber (Paperback Library, 1971). Bob McGinnis evidently took performers Goldie Hawn and James Coburn as his models for this painting. But he originally imagined Hawn in the nude. That was apparently too much for Chaber’s publisher, because the finished cover finds her wearing a bikini.

The Girl Who Cried Wolf, by Hillary Waugh (Dell, 1958). McGinnis’ alternative art for that novel can be seen here.

Beebo Brinker, by Ann Bannon (Gold Medal, 1962).

The April Robin Murders, by Craig Rice and Ed McBain (Dell, 1959).

The Black Bird Is Back!

I had known for a long while that Iowa crime novelist Max Allan Collins wanted to pen a sequel to Dashiell Hammett’s genre-defining 1930 private-eye novel, The Maltese Falcon, so when the official announcement of his effort came last September, I was hardly surprised. However, the subsequent rush to print of Return of the Maltese Falcon, due out from Hard Case Crime in January 2026, seems remarkable.

As Collins writes today in his blog, “My editor at Hard Case Crime, Charles Ardai, is something of a wonder. Normally when you turn a manuscript in, it takes an editor months or at least weeks to get you the line-edited manuscript to go over. Charles gets back to you the next day, or if he takes two or three days, he apologizes for the delay. Then he has the book typeset in another day (he does this himself) and provides galley proofs, and to say this is unusual is an understatement.

“It’s very cool to have the process go this quickly. Writers like the feeling when a book has ‘gone to bed.’”

No less cool is the fact that we now have a front for Return!



Both this novel’s cover painting and design (including title type hearkening back to Falcon’s original edition) are credited to Irvin Rodriguez, “an artist working in painting, drawing, digital media and illustration based in Los Angeles.” You can see more of Rodriguez’s work on his Instagram page.

Meanwhile, Collins has posted his afterword to Return of the Maltese Falcon in CrimeReads, which tells how he was first introduced to Hammett’s best-known yarn and what he asked of himself in order to echo that long-dead author’s writing style. An introductory note to the excerpt cites some resources Collins used in order to re-create the Depression-era San Francisco of Sam Spade’s heyday. (Don Herron’s The Dashiell Hammett Tour receives due applause.) Why post this afterword rather than some portion of the actual story? “Where normally an advance look at the first chapter might have been used as a promotional teaser,” he explains in his blog, “something had to substitute, because the public-domain nature of the original novel won’t kick in until my sequel is published next year. So advance promo couldn’t use any of my novel itself—we’d be in violation of the original copyright.”

I’m normally skeptical of another writer being hired to augment a prominent but deceased author’s oeuvre; Collins himself acknowledges that “following in the footsteps of a genius writer as precise as Dashiell Hammett is a sort of suicide note.” However, the creator of series gumshoe Nathan Heller has already done a fine job over these last 16 years of doubling the number of novels starring Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (a run that ended recently with Baby, It’s Murder). I am confident Return of the Maltese Falcon will do Hammett proud, too.

* * *

Max Collins’ CrimeReads post today reminds me that a “somewhat different version of [The Maltese Falcon]’s initial pulp serialization” was included in Otto Penzler’s The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (2010). I never did get around to reading that variant. Perhaps now is the time to take it down off the shelf.

Upfront About Its Cursorariness

“The world’s most superficial book reviews.” How can you not love a Web site that promotes its contents so unabashedly?

Judge a Book by Its Cover (JABBIC) says it “offers brief, irreverent reviews and ratings of current books based solely on their covers. No pre-reading plot summaries. No peeking inside. Just an honest reaction to the visual pitch publishers [make] to readers. Each book gets a short, snappy review and a star rating—all judged from the cover alone. ‘This isn’t about literary analysis—it’s about that first, instinctive reaction every reader has when they see a book for the first time,’” explains founder Gary Apple, a comedy writer.

For example, here is JABBIC’s assessment of The Writer (Little, Brown), a March release from James Patterson and J.D. Barker:

This strikes us as a book that’s a little insecure about what it is. Maybe it doesn’t trust readers to figure it out on their own, so it spells things out: “A Thriller” and “You’ll Never Forget the Ending …” (Neither of which are review quotes, by the way—just bold declarations slapped on the cover like a marketing intern’s fever dream.) And ANY book can say “You’ll never forget the ending.”

The oversized gold text screams JAMES PATTERSON while poor J.D. Barker plays the backup singer with slightly smaller font. Oddly, the smallest name is “James.” Go figure.

The title, The Writer, is vague bordering on generic—but the design does pull us in. That blazing red aura around the woman’s silhouette (the writer, we assume?) gives the whole thing a heat that’s hard to ignore. Paired with the tagline, it’s trying really hard to say, “Something shocking is coming …”

We’re not diehard Patterson readers (sorry), but this cover might get us to flip it over and check the back. Mission accomplished?

If we had to guess …
It’s about a famous female writer whose life unravels when a man accuses her of stealing his book. She insists it’s fiction. He insists it’s his life. Someone’s lying—and someone’s about to turn up dead.

What a fabulous gig! As one who’s spent much of his life actually reading books in order to come up with thoughtful analyses—which can demand many hours, or even days to complete—I envy those JABBIC contributors who dash off their opinion of a new work after a perfunctory inspection. Imagine all of the time I could have saved, if I’d only known this sort of critiquing was an option!

