Also, please call my parents and tell them this wasn't my fault. They'll only believe it coming from you.
We can never see a hostage cover without thinking of our own experience with this crime, but we don’t have to go into it here—we already did a while back. So let’s focus on the art. Ellen Edisson’s Enkele reis Moskou (“one-way trip to Moscow”) came from Dutch publisher Uitgeverij Nooit Gedacht in 1960 for its Zwarte Molen collection and the art is by James Dwyer, which he originally painted for Collier’s magazine and a John D. MacDonald short story titled “Flight of the Tiger.” Maybe. Or—stick with us here—it was painted by Dwyer, but based on an illustration by Ward Brackett, also for Collier’s. Sources vary on that. To make things even more confusing, Dwyer’s or Brackett’s art was used in 1958 by Spanish publishers Editorial Molino for their translation of Agatha Christie’s The Big Four, titled in Spanish Los quatros grandes. We could dig deeply into this and sort it out, but why bother? It’s the digital age. Everybody knows everything, but nobody knows anything. There’s another edition of the book to be seen here.
Stick your nose into something volatile and it's liable to blow up in your face.
We said we’d be surprised if Geoffrey Household’s 1948 adventure Arabesque were better than The Adversary. Not only wasn’t it better—we didn’t enjoy it. Household was an intelligence officer during World War II, spending part of that time in the Middle East, so the novel’s setting in Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt is one he knew well, but perhaps in his effort to relate the details of espionage he forgot those of plot movement. It was only his third novel of twenty-four. Before we opened it we thought it might be the source for the fun Gregory Peck/Sophia Loren movie Arabesque, but that was actually adapted from Gordon Cotler’s 1966 novel The Cipher. Arabesque follows idealistic British-French woman Armande Herne, as she’s living in Beirut and trying to find political purpose in life. She’s drawn into a couple of wild capers in Palestine, precipitating her relocation to Cairo, where romance blossoms. An interesting part of the book is Household’s musings on a nascent Israel, but unless you crave contemporaneous perspectives on that subject, we don’t think Arabesque is the best usage of valuable time. The cover on this Consul edition, by the way, is the work of Renato Fratini.
Jesus, dude, get off my ass! The town is exploding! Can't you forget your stupid grudge until we're out of here?
This Pan Books cover for Hammond Innes’s 1950 Italy based thriller The Angry Mountain doesn’t quite work, in our view, but it struck us because we could imagine the conversation between cover artist “FVM”, who was in actuality Francis Marshall, and Pan’s art department.
Art director: “For the cover art we need the hero, the villain with a gun, a chase, the volcano in mid-eruption, lava flowing through the streets, and a pretty good sense of eighteenth century Neapolitan architecture. Sound good?”
Marshall: “Er… sure.”
Which is to say this cover might have been improved had Marshall ditched any single major element, but we suspect he had little choice about composition. Even so, it’s better than we could do. 1954 on this edition. We talked about the book and its 1952 cover by Mitchell Hooks here.
Bond takes a relaxing vacation but somehow finds trouble anyway.
This edition of Thunderball from publishers Jonathan Cape is said to be rare, but it wasn’t expensive. While some vendors out there try to sell it for two-hundred dollars, ours was twelve. This was Fleming’s eighth Bond novel, and it has two publication credits, one from Glidrose Productions, the other from Jonathan Cape, both 1961. We’re not going to try figuring that out other than to note that this is a Book Club edition, and the second publisher probably came on board for that reason. The book’s background contains other complications. It was the novelization of the Thunderball screenplay, which hadn’t been filmed yet, and multiple people had a hand in it. Fleming received sole credit initially, then after legal challenges Thunderball producer Kevin McClory and screenwriter Jack Whittingham were added later.
We were drawn to this edition not only by the price but by the cover art, though the hardback we posted in this group has an even better front, one could argue. The creator on this edition isn’t credited, and we can’t decipher the signature at bottom right. It’s “cut-” something, maybe “cuthbert.” No idea, really. Though the art wraps onto the spine, the rear advertises novels by other authors, so there’s nothing notable going on there. Why are there two 1961 editions with different art? One source suggests that the original Jonathan Cape art was damaged when the Book Club edition was being put together, so a rush job was commissioned, and that’s what you see here. Sounds plausible, and it’s a possible reason for the lack of artist attribution.
