Paperback 1167: Pocket Books 1090 (1st ptg, 1955)
Title: The Devil Threw Dice
Author: Amber Dean
Cover artist: Lou Marchetti
Condition: 6/10
Value: $5-7
- Norman Bates lookin' like "aw, geez, not again."
- "She was the kind of gal that many men might kill." Oh, one of those.
- "OK, sure, I threw dice at her, but since when has that ever killed anyone? I've thrown dice at lots of girls and none of them ever died!"
- I assume that's the girl's ghost looming over him. "Thought you'd be rid of me, did you? Ha. I'm gonna haunt this stairwell til doomsday, brother!"
- Even in death, the woman must be portrayed in a way that emphasizes her shapeliness, even if that means that her left breast levitates comically skyward.
- Amber Dean ... is a woman. Not a lot of women writing this kind of hardboiled fare midcentury. She published over a dozen crime novels with Doubleday between the mid-'40s and mid-'60s. I just discovered that a. I own other books by her, and b. she was from western NY (specifically Rochester, only a few hours drive from me). The University of Rochester has her papers. The academic / detective in me wants to Start A New Project...
Best things about this back cover:
- "Someone had killed her. And it had to be a guy!" I mean, statistically, yeah, pretty much.
- I'm calling it right now. It was Putt Perry. That guy is two little arcs away from Butt Berry. Who knows what depravities someone with that name could get up to!?
- "She had an excitingly evil face" ... not one of them depressingly evil faces you see sometimes. No siree, this was an evil that could really rev a guy's engine, if you know what I mean [yeah, we get it, Putt, we get it]
- Artist credit! Lou Marchetti! A titan. Can't say that this is my favorite cover of his, but the man generally does great work.
Page 123~
Somewhere a bird twittered sleepily, and an answering twitter said "Darling, I'm here. I'll be here when you wake."
What the hell kind of twisted avian fantasy is this?!
~RP
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1 comment:
Really good floating head, but the out-of-context side-eye spoils it a little. What's she looking at?
The first paragraph on the back is badly printed. It looks like it isn't square to the book, but that might be an artifact of the angled red text. But it sure looks to me like the line spacing is bigger on the right end of the lines than on the left. For that matter, I'm not sure the red lines are at the same angle. I expect better from a top-notch outfit like Pocket Books.
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