Paperback 294: Lady in Peril / Ben Ames Williams (Popular Library 164)

Paperback 294: Popular Library 164 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Lady in Peril
Author: Ben Ames Williams
Cover artist: Rudolph Belarski

Yours for: $23

It's "LADY IN PERIL" week at "Pop Sensation" — three early Popular Library covers all featuring ... yes, you guessed it, LADIES IN PERIL. First up, "LADY IN PERIL" —


Best things about this cover:

• "I'll be back in five minutes, I swear!"
• You have to be superhot to pull off wearing that much of that color. This lady (in peril) succeeds. Dress alone = OK, but dress + long gloves = wow.
• This cover rules and Rudolph Belarski was a pulp art genius. Such great lurid action. Just the idea of a lady dressed like this trying to escape out of what appears to be at least a second-story window — that's enough to convince me that peril is for real.
• Hand-on-wrist action right in the dead center of the cover, combined with the vividness of her splayed, aqua hand, really creates a sense of immediacy here.
• Her hair is fancy, her horrified expression believable, her rack exquisite.

Best things about this back cover:

• Inspector Tope, HA ha. That character writes itself. Not enough fall-down-drunk detectives in the crime fiction canon for my tastes.
• The sentence that begins "During..." is so convoluted that it makes me want to shoot myself, others.

Page 123~

And it was only when her back was turned that he realized she wore over her nightgown a negligee of metal cloth, bright as silver. This was Lola Cyr!

When are metal negligees going to make their comeback? I like a lady who's not afraid to wear chain mail to bed.

~RP

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Paperback 293: Give 'Em the Ax / A. A. Fair (Dell 389)

Paperback 293: Dell 389 (1st ptg, ca. 1952)

Title: Give 'Em the Ax
Author: A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner)
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: $22

Just received this book in the mail as a gift from a generous reader, C. Cope of Weatherford, TX. I already own it, but am psyched because now I have a copy to read. I'll get right on it, right after I finish rereading "The Long Goodbye" for the umpteenth time (teaching it this week). The copy offered here is from my original collection.


Best things about this cover:

• Gams. Heels, hosiery seams ... the works.
• World's shallowest bathtub.
• Where is the ax that she gave him? I wish I could see it.
• What kind of skirt is that? Looks like a pelt of some kind.
• They killed Big Bird to make that bath mat.
• I love the horrid realism of that guy's face folds.

Best things about this back cover:

• Mapback! Always awesome.
• When I open a gin joint, it will be called "Rimley's Rendezvous." Actually, scratch that. Too many syllables, a little too French. Still, it's colorful.
  
• This is like some architect's sketch pad — an architect preparing to enter a "Best Rectangular Shape-Drawing" contest.
• Love love love the bungalow-style old skool motel. Motels are the bestest of all crime novel settings.

Page 123~

Bertha's jaw was pressed forward like the prow of a battleship. "What's your proposition?" she said ominously.

If you've ever read a Lam & Cool mystery, then you know Bertha Cool is not to be @#$#ed with. She's ... imposing. 165 lbs and "hard as barbed wire." I really like Gardner's Lam/Cool stuff. Perry Mason, not so much, though, to be fair, I haven't read a Mason novel in a long, long time. Maybe it would hold my interest better now.

~RP

Paperback 292: The Four False Weapons / John Dickson Carr (Popular Library 282)

Paperback 292: Popular Library 282 (1st ptg, 1950)

Title: The Four False Weapons
Author: John Dickson Carr
Cover artist: Uncredited (Bergey? Belarski?)

Yours for: $25


Best things about this cover:

• Another deservedly famous cover. Vivid, sensational, boobtastic.
• If it weren't for the evident violence that has been committed here, I would say her posture suggests an accompanying statement of "Go ahead, take them! Take my breasts! They are all yours, cheri!"
• The tendons on the back of his left hand are doing something awfully scary.
• I love the word "wanton" as a noun.

Best things about this back cover:

• OK, OK, I get it, she was a whore, a strumpet, an easy lay, etc. No need to belabor the obvious. Give the poor dead girl a break.
• Look, Sherloque, *I* could have told you that if you find four different weapons near a body, *at least* three of them are "false."
• The last line here takes the story from contrived to ridiculous.

Page 123~

Mrs. Toller had now an air of complete boredom. You would not have thought the broad-nostrilled nose could have gone so high without absurdity, yet there it was ...

Her high bored nose now provided shelter to several small animals and a family of Hobbits. And yet still, no absurdity. Astonishing.