Anyway, Bond, who admits to going through half a bottle of hard liquor and smoking sixty cigarettes every day, is sent by his bosses to a British rejuvenation retreat called Shrublands. There, of all places, he stumbles upon hints of a secret international organization that will turn out to be SPECTRE—Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion—headed by the soon-to-be-infamous Ernst Stavro Blofeld. SPECTRE subsequently hijacks a military plane and its two nuclear bombs, then threatens to use them unless paid £100,000,000. That would be nearly £3 billion today. The mission undertaken by the Western powers to find the bombs is codenamed Operation Thunderball. Bond is sent off to the sultry Bahamas to try picking up the trail of the hijackers there.
The book’s resemblance to the movie is strong of course, but there are a few small surprises even if you’ve seen the film. Example: Did you know the character Domino—played by Claudine Auger in the film—has one leg shorter than the other? Just an interesting note. Overall, in cases of cult literature it’s useful to turn to fans, and Bond fans rate Thunderball after eight other books, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. We wonder whether the known fingerprints of two other participants in the forms of McClory and Whittingham downgrades it on principle for some Bond-o-philes. While it’s true various ideas would have come from that pair, the writing is still Fleming’s. You get a tropical setting, underwater action, a wily villain, and in the end it all makes for a very, well, Bond adventure.
Thank you for hearing my complaints, but I can't help noticing that in your new hat-based hierarchy I'm still on the bottom.
There were many editions of Peter Cheyney’s Dark Bahama released. We’ve already looked at three. Above is another, a Harlequin-Pan edition from 1956, which caught our eye because of the hats. Harlequin and Pan collaborated on only about a dozen books. It was veteran Harlequin illustrator Paul Anna Soik who got the cover nod. Click here, here, and here to see more of his work.
It's not which path you choose. It's whose path you cross.
We couldn’t resist this one. A book set in Venice, California? As former residents, sign us up. In The Venetian Blonde, A.S. Fleischman tells us about a professional card cheat named Skelly whose sudden loss of the ability to deal cost his backer $125,000 during a high stakes poker game. He’s fled from Boston across the country to Venice, California to escape retribution, but in need of money becomes embroiled in a fake spiritualist scheme engineered by a femme fatale named Maggie Williams.
It’s one thing to scam a hundred dollars promising someone a chat with their dead relative. It’s another thing entirely promising to bring the relative back from the dead for a cool $150,000. That’s some trick, but Maggie has it all figured out. She isn’t the Venetian blonde of the title, though. That would be redemptive archetype Viola, wandering around a subplot and making Skelly think there’s a good future for him. Is there? Maybe, if he doesn’t end up in the great beyond himself.
The central scam in The Venetian Blonde is nearly impossible to buy, but Fleischman makes the book a good read by utilizing a jazzy style we don’t come across often enough in old fiction. Slang trips off Skelly’s tongue fast and funny. Being broke is “tap city” or “tapioca.” Cigarettes are “gaspers.” Dollars are “piastres,” as in the old Egyptian currency. He calls the entire medium con “fakus,” as in, “It really wasn’t my brand of fakus.” He says at one point, “Venice on a Sunday night was skid row with seaweed.”
Literary slang slingers are usually cynical, and Skelly is no exception. He’s unimpressed with Venice. He describes it as a tidepool, a backwater. It wasn’t when we lived there, and our personal connection to a bustling L.A. enclave depicted as a crumbling, dead-end resort is certainly a reason we liked the book, but in our opinion Fleischman’s work in The Venetian Blonde will also easily entertain readers who’ve never laid eyes on Venice. There’s no fakus in his writing. It’s concise, acerbic, colorful, and confident.
We filled in another Michael Caine blank last night by watching The Ipcress File. Adapted from Len Deighton’s 1962 novel, the movie opens when a government scientist named Radcliffe disappears from a train with a piece of important technological equipment—a “proto proton scattering device.” He’s one of seventeen scientists to disappear in the last two years, but the presumption is that he’s alive somewhere. Caine, an “insolent, insubordinate, trickster,” is assigned to a Home Office department tasked with the case. Pretty quickly he gets a line on the missing equipment and his bosses decide to buy it back. They manage it, and retrieve Radcliffe too, though he doesn’t remember anything that happened to him. But there may be more going on than mere amnesia.
