If you lower your shades or blinds all the way it’s a deterrent. But if you leave them an inch or three open, it’s really kind of an invitation, don’t you think? Everything is sexier when viewed through a crack. The Mahatma said that. Anyway, call it peeping, voyeurism, committing a misdemeanor, or just being a complete dick—it’s a time-honored plot device in pulp and sleaze fiction. Above and below are ten of the best covers depicting the art of enjoying a cheap thrill.

 

In color therapy pink symbolizes unconditional love, and you wear it when you want someone to be instantly drawn to you. Well, that stuff must work, because we're instantly drawn to these covers by Robert McGinnis for Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason series, circa early 1960s. We were thinking about changing our website a bit, but now that we know this about the color pink, forget it. Our traffic might drop to nothing.

Stay away from the U.S. long enough and when you go back you get really good gifts. The Big Book of Pulps, above, was a belated birthday present—and what a present it is. At over 1,000 pages, this is probably the most comprehensive pulp anthology we’ve ever seen. Published in 2007 by the now defunct pulp revival specialists Black Lizard, the collection contains stories from Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, James M. Cain, Paul Cain and many others, and is even sprinkled with some ink illustrations. We’ll be working our way through this tome for the next couple of years, no doubt. Which means we should finish just in time to go back to the States again and get another great gift. Thanks Neil S. 

You may be asking yourself whether this book is really about what the cover seems to imply. Yes, Erle Stanley Gardner’s fictional attorney Perry Mason does indeed encounter a talking parrot that saw a murder. The Case of the Perjured Parrot was published in 1939, so we’re pretty sure Gardner was the first writer to conceive of such an outrageous plot device. He has plenty of fun with the idea, and his bird is full of surprises. Or birds, we should say, since there turns out to be more than one. In the end, Perry Mason learns that a parrot can be as difficult a witness as a human. Excellent cover art is by unknown.

No, it doesn’t look like that to us either. Don’t get us wrong. It isn’t bad. But top sixty? Ever? Yet we found it on a site that included it in its top sixty, along with a collection of other covers of which we can honestly say only three were excellent. There was not one Fixler or Aslan to be found. Nary a J. David, nor a Peff, nor even a hint of a Rader. Clearly, whoever put the feature together took sixty random images off Flickr (yet watermarked the art they borrowed) and called it a day. This highlights one of the main problems with the internet: it’s difficult to know which sites are primarily focused upon providing information, and which exist solely to generate traffic revenue. A site can do both (as we try to do here with our very minimal ad presence), but when some corporate pulp site that possesses endless resources somehow misidentifies the pulp era as lasting from the 1950s to 1970s, and asserts that the term “pulp” was popularized by the movie Pulp Fiction, it’s clear that information has not only taken a back seat to traffic revenue—it’s being dragged 100 feet behind the car on a rope. We would never presume to do something as subjective as select the best covers of all time, because who the hell are we? But we have, we hope, earned some credibility over the last three years. So on this, our official third anniversary, we're going to do a pulp cover collection of our own. We don't claim these are the best—only that we like them very much. We’re posting twenty-five because we’re too lazy to do sixty, but we think all of them are winners. A few have already appeared on our site; most have not. Got better ones? Use our reader pulp feature to send them. So here we go. And thanks to the sites from which we borrowed some of these.  

Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of The Sulky Girl is one of those books that was reissued many times through the years with different covers, all quite nice. This isn’t an exceedingly rare occurrence, but the quality of the art in this case is notable. Below, we have seven examples starting with the original paperback cover from 1933, followed by excellent efforts from Muni (panel three), Dawson (panel four), Peffer (panel five), McGinnis (panel seven) and unknowns. 

Above, a rare hardback dust jacket for Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Substitute Face, starring his fictional defense attorney Perry Mason, published in 1938. 

Below, fifteen pieces of pulp art with terror as their central theme. The cover in panel three from Erle Stanley Gardner is the German version of 1948's Perry Mason and the Case of the Vagabond Virgin, retitled Perry Mason und die Unschuld vom Lande, or Perry Mason and the Innocence of the Country.