Paperback 601: Ace Double D-347 (1st ptg / PBO)

Title: Play For Keeps / The Corpse Without a Country
Authors: Harry Whittington / Louis Trimble
Cover artists: Uncredited / Uncredited

Yours for: $25


Best things about this cover:

• Perspective!
• Other shoe!?
• Come on, Vogue!
• Garters!?!?! Even in imminent-death, sexy as hell.
• I am very, very, very distracted by the placement of his pinky finger / left side of his hand.
• Is that Fear Hand or Buh-Bye Hand?
• "GOOD"!!! LOL x a million.

Best things about this other cover:

• Death Is A Sexy Southern Belle Raining Fuchsia Death From Above.
• The Corpse Had Womanly Hips.
• Actually, that looks like me coming out of savasana at the end of yoga class.

Page 123~

"I should have killed you. I knew. When you came in. You'd figured it. I knew. I saw it in your face."

"Too bad, Tony. It's all too bad."

Too Bad Tony would be a great nickname. Also, "It's all too bad, Tony" would be the closing aria if this were a musical / opera.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 91: The High Window / Raymond Chandler (Pocket Books 50118)

Paperback 91: Pocket Books 50118 (5th ptg, 1965)

Title: The High Window
Author: Raymond Chandler
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: SOLD (sometime in early May 2008)



Best things about this cover:

• That dude's face - absolute comedy gold
• That dude's shadow
• The fact that that dude is upside-down (rarely seen position for anyone to be in on a paperback cover). If you turn the book upside-down, that guy looks like your dad pretending to be a monster after he's had a hard day at work / a little too much to drink.
• The prissy font of the title - contrasts nicely with the imminent death of the screaming man in the grey flannel suit

This book is not officially in my collection (it sits on my ordinary bookshelf with my meant-to-be-read books), but this cover is just screaming to be in the collection. So here it is.

PAGE 123~

The room had that remote, heartless, not quite dirty, not quite clean, not quite human smell that such rooms always have. Give a police department a brand new building and in three months all its rooms will smell like that. There must be something symbolic in it. A New York police reporter wrote once that when you pass in beyond the green lights of a precinct station you pass clear out of this world, into a place beyond the law.

~RP