The first thing you’ll notice about The Ipcress File is its canted angles. There are dozens of such shots. Generally they’re used in film to heighten tension, or denote a fundamental change in the nature of a narrative. For instance Steven Spielberg uses one in Jaws the first time Roy Schieder sees the shark. Everything has changed from that point, because they’re definitely “gonna need a bigger boat.” In The Ipcress File these angles decrease as the movie progresses and Caine gets closer to the truth. We thought the backwards use of the device was pretty clever.
There are numerous other unusual camera techniques used as well, some just for style, such as a few references to film noir, and others used symbolically (keep an eye out for a bright red lampshade used in combination with an important plot revelation). There’s a lot of exterior work too, so you’ll get to see a London that has largely gone under the bulldozer as the city was remade into the favored moneylaundering center it is today. In fact, merits of the story aside, The Ipcress File is a filmmaking clinic. Director Sidney J. Furie and cinematographer Otto Heller deserve a lot of credit for thinking outside the box—or overthinking, depending on your opinion.
The Ipcress File was meant to be an anti-Bond, a prosaically realistic spy movie, as opposed to the flair and gadgetry of the Connery series. But purely on paper it’s not actually much different from Bond—it’s just paced more deliberately. Caine still beds down with a willing helper (Sue Lloyd). Other spies are still shot dead. While there are some nods to boring paperwork and grinding bureaucracy, in order to put bottoms in cinema seats spy movies need action and The Ipcress File has enough to sustain its momentum. The fact that it spawned four sequels says plenty. Like many Caine films its reputation has grown after some tepid contemporary reviews, to the point that it’s now revered by most lovers of British film. We wouldn’t say it deserves reverence. But it’s very respectable. It premiered today in 1965.
It’s difficult to tell precisely what’s happening on this Tommy Shoemaker cover for C.S. Cody’s, aka Leslie Waller’s, horror novel The Witching Night, but it’s still an eye-catching piece. We figured the art would make sense once we read the book and it did. The tale follows Joe Loomis, a Chicago doctor whose long lost pal Colin reappears in his life but wastes away over the next several weeks suffering from debilitating headaches while hinting at possible supernatural causes. After he dies Loomis learns that Colin has willed him all his worldly goods, and amongst the trove are items pointing toward a cabal of satanists. Loomis probes, for his trouble begins suffering debilitating headaches himself, and learns that another person died of them before Colin. Uh oh. He’s a doctor not an investigator but he’ll need to toughen up if he hopes to survive. You get all the expected notes here—black masses in the wilderness, naked maidens, strange artifacts, and more. Cody relates it well, with considerable creepiness, making The Witching Night one of the better early- to mid-period horror novels. Hail Satan!
Kneel! Very good! Beg! Gooood girl! Now roll over and you'll get a treat.
Don’t blame us. It was PI-1 who said the female figure on the cover of Roy Chanslor’s 1953 novel The Naked I looked like she was doing a trick for a glass of Champagne. Anytime she tries to help with this website we have to go with it. And she’s right—no? This looks like trick-for-treat. For our part, we can understand the motivation—we’d kneel for a glass of Champagne too. The art is not credited, unfortunately. We could take a guess who painted it, but we’d probably be wrong, so why bother?
The Naked I is another Hollywood melodrama but with more verve than usual. The main character Maggy McLeod is a stuntwoman turned actress who becomes so famous she’s soon a one-name superstar—simply Maggy—whose many relationships become tabloid fodder. The narrative follows her affairs, marriages, and splits in multi-pov style, with the various characters narrating their parts in her life. There are many liaisons, as the salacious rear cover text implies, but the book isn’t a sex romp. It’s an attempt at serious literature, though within the popular fold.
A portrait of Maggy emerges—she’s sweet, liberated, and sentimental, yet far too career oriented to be distracted from her goals by the wants and wishes of men. At least until that special one finally comes along. He’s Sam Blake, an ambitious novelist slumming by deigning to write for Hollywood, driven onward by his equally ambitious wife Eve, who believes it’s her role to keep her husband on the path to literary greatness. What eventually emerges is a love triangle between Eve, Sam, and Maggy.
These characters evolve in curious ways, but for most modern readers we suspect Eve initially will be perceived to be a doormat, and Sam a cad. He has numerous affairs and Eve always takes him back. At one point she even puts a number to his sexual encounters—thirty one. It’s unclear if these are all extramarital flings or it’s more of a full body count, but it’s made clear in any case that Sam’s wanderings have been many. Why does Eve continually forgive him? She’s the most interesting character in the story, in our view, because of this question. We weren’t pleased with how Chanslor resolved it, but others may feel differently.
