Paperback 1149: Dell 550 (1st ptg, 1951)
Title: Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective
Author: Agatha Christie
Cover artist: Rafael de Soto
Condition: 7+/10
Value: $8
[Autumn Leaves, Ithaca, NY, summer '25]
- Hey, alright, balding middle-aged bespectacled guy gets to be semi-heroic. You don't see that every day.
- This lady is really bringing the hand action. Fear Hand™ reaching out toward us, while the other hand clutches her throat. Meanwhile, the guy's hands are also pretty busy, one of them holding and guiding the young woman, the other holding a handkerchief to his face (surely a more effective survival strategy than self-strangulation)
- I assumed they were fighting their way through poisoned gas, but maybe it's just a smoke from a fire. But if it was a fire, I assume we'd be getting more clearly FIRE iconography. Where are the flames? Since when do fires give off a kind of mauve miasma?
- Rafael de Soto was one of the artists who jumped from pulps to paperbacks, and you can really see the pulp expertise here. So good at conveying drama and action, so many nice little details—the wrinkles in his brow, for instance, or her bracelet, or his surprisingly stylish purple tie. If he's gonna die, he's gonna die in style!
Best things about this back cover:
- Mapback! God bless Dell for the Mapback period. Every back cover a cartological adventure!
- If ever there was an image of imperialism ... Great Britain is barely on this map, but the Houses of Parliament, seem to have invaded and absolutely crushed eastern Europe and Russia.
- The iconography is perfect. Paris has the Arc de Triomphe, Britain has Parliament, Turkey's got minarets, Egypt's got pyramids, and then there's Iraq, which is represented, of course, by its world famous bus.
Page 123~
"Oh, yes! Edward's a perfect angel." She hesitated. "Not, perhaps, very much go to him. Just a little—well, I'd call it strait-laced. Lot of Puritan ancestry and all that. But he's a dear," she added hastily.
"Where oh where did my go go? Why is it so low? I'll never know"—Edward
~RP
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Letterboxd]
2 comments:
My inner six-year-old is yelling "He who smelt it, dealt it!". Does the hand on her shoulder belong to the man? Because it looks to be around 50% through a werewolf transformation. I do like the details of his ring and her bracelet, which she apparently stole off of another six-year-old.
Looking at the back cover, I‘ve learned that "Stamboul" was the common usage, for the ancient core city, until "Istanbul" was officially adopted in the 1930s to refer to the entire city. I also note the careful avoidance of location names around the Transjordanian border. What is that crest in the map’s top left-hand corner? Is it just a generic "Britain is posh" sigil?
It’s worth looking up "Parker Pyne Investigates" on Wikipedia to see the unspeakable horror of the cover for the original UK edition. This 1951 US cover is a treat.
I like how clear it is that his hands are not those of a young man. It's the sort of detail that's easily overlooked by artists.
It's been decades since I read the Parker Pyne stories, since I didn't much care for them the first time. I'd have said they were all set in the UK. Given all the Middle Eastern locations, a lot of them must have been written after Christie married archaeologist Max Mallowan. Maybe I should give these another go.
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