~RP

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Paperback 291: The Maltese Falcon / Dashiell Hammett (Pocket Books 268)

Paperback 291: Pocket Books 268 (1st ptg, 1944)

Title: The Maltese Falcon
Author: Dashiell Hammett
Cover artist: Leo Manso / Stanley Meltzoff

Yours for: Hell no

The following is so self-evidently awesome that I refuse to sully it with my usual commentary:

Here's the original 1944 cover:



And now here's the cover of the DUST JACKET (you heard me) they issued several years later (this image went on to grace the cover of a later Permabooks edition)



Page 123:

"Morning, Sam. Set down and bite an egg." The hotel-detective stared at Spade's temple. "By God, somebody maced you plenty!"

~RP

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Paperback 290: Dagger of Flesh / Richard S. Prather (Gold Medal s1157)

Paperback 290: Gold Medal s1157 (4th ptg, 1961)

Title: Dagger of Flesh
Author: Richard S. Prather
Cover artist: no idea

Yours for: not for sale (gift of Doug Peterson)


Best things about this cover:

• As I told Doug the first time he showed this to me: "Dagger of Flesh ... well, that wouldn't be very effective. It would buckle on you every time you tried to use it."
• At first I thought I was looking at a drug-addled couple sitting/lying on a bed. Then I realized they were sitting/lying on the neck of a donkey.
• Why are the man's hands bound by the wimple of a snow leopard with an Asian lady's face?
• I imagine that these two look as wasted as the artist must have been when conceiving / executing this painting.
• Trite tagline! Come on, copy writers! Shell deserves better.

Best things about this back cover:

• Op Art! I am getting dizzy...
• "Like I had no control over my brain" — been there. Am there, frequently.
• "Maybe I did kill Jay" — now now. No one wants to kill Jay himself. Just his mediocre new show.

Page 123~

This is the day, Logan, I thought. Today you get even, maybe. Today you find out what the hell's been going on and fix some bastard's wagon, if you're lucky.

"Fix some bastard's wagon" is pure awesome. I have to start using wagon-fixing as a metaphor for revenge. For real.

~RP

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Paperback 289: Kill Him Twice / Richard S. Prather (Pocket Books 55025)

Paperback 289: Pocket Books 55025 (6th ptg, 1968)

Title: Kill Him Twice
Author: Richard S. Prather
Cover artist: Schlocky Crapperson

Yours for: Not For Sale (gift of Doug Peterson)


Best things about this cover:

• Well, it's yellow. With orange font. That's pretty original.
• Her hair ... her hair ... it's OK, until it gets over her elbow, and then it becomes something unrecognizable, bordering on unholy. Are those dead stoats hanging off her head? A dirty bathmat? A skein of brownish yarn.
• It appears that Pocket couldn't afford to pay cover artists any more, and so had to resort to picking old sketches and doodles out of the waste baskets and passing them off as art. Here, we see the partial remains of "Artist practicing drawing a dead guy."
• "I said 'Kill him twice,' not "Kill him and a guy who looks just like him!'"

Best things about this back cover:

• Nice big gun hand. Can't ask for much else.

Page 123~

They were lips that said hello and were warm friends two seconds later, carrying on a conversation Cassanova would have censored, carrying on a dialogue to bring dead libidoes back from limbo, carrying on a bedroomy hoo-hah in hot, hushed whispers—man, how they carried on.

I think "hoo-hah" means something different from what I thought it meant.

~RP

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Paperback 288: Bianca in Black / Elizabeth Sax Rohmer (Airmont M3)

Paperback 288: Airmont Books M3 (1st ptg, 1962)

Title: Bianca in Black
Author: Elizabeth Sax Rohmer
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: not for sale (gift of Doug Peterson)


Best things about this cover:

• First of all, if the cover is to be believed, then the bride wore navy. Second, it appears the bride also wore a wig the color of pink lemonade.
• If Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and Sax Rohmer and Cornell Woolrich wrote a book together, it would be this book. In fact, I'm not convinced "Elizabeth Sax Rohmer" is a real person. Who gives his first name to his daughter as a middle name? Elisabeth Sanxay Holding was very big at the time this pb was published, and many of her book covers have this rain-streaked, pseudo-gothic look to them. Cornell Woolrich wrote "The Bride Wore Black," a great revenge story (though his greatest was probably Rendezvous in Black, one of my favoritest works of crime fiction of all time).
• "Bianca" means "white" in Italian. Cute.
• God, her neck is a hot mess. Looks like a colorful, irregular UPC (i.e. barcode).
• Doug Peterson gave me a bunch of campy old paperbacks when I saw him at a recent crossword tournament I attended. I'll be showcasing them all week. This is the first of four.
  

