The thing about GGA covers is they often mislead in terms of written content. The dove in The Frightened Dove is not the femme fatale on the cover but rather a Mussolini underling named Colombo—Italian for dove—who’s hunted by the hero Ricci Bartoli, a retired anti-fascist fighter dragged out of his peaceful life as a tailor in New York City. Colombo is after a trove of gold, and Bartoli is out to stop him, with the crucial action taking place in Montreal. You can always tell there’s something French about a book when the cover femme is wearing a beret. And her name is Marie, which seems to be the go-to for French women in genre fiction. The story here fits squarely into the post-war political adventure niche—i.e. cleaning up the loose ends of World War II. And on the subject of pseudonyms, Hardin was actually a Hungarian author named Louis Vaczek. The Frightened Dove was originally published in hardback in 1951, with the above Bantam paperback arriving in 1952 with uncredited cover art.
