That look right there. That’s the one you never want to see on someone’s face, because even if they aren’t actually going to kill you, they’re for sure thinking about it. In Dana Chambers’ Someday I’ll Kill You, the heroine Lisa is targeted by a blackmailer who threatens to pin an accidental death on her as murder if she doesn’t pony up a hundred grand.
She summons help to her enclave in the Connecticut countryside in the form of a rugged pilot and former lover with the unlikely name Jim Steele. He’s reluctant to get involved because Lisa jilted him after a Caribbean idyll and married a wealthy psychiatrist. But he can’t resist—and really, how can he when asked by “a long-legged, slim-hipped Diana with—startlingly and unforgettably—the breasts of Venus.”?
The story unfolds from his perspective—partly obscured by the aforementioned Venusian breasts—as blackmail leads to murder, first thought to be a case of mistaken identity, then understood to be part of the plan. Steele sets about trying to unravel the scheme and to somehow insert himself back into Lisa’s bed.
Chambers, aka Albert Leffingwell, originally published this in hardback in 1939, with the Popular Library paperback edition you see above coming in ’53. There’s considerable online debate about who painted the cover art, but for now it remains in the unknown bin.
