Above: a 1959 with cover painted by Stephen Richard Boldero, who signed as S.R. Boldero, for The Plunderers by L.P Holmes, from Corgi Books. We think this is beautiful work.
We're too late? Seriously? Are we at least in time for the hoe-down?
Hmph. Her thrashing around really frothed up the water. That must be some high quality bubble bath.
Above: Sydney Horler’s Murder is So Simple, published originally published in 1943, with this Corgi paperback coming in 1954.Horler was a prolific British novelist who produced more than 150 novel in various genres. He’s well known for creating the character of Tiger Standish, and possibly even better known for being a frothing racist. The art for Murder Is So Simple looks like it’s signed by someone named Thorpe, who we haven’t run into before. It’s a workmanlike effort that does the job with no frills. You can consider it an addition to our collection of death in bathtubs covers, which you can see at this link, and we have a couple of other bath related covers here and here.
Cryin' won't help you, prayin' won't do you no good.
We enjoyed an excellent tale not long ago in John and Ward Hawkins’ natural disaster thriller A Girl, a Man, and a River, which was also published as The Floods of Fear by Corgi Books, as you see above. The striking art on this edition is by John Richards. You can read more about the book here.
This is the part of dating I hate. Getting caught by my husband.
Above: a cover for Michael Underwood’s 1961 novel Cause of Death, part of a series starring franchise character Detective-Superintendent Simon Manton. Underwood, who was in reality John Michael Evelyn, wrote more than fifty novels during his literary career, with Det. Manton starring in more than a dozen. This cover was painted by Josh Kirby, an interesting artist we don’t encounter often, but who we’ve managed to highlight three times. You can see those here, here, and here. This one would have fit nicely with our collection of covers featuring couples caught in the act of cheating. Check here for that.
What do you mean do something? Generally, people just look at me and applaud.
This is a lovely cover for The Package, aka The Package Deal, by Willis T. Ballard. It’s a book we talked about and shared a cover for a few years ago. We don’t know which art we like better. Probably the above example. Both illustrations are uncredited, but this one could be by John Richards. His work was appearing on Corgi fronts around this time, 1959 in this case.
This has nothing to do with genocide and land theft, English! I just hate your fucking face!
On this cover for Lauran Paine’s novel The Farthest Frontier, illustrator Roger Hall depicts how even in the midst of tectonic historical upheavals there are moments of interpersonal drama. Like this knife fight, which started over confusion about whether trade talks were dressy casual, or just casual. 1957 copyright.
I've been working on some fresh runway poses. I call this one: sociopathicool.
Above: a cover for Australian author Neville Jackson’s, aka Gerald Glaskin’s 1965 novel No End to the Way. What you see here is a 1967 edition from the British publisher Corgi. This is a significant book, one of the first novels with gay themes to be widely available in Australia. It wasn’t legal to mail into the country, so Corgi, the legend goes, flew it in aboard chartered planes to skirt the law.
Plotwise what you get here is a drama about Ray and Cor, two men who meet in a bar and form a relationship that becomes committed, and seems aimed toward permanence—which is exactly when their most serious challenge arises in the form of a bitter ex-lover. This ex is determined to ruin what Ray and Cor have built, up to and including slander, career damage, and more.
We were quite interested in the cover art because Corgi was a mainstream publisher, and with this bright yellow effort they gave this controversial book the full court press. The push, the art, and the quality of the story worked—it was reprinted at least twice, and in fact was Jackson’s/Glaskin’s best selling book. He was an eclectic and fairly prolific writer, so maybe we’ll run across him again later. There’s a good bio here. Now we’re going to work on that pose.
They say you can't buy love, but you just have to know where to shop.
Above: a striking cover for Gilbert Miller’s novelization of the 1957 movie The Flesh Is Weak, which is about how a ring of sex traffickers trick naive women into street prostitution. It stars Milly Vitale, and the painting here by John Richards is a very good likeness of her, despite its cartoonish style. We also like the fur. She must have borrowed it from her pimp. To see our other material on this film just click its keywords below and scroll.
Some people need a mental health day every day.
