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
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]
14 comments:
From the bosom down, she's fabulous. From the armpits up, not so much.
She's not dead, she's just horizontally surrendering! /cliched French joke
Is her hair like neon green?
She may be dead, but those boobs are still very much alive.
Them tendons need lookin' at by a doctor.
"Look, Sherloque..." ha!
@ Frank
Cliche, maybe, but never-fail funny!
Full disclosure: growing up, my sister and I thought "wanton" was pronounced "wonton", like the soup. Luckily, being well brought up, we never had much occasion to say it.
Also full disclosure: I totally thought it DID say wonton, and I thought, well hell, I murdered 4 of those last night...
Hey, I own that book! Not only do I own it, I used a piece of this cover on my website (on the "fiction" page.)
To expand on your point, Rex, I would have thought that it wouldn't take a famous French sleuth to look at a body and distinguish among the options of shot, slashed, poisoned, or stabbed.
"But M. Bencolin, even though she may have bled from a small slotted wound in her back, surely she died from arsenic!"
Gotta say, I love this cover. And now I have boob envy.
Yeah, because most of us Wantons, lying on our backs (let alone dead.) would not find our boobs still pertly at attention, ya know?
Best things about the cover: "...mistress to half the men in Paris."
HALF? Half? Srsly? That's like 1.35 million men.
I just can't get over the fact she wore those shoes with that dress. I mean, really, lady, are you color blind as well as a slut?
You could probably make a case -- not that I am, mind you -- that if you are "mistress to half the men in Paris" you have more than "ONE lover too many." But hey, I don't judge.
My momma raised me to believe that French women don't shave their pits.
The artist is Rudolph Belarski.
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