Best things about this back cover:

• Now they're just patently, blatantly, shamelessly ripping off Cornell Woolrich (who wrote "The Bride Wore Black")
• "Internationally famous mannequin"!? More famous than that chick from the movie "Mannequin?"
• I wish the front cover had more "daring black swimsuit" and less "startling red-gold hair."

Page 123~

"Normally, Natalie has a very good brain."

~RP

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Paperbacks 284-287: The work of Clark Hulings

Sorry for missing Wednesday. First week of school had me a bit overwhelmed and I completely spaced. To make up for it — a glut of paperbacks. Four, to be precise, all featuring the cover art of Clark Hulings. I culled all the Hulings covers I had and scanned them at the request of someone producing an article on Hulings for Illustration magazine. Sadly, upon perusing the covers I have, there's no signature style that I can see, and no one cover that really makes you go 'wow.' They are all very typical mid '50s covers, but only "Savage Holiday" really gives Hulings a broad enough canvas to have a real artistic impact. The others crowd the cover with text and offer only tiny pictures — mostly free-floating heads. Cover for "Winesburg, Ohio" is about as dull and generic as they come. The clear WINner here is "The Brave, Bad Girls." Bold, bright design with fantastic background use of the familiar fedora'd and trenchcoated detective. Coincidentally (I assume), two of these covers deal with interracial themes.

Paperback 284: Lion Library 47 (PBO, 1954)

Title: Strange Barriers
Author: J. Vernon Shea (ed.)

Yours for: $12


Best things about this cover:

• "Strange Fruit" + "Racial Barriers" = "Strange Barriers"
• Given the tagline, this cover is *very* disappointing. Where's the tumult, I ask!?
• These heads are drawn in different styles, to different scales, with different textures ... we get it, they're different! There's a "barrier." etc.
• Mark Schorer?

Best things about this back cover:

• "I'm enthralled by his jazz trumpeting, but his shirtless gun-toting just makes me howl with laughter."
• Man, I really, really wish I knew what was going on in that last panel.

Paperback 285: Avon T-86 (PBO!!!?, 1954)

Title: Savage Holiday
Author: Richard Wright

Yours for: $25


Best things about this cover:

• Oh no, why is bed-headed Anthony Perkins attacking Lena Horne!?
• "I was just borrowing your Dick Tracy trenchcoat! I swear I was gonna put it back!"
• Love the random pseudo-japonesque pattern on those curtains.
• "I've made my decision, Steve. I choose the roses — not you."
• Her hands look very wrong — like she's got extra fingers or stubby fingers or fused fingers or something.

Best things about this back cover:

• The first and last time "The Yale Review" was used as a blurb on a paperback book.

Paperback 286: Signet 1304 (2nd ptg, 1956)

Title: Winesburg, Ohio
Author: Sherwood Anderson

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• "Breathe, damn you, breathe! Oh, why won't that doctor stop staring wistfully into the distance and get over here and help me!"

Best things about this back cover:

• Why is there no picture of "The girl who walked naked in the rain"!? Booooo!
• Thank god my neighbors "completely hide their private lives from" me. Barely repressed anger + miniature fainting couches (!?) = some crazy-ass !@#@ I don't need to know about.

Paperback 287: Perma Books M-3089 (1st ptg, 1957)

Title: The Brave, Bad Girls
Author: Thomas B. Dewey

Yours for: $9


Best things about this cover:

• Damned sticker pull!
• Red-on-yellow Totally makes this cover pop. Beautiful.
• Looove the expression on Girl 1 — nice, smug F@#$ You expression to complement the (in order) Just Woke Up, Meek and Scared, and Suicidally Depressed expressions of the others.

Best things about this back cover:

• "A Man! A Man, I say!"
• "A large pea?" — wtf? Like ... a marble? A dime? How big is a "large pea?" Are we talking freakishly, County-Fair-ribbon-winning large or what?
• Things Not To Say To A Lady You Just Met: "Just for tonight ... I wish you were seventeen."

Page 123~

• I was a friend of Karl Kadek's ("The Brave, Bold Girls")
• He took a cheap revolver from the case and began to wave it about. "You get out of here!" he shrieked. "We don't want any collar fasteners here!" ("Winesburg, Ohio")
• "On a Sunday morning?" There was a trace of scorn in his voice. "And what would he be doing barefooted?" ("Savage Holiday")
• Then he saw the hole in Jenny's side, right between the ribs. It was round, wet, red. ("Almos a Man" by Richard Wright —from "Strange Barriers")

Jenny is a mule, for the record.

~RP

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