Above is a Victor Kalin cover for the John D. MacDonald thriller Soft Touch, a book that originally appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine as Taint of the Tiger in March 1958, back when Cosmo used to print abridged novels.
It’s the story of a man whose old war buddy approaches him with an offer to commit a seven-figure heist. The idea is to rob a courier of cash he’s shuttling from Latin America. The lead character is willing to do the job because his work sucks, he misses military action, and his wife is a cheating lush. Basically, he sees the crime as a way out, but of course he actually ends up getting way in—everything goes wrong.
Taint of the Tiger was published in hardback as Soft Touch shortly after its Cosmo debut, and appeared in August the same year as a Dell paperback edition, above, with Kalin’s art. This is MacDonald before he invented Travis McGee, which, as we’ve mentioned before, is where we—and consensus concurs—he did his best work. This one isn’t perfect, but it’s well worth a read.