We were going to post an assortment of covers we thought were scary, but when we came across these Psycho fronts we realized they were all we needed. The creation of veteran horror author Robert Bloch and originally published in 1959, one of literature’s early homicidal psychopaths remains frightening even today. When Bloch wrote Psycho the concept of psychopathy was little known in American culture, but after Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 movie adaptation, as well as the real-world Dahmers and Specks and Bundys, that naïveté evaporated. Now everyone knows psychopaths are real and live among us.
Bloch’s man-child Norman Bates, a sadist and misanthrope with lust/hate feelings toward women, was able despite his dysfunctions to operate in society with a veneer of civility, and was capable of love, but only a stunted and twisted variety instilled by an emotionally violent forebear from whose shadow he could never fully escape. Sound like anybody you know? We have mostly front covers below, along with a rear cover and a nice piece of foldout art we found on the blog toomuchhorrorfiction. These are all English editions. We’ll show you one or two interesting non-English covers later.
British publisher Corgi slips its readers some Mickeys.
A while ago we found a cover of Mickey Spillane’s The Deep from Corgi Books and commented that we thought the art was by an Italian illustrator named Renato Fratini. That’s now confirmed. Fratini painted covers from British publishers such as Corgi, Coronet, Hodder, and Pan, and was also prolific in the realm of magazine art and movie posters. Above and below we have more of his Corgi-Spillane covers, published during the mid-1960s. Fratini sometimes produced alternate versions of these, and other times Corgi changed the background colors for later editions, which means there are even more Fratini-Spillane pieces out there to be found. We also couldn’t find a usable cover for Bloody Sunrise, starring his spy character Tiger Mann. Maybe we’ll have better luck with that later. But as it stands, this is a nice little collection showcasing an interesting artist who we think deserves to be more widely known.
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HISTORY REWIND
The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1920—League of Nations Holds First Session
The first assembly of the League of Nations, the multi-governmental organization formed as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, is held in Geneva, Switzerland. The League begins to fall apart less than fifteen years later when Germany withdraws. By the onset of World War II it is clear that the League has failed completely.
1959—Clutter Murders Take Place
Four members of the Herbert Clutter Family are murdered at their farm outside Holcomb, Kansas by Richard “Dick” Hickock and Perry Smith. The events would be used by author Truman Capote for his 1966 non-fiction novel In Cold Blood, which is considered a pioneering work of true crime writing. The book is later adapted into a film starring Robert Blake.
1940—Fantasia Premieres
Walt Disney’s animated film Fantasia, which features eight animated segments set to classical music, is first seen by the public in New York City at the Broadway Theatre. Though appreciated by critics, the movie fails to make a profit due to World War II cutting off European revenues. However it remains popular and is re-released several times, including in 1963 when, with the approval of Walt Disney himself, certain racially insulting scenes were removed. Today Fantasia is considered one of Disney’s greatest achievements and an essential experience for movie lovers.
1912—Missing Explorer Robert Scott Found
British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his men are found frozen to death on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica, where they had been pinned down and immobilized by bad weather, hunger and fatigue. Scott’s expedition, known as the Terra Nova expedition, had attempted to be the first to reach the South Pole only to be devastated upon finding that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them there by five weeks. Scott wrote in his diary: “The worst has happened. All the day dreams must go. Great God! This is an awful place.”
1933—Nessie Spotted for First Time
Hugh Gray takes the first known photos of the Loch Ness Monster while walking back from church along the shore of the Loch near the town of Foyers. Only one photo came out, but of all the images of the monster, this one is considered by believers to be the most authentic.
1969—My Lai Massacre Revealed
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the story of the My Lai massacre, which had occurred in Vietnam more than a year-and-a-half earlier but been covered up by military officials. That day, U.S. soldiers killed between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians, including women, the elderly, and infants. The event devastated America’s image internationally and galvanized the U.S. anti-war movement. For Hersh’s efforts he received a Pulitzer Prize.
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Robert McGinnis cover art for Basil Heatter’s 1963 novel Virgin Cay.
We've come across cover art by Jean des Vignes exactly once over the years. It was on this Dell edition of Cave Girl by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Untitled cover art from Rotterdam based publisher De Vrije Pers for Spelen op het strand by Johnnie Roberts.
Italian artist Carlo Jacono worked in both comics and paperbacks. He painted this cover for Adam Knight's La ragazza che scappa.
