Paperback 777: The Thursday Turkey Murders / Craig Rice (Pocket Books 461)

Paperback 777: Pocket Books 461 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: The Thursday Turkey Murders
Author: Craig Rice
Cover artist: William Wirtz

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• Would not have thought a cover featuring a half-naked woman could be this dull and ugly, but evidence is evidence.
• Seriously, terrible painting. I can't even glean context from this thing. Where is she? It's like she's in some creepy guy's ice-fishing shack, looking out in a Dali-esque winter landscape. After an earthquake that has left everything oddly atilt. Plus the painting is all smeary. Blargh.
• Craig Rice was a woman. See also Leigh Brackett. They both ghost-wrote novels for actor George Sanders in the 1940s.

Best things about this back cover:

• This book is part of Rice's "Bingo and Handsome" series, which is the title of a mediocre TNT comedy-crime drama waiting to happen.
• "Baby, your skin is the color of extra-thick whipping cream." Nope. You can say this in as many different voices as you like. Not sexy.
• I will say that "A figure that would have made Venus jump back into the ocean" is pretty damn good, as cover copy writing goes (admittedly low bar).

Page 123~

"Now a bullet from a high-powered rifle would go through a feller's head and come out the other side without making much of a hole, providing the feller had the right kind of bones in his skull and that the rifle was shot off from far enough way [sic]."

I have no idea what it means, but "The Right Kind of Bones" would make an excellent book title.

~RP

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Paperback 362: Bury Me Deep / Harold Q. Masur (Pocket Books 558)

Paperback 362: Pocket Books 558 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: Bury Me Deep
Author: Harold Q. Masur
Cover artist: William Wirts

Yours for: $20


Best things about this cover:

• A quintessential keyhole cover (yes, it's a thing) — and an early one. Turns reader into an implied voyeur / peeping tom.
• 1948 (or thereabouts) seems to be a turning point in cover art — covers start to become more sensational, more sexual, more lurid ... If you click on "1947" or earlier in the tags for this site (sidebar), you'll see what I mean. Not sure why 1948 should be that year [the year of the first Kinsey Report!] ... but by the '50s, lurid and sensational will be the norm.
• I wish I could hear her undoubtedly learned disquisition on the merits of half-naked whisky-drinking.
• That underwear looks painted on, like she was drawn naked but then repurposed for this cover.
• Something about her face is off-kilter and strange, and her thumbless whisky-claw is mega-disturbing.

Best things about this back cover:

• Even the tagline is sensational. Sweet.
• "The lawyer in him" has the better cliché—hey, "inner man," who looks at a sexy woman in her underwear and thinks "gift horse!?"
• "Newest detective sensation," HA ha. How did that turn out, Scott Jordan?

Page 123~

Another shot exploded. I saw a spurt of flame from the muzzle spit luridly into the darkness beside a tree not fifty yards away. I arched my back, screamed like a frightened horse, threw out my arms and tumbled drunkenly to the ground.

Mmm, manly.

~RP

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