Paperback 675: The Lodger / Mrs. Belloc Lowndes (Pocket Books 43)

Paperback 675: Pocket Books 43 (8th ptg, 1944)

Title: The Lodger
Author: Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $10


Best things about this cover:

• Love! Wall-to-wall painting, fantastic composition, creepy miasmic haze, exciting font! Creepy over-the-shoulder look, purposeful walk, murder-hand! It's all here in a bright, simple package.
• Love the quaint "Mrs." Look, a lady writer!
• I read this book (this very book) many years ago and enjoyed it. Remarkably modern-feeling, especially for a book that turns 100 this year.

Best things about this back cover:

• See. "Why?" rather than "Who?" None of this whodunnit crap for Mrs. Belloc. This puts the book more in the tradition of noir, and a lot of good contemporary crime fiction, which explores the qualities of criminality and darkness rather than merely offering a puzzle to solve.

Page 123~

"Hark to her now!" Bunting looked at his Ellen with amusement. "Contrary isn't the word for her! But there, I've noticed the last few days that she seemed to be taking that monster's part. That's what comes of being a born total abstainer."

Ellen: Hard on Liquor, Soft on Crime, Wrong for England.

~RP

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Paperback 574: The Innocent Mrs. Duff and The Virgin Huntress / Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (Ace Double G-509)

Paperback 574: Ace Double G-509 (1st thus / 1st thus, 1963)

Title: The Innocent Mrs. Duff / The Virgin Huntress
Author: Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
Cover artist: Uncredited / Uncredited

Yours for: $11

Best things about this cover:

• Singularly ugly. The only thing I can really get behind here is her hair, cutting its epic, destructive path across the lower Great Lakes.
• Cat: "Meow, why am I in this picture. Meow."
• Why has the lady incompletely painted her face like the Italian flag?
• That insane Puritan-looking doll is one of the creepiest things I've ever seen on a cover. At least I  hope that's a doll. . .
• Somewhere, a magician mourns his exclusion from this painting.

Best things about this other cover:

• More phenomenal, outsized hair. Also, she appears to be mowing the lawn with her chin.
• She reminds me of Kim Novak in "Vertigo," only with a disembodied head and scary psychokinetic powers.
• Seriously, the cover painting C-team must've got this book assignment. Blocky, ugly, head-y. Junk.

Page 123~

He was choking; he could not draw any air into his lungs. His neck swelled; there was a frightful pressure in the back of his head. O God ... This is it ...

Holding bravely tackles the issue of auto-erotic asphyxiation. Way ahead of her time.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]

Paperback 485: Rage in Heaven / James Hilton (Avon [39])

Paperback 485: Avon [39] (unnumbered) (1st ptg, 1943)

Title: Rage in Heaven
Author: James Hilton
Cover artist: Uncredited (I have "Gonzales" written on the tag ... don't know why)

Yours for: $14

Best things about this cover:

• "Hey, nice uraeus" (try saying that to the next pretty lady you see — see where it gets you)
• For a very early paperback, this one is unusually realistic (and sexy) in its depiction of the female form. You don't start seeing real GGA (Good/Great Girl Art) until the late '40s. In the early years of mass market paperbacks, the cover art tends to be more abstract, or more in the vein of magazine illustration. Paperbacks were still concerned with aligning themselves with good (i.e. edifying, or at least inoffensive) books. The selling power of the Lurid had not yet impressed itself on the paperback sellers of America. It didn't take long.
• Looks like that soft shoe guy is getting zapped by the laser goggles of some space monster.

Best things about this back cover:

• Shakespeare Head Say: Reading is GOOD for you.
• Wartime book. Wartime message. 

Page 123~

She felt then that he, Ward, was her husband, and that Philip, weak and puny on the bed in the next room, was their child, whom they had watched over and tended together. 

That's some awkward role-playing game they've got going there.

~RP