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Illustrator Tom Miller went minimalist with this cover for Jay Carr’s 1962 drama Crack-Up in Suburbia. He’s an interesting artist who’s usually self-contained in his work, but this goes to even lesser lengths. You can see a couple of examples of him being more detailed here and here. Jay Carr, who was really James P. Duff, liked his suburban dramas, as we noted a while back when we looked at his novel Suburban Lovers. And whaddaya know? Miller painted that cover too.
You could be forgiven for thinking the front of Robert Dietrich’s, aka E. Howard Hunt’s, 1961 novel Steve Bentley’s Calypso Caper was painted by Robert McGinnis, but it’s actually the work of Tom Miller. So sayeth the rear cover, otherwise we’d have guessed McGinnis and had little doubt.
What’s truly doubtless, though, is that Hunt rescued the Steve Bentley adventures from an ignoble death by toning down the invective. In this episode, the seventh Hunt wrote and the third we’ve read, Bentley is sent down to the steamy island of St. Thomas to help with a tricky tax case and arrives in time to see his client jailed on suspicion of murder. What’s an accountant to do at that point? He launches his own investigation.
It’s all very unlikely, but it works this time around, and Hunt manages to do well with island flavor (though he’s not particularly kind to island inhabitants). There’s plenty of action, drinking, sexual intrigue, and repartee. This is well above average work from Mr. Watergate. So, after a success, a failure, and today’s success, what next? We’ll leave on a high note. E. Howard, we barely knew ye.
Above: a very nice Tom Miller cover for Stuart Friedman’s novel Irina, from Monarch Books, copyright 1963. The maxim, “Don’t ask don’t tell,” would seem to apply here.
Above: a cover for Carlton Joyce’s campus sleazer Fraternity Row, 1963, about a charming sociopath named Chaz Graycen III, king of the hotshot Delta Mu fraternity, who knows no bounds of taste nor conscience when it comes to using people for his own benefit. So basically it’s a deadly accurate take on entitled one percenters. The cover art is by Tom Miller, who we did a little feature on here.
There’s no end to suburban misadventures in mid-century fiction. In Sam Webster’s My Neighbor’s Wife, a sales manager at a steel company develops an interest in an employee’s wife, so he gives the employee a traveling position and tries out some positions with the wife. Webster was a pseudonym for author Ben Haas, and this is copyright 1963 with Tom Miller cover art.
Above: a nice Tom Miller cover for Suburban Lovers, Jay Carr’s tale of various married suburbanites bedding their neighbors, published 1962, for Monarch. Carr, who was in actuality James P. Duff, must have done okay with this theme, because he also published Crack-Up in Suburbia for Monarch, also in 1962.
Did you ever see the movie Doc Hollywood? Well, 1962’s A Halo for Dr. Michael is the same sort of thing—i.e., a bright young doctor passes up a glittering career in the big city (Manhattan) and practices medicine in a small southern town. He learns a little about himself, and of course finds love. Author Dorothy Worley specialized in this stuff, churning out books such as Dr. John’s Decision, Dr. Jefferey’s Awakening (are you sensing a theme here?) Dr. Michael’s Challenge, and, for a change of pace, Cinderella Nurse. It’s cheeseball stuff, but sometimes only a medical romance will scratch that itch. The cover art, in all its overwhelming pinkness, is by Tom Miller, who did a lot of work for Monarch and Fawcett. You don’t hear his name mentioned with the top rank of pulp artists, but he was a first rate stylist who created more than a few classic images. We’ve collected a few below so you can see for yourself. 
BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.
Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.
Actress Joanne Woodward receives the first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the Los Angeles sidewalk at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street that serves as an outdoor entertainment museum. Woodward was one of 1,558 honorees chosen by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce in 1958, when the proposal to build the sidewalk was approved. Today the sidewalk contains more than 2,800 stars.
Satchel Paige becomes the first player from America’s Negro Baseball League to be voted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Paige, who was a pitcher, played for numerous Negro League teams, had brief stints in Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the Major Leagues, before finally retiring in his mid-fifties.
The Allende Meteorite, the largest object of its type ever found, falls in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The original stone, traveling at more than ten miles per second and leaving a brilliant streak across the sky, is believed to have been approximately the size of an automobile. But by the time it hit the Earth it had broken into hundreds of fragments.