Other aspects are very pleasing. The Naked I is pretty much the brand-droppingnest novel you’ll ever read: Ciro’s, Mocambo, Bellodgia, Amatista, Chasen’s, Top of the Mark, 21, Romanoff’s. For pop history buffs these are like names from colonial empires long gone, as magical sounding as Constantinople and Siam. Chanslor really seems to love Hollywood, and no wonder—he was an accomplished screenwriter who produced more than sixty scripts, including Black Angel, Framed, and Cat Ballou. But like his character Sam Blake, maybe he should have written more books.
While many authors avoid making their main characters too autobiographical, in The Naked I Chanslor leans hard the other direction. We can assume he largely is Blake. That’s rammed fully home when Blake finally sits down to write the great American novel, and it’s called—guess what? Yup. The Naked I. “Any resemblance to actual persons is purely coincidental.” Sure, sure, Roy, you’re not Blake. But we get you: Follow your dreams, never compromise, in art or in women. And superstar Maggy tells us: Follow your dreams, never compromise, in art or in men. They’re a perfect match.
It's a game to the boys who pay to play, but not so much for the girls.
We picked Frank Bonham’s 1961 novel The Skin Game because it was another cheapie with good cover art. That’s it. We knew nothing about its contents. The book is excellent. It’s well written, involvingly and believably plotted, interestingly characterized, and—by chance—topical. Ex-cop Sam Garrett is a parole officer searching for his AWOL parolee Gene Forman, also formerly a cop, now a sex offender, a statutory rapist. Forman evades capture while claiming his jailing was a set-up. He says his framers, who he had been investigating, are a group that lures men seeking sex with under-sixteens, and later blackmails them. Garrett, who worked with Forman when they were both cops, believes the story and decides to help Forman prove his claims—assuming they’re true.
In 1961 part of this book’s believability would have derived from many readers’ assumptions that, even without the existence of concrete evidence, its crimes were probably happening somewhere. In 2026 we know concretely that powerful men raped children, and we even know where somewhere was. The maneuvering on behalf of this cabal of rich monsters reveals the true, servile faces beneath the masks worn by government and law enforcement, and more broadly, is proof of moral vacuity at the very heart of America. It will never be forgotten. We won’t tell you how The Skin Game ends, but we can tell you that, because it’s built around a protagonist in Garrett who wants to bring rich child rapists to justice, it feels like reading speculative fiction.
In the U.S., CIA director Allen Dulles launches a program codenamed MK-ULTRA, which involves the surreptitious use of drugs such as LSD to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function. The specific goals of the program are multifold, but focus on drugging world leaders in order to discredit them, developing a truth serum, and making people highly susceptible to suggestion. All of this is top secret, and files relating to MK-ULTRA’s existence are destroyed in 1973, but the truth about the program still emerges in the mid-seventies after a congressional investigation.
1945—Franklin Roosevelt Dies
U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt dies of a cerebral hemorrhage while sitting for a portrait in the White House. After a White House funeral on April 14, Roosevelt’s body is transported by train to his hometown of Hyde Park, New York, and on April 15 he is buried in the rose garden of the Roosevelt family home.
1916—Richard Harding Davis Dies
American journalist, playwright, and author Richard Harding Davis dies of a heart attack at home in Philadelphia. Not widely known now, Davis was one of the most important and influential war correspondents ever, establishing his reputation by reporting on the Spanish-American War, the Second Boer War, and World War I, as well as his general travels to exotic lands.
1919—Zapata Is Killed
In Mexico, revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata is shot dead by government forces in the state of Morelos, after a carefully planned ambush. Following the killing, Zapata’s revolutionary movement and his Liberation Army of the South slowly fall apart, but his political influence lasts in Mexico to the present day.
1925—Great Gatsby Is Published
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby is published in New York City by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Though Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s best known book today, it was not a success upon publication, and at the time of his death in 1940, Fitzgerald was mostly forgotten as a writer and considered himself to be a failure.
Edições de Ouro and Editora Tecnoprint published U.S. crime novels for the Brazilian market, with excellent reworked cover art to appeal to local sensibilities. We have a small collection worth seeing.
There have been some serious injuries on pulp covers. This one is probably the most severe—at least in our imagination. It was painted for Stanley Morton's 1952 novel Yankee Trader.
