Paperback 273: Danger in Paradise / A.S. Fleischman (Gold Medal 295)

Paperback 273: Gold Medal 295 (PBO, 1953)

Title: Danger in Paradise
Author: A.S. Fleischman
Cover artist: Barye Phillips

Yours for: $15


Best things about this cover:

• Is she trying to crawl under some kind of tarp? What's that huge dark area above her right hand supposed to be? Pan back!
• Seriously, pan back. This woman was not meant to be appreciated at this distance. She looks scared. And smeary.
• "Her love was an invitation to death ... but first she needs to change her car's oil" (my new explanation for what she's doing on her back on the ground about to go under some dark object)
• I only just got the fact that the title is a play on the phrase "Stranger in Paradise."
• The right hand doesn't quite look like it belongs to her. And those talons are freaking me out.

Best things about this back cover:

• Oh, "Look Behind You, Lady"'s got a comma now, eh? Well, la-di-dah.
• Apollo Fry, the lost Fry Guy.
• "I flicked her chin with my knuckles" is a great euphemism for "I punched her in the face."
• "When we came out of the trance..." Wait, what? What happened between paragraphs. One second he's playfully abusing her, and the next, they're coming out of a trance?
• "... set in the troubled East." i.e. exotic downtown Trenton, NJ.
  

Page 123~

"She wouldn't be hard to fall in love with, would she?"

I clamped my jaws.

Well, that's an awkward sentence. All I can picture is him with his lower face in a vise.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 265: Look Behind You Lady / A.S. Fleischman (Gold Medal 223)

Paperback 265: Gold Medal 223 (PBO, 1952)

Title: Look Behind You Lady
Author: A.S. Fleischman
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: $14


Best things about this cover:

• All I can say is: there'd better be a comma underneath her head.
• "For the last time, fella, I'm not 'lost.' I work in this here Mexican restaurant and I'm just takin' a smoke break. And I already looked behind me, and there was nothin' but a newspaper vending machine. Now beat it!"
• Strangely the rainy street tableau in the background is far more interesting / beautiful to me than the Lady in the foreground.

Best things about this back cover:

• Damn, no comma.
• I am currently waiting for the perfect opportunity to use the line: "I'm probably signing my death warrant, baby, but I'm going to listen to you."
• Oh, SHANGHAI FLAME, you don't say ... is that ... something?

Page 123~

"I was licked in Macao."

Well, we've all been there.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]