JABBIC’s contents include best-selling fiction and non-fiction works, brand-new releases as well as some older tomes. And at the bottom of every page, a pop-up delivers the publisher’s description of the book in question, so you can see how accurate the reviewer was in his or her guess. The site updates its features weekly.

One change I’d like to see made: JABBIC is all about the book covers, so shouldn’t it tell who created those fronts? Crediting the designer and photographer/artist would seem the respectful thing to do.

Never to Be Matched: McGinnis Is Gone

(Above) The Case of the Duplicate Daughter, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Pocket, 1962). Cover illustration by Robert McGinnis.

Art Scott, co-author of the gorgeous 2014 book The Art of Robert E. McGinnis, brought me the sad news today that McGinnis—who became famous by painting covers for paperback books and posters for Hollywood films—died in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, on March 10. That was just a month after I posted on this page my latest tribute to him, tied to his 99th birthday.

Here is an excerpt from McGinnis’ obituary, written by two of his children and posted at the online memorial site Legacy.com:

Bob was one of the most prolific illustrators of the 20th century. It’s likely you have seen one or more of his artwork images somewhere. They appeared in magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic, Good Housekeeping, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest and Guideposts; on very many book covers (especially paperback books, spanning many genres, from Detective to Mystery to Gothic to Historical Fiction to Romance to Fantasy); in the form of personal-project paintings that included many Old West scenes; and also on movie posters for culturally significant movies (and also on soundtrack album covers). In our biased opinion, Bob was the very best of the James Bond/007 artists, having created exciting images for the posters for movies such as Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, Casino Royale (parody movie), and Live and Let Die. In 1993, Bob was inducted into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame. This was a tremendous honor for Bob. He said he had to have three drinks before walking up to the podium to deliver his acceptance speech; he was a shy and unpretentious person.

Born in Cincinnati on February 3, 1926, Bob never allowed the limited vision in one of his eyes to slow him down: playing as number 74, left tackle, on the Ohio State University undefeated team of 1944, working as a teenage apprentice at Walt Disney Studios (he met Walt), and serving on boats in the Merchant Marines right before WWII ended. He was a man’s man. Among other things, he loved fishing with friends and his son, socializing with other artists and cartoonists and writers (he was friends with some of the top illustrators and gallery artists of his generation), and playing poker with a group of friends. He reveled in being surrounded by nature, whether it was as a kid roaming the fields of his grandparents’ farm in Oxford, Ohio, or later paddling a canoe on Ahmic Lake in Ontario, or fishing amid the Catskill Mountains, or jogging around Tod’s Point with his dog, Nellie.

Much is written about Bob, in books and magazines and online, regarding his massive talent and output. He was an active, competitive and innately hard-working person, and, most of all, he loved to draw and paint. His drive to succeed and his endurance at the easel enabled him to leave behind a body of work that will never be matched. …

Remember Bob the next time Ohio State beats Michigan in football. Or when you see the Breakfast at Tiffany’s movie poster image of Audrey Hepburn with a cat perched on her shoulder. Our father created that!

This is so sad. I was hoping Robert McGinnis would be around to celebrate the centenary of his birth next February. That is not to be. Fortunately, he left behind a profusion of outstanding artworks, some more of which I am likely to post here soon. Stay tuned.

READ MORE: “Robert McGinnis (1926-2025),” by Matthew Field (MI6).

“The February Plan,” by Robert L. Duncan

The February Plan, by Robert L. Duncan (Ballantine, 1978).

Duncan, who was born in Oklahoma and died there in 1999 at age 71, was a highly productive TV screenwriter, turning out scripts for popular series such as The Man From Blackhawk, Bonanza, Have Gun, Will Travel, The Virginian, and Lost in Space. In addition, he penned mystery and thriller novels, and at least one biography, some published under the pseudonyms James Hall Roberts and W.R. Duncan.

The February Plan was published originally in 1968 by William Morrow under the author’s Roberts alias. An Amazon reader review says its story “takes place in Tokyo, Japan, and is about novelist/father Phillip Corman trying to find out what exactly happened to his Army Lieutenant son (Paul), who turns up dead shortly after the Christmas/New Year’s Day holiday. What is the Army/U.S. government trying to hide and why?”

Cover illustration by Elaine Duillo.

Another Look: “The Judas Hour”

Warning: Artistic inspiration drawn from book titles may vary.



Left: The Judas Hour, by Howard Hunt (Gold Medal, 1951); cover artist unidentified. Right: The Judas Hour, by Howard Hunt (Gold Medal, 1959), with a front painted by Charles Binger.

“Howard Hunt” is, of course, E. Howard Hunt (1918-2007). Although he later became infamous for participating in a 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington, D.C.’s Watergate Office Building (which earned him a three-year prison sentence), Hunt spent much of his career as an operative and officer in America’s Central Intelligence Agency. He also penned dozens of hard-boiled and espionage novels, many under pseudonyms such as Robert Dietrich, David St. John, and Gordon Davis.

Publisher Cutting Edge has reissued (in both print and Kindle versions) many of Hunt’s novels in recent years, including The Judas Hour.

READ MORE: “From Watergate with Love—Howard Hunt, the CIA Spy Who Wrote Fake 007 Novels” (Spyscape).