Title: Lady in Peril / Wired for Scandal
Author: Lester Dent / Floyd Wallace
Cover artist: Uncredited / Uncredited
Yours for: $18
Best things about this cover:
- Nice, ominous, off-kilter, killer-POV shot.
- She has incredibly good posture for someone about to be brutally murdered. Style points for erect bearing and dramatic hand placement.
- This painting is like a giant metaphor for "No Means No"—What part of "Do Not Enter" do you not understand!?
- Lester Dent helped create the pulp hero Doc Savage.
Best things about this other cover:
- LOVE the design on this one. Strategic bursts of red against a semi-abstract green/white background. Nice variation on the floating head motif. Green rectangle with the tagline "Tune In And Die" brings balance and drama.
- Those guys are amazing dancers. Shake those hips, boys!
- I kind of dress like the victim but I secretly aspire to dress like the killer.
Page 123~
"Can I look around?"
"Look, but keep your prints to yourself."
"I left some last night."
"If you know what I mean…"
~RP
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]
4 comments:
If someone with a gun is coming at me, I don't care if the door says "Do Not Enter." I'm entering!
The back cover can only remind me of the theme song for "Weeds" - "little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky," etc., a truly horrible earworm that I wish SO much I'd never heard. Bleccchhh.
I first read the line just below the price on the cover as "Marked down with a vengeance" and thinking "35 cents is pretty cheap; I wonder what the regular price was".
I'm not so sure about the action scene on Wired for Scandal. It feels like it's been reskinned from a western. The killer's posture is totally that of a guy who has just drawn from his leg holster and is getting off a quick shot. I do like the way his tie is blowing, though.
Lester Dent is best known today for creating Doc Savage, but he was a lot more. He was one of the million-words-a-year men of the pulp era alongside the Shadow's Walter Gibson, and quite a fascinating character in his own right.
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