Pocket 1274

Title : So Dead the Rose

Author : Chaber, M. E.

Cover art : Jerry Allison  

  [N. Y. : Pocket, 1960. Number 1274. Pseud. of Kendall Foster Crossen. Front cover art : Jerry Allison. First printing. Originally published in hardcover, New York, Rinehart, 1959].

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“She was dangerous – but beautiful!” 

Vintage Cold War skullduggery in East Berlin & Moscow : insurance investigator (and former OSS & CIA agent) Milo March is recruited by the CIA to recover stolen government files. Jerry Allison’s front cover art for the Pocket reissue depicts the elegantly sinister Soviet femme fatale in most alluring, spider-woman fashion.

Signet 1755 (1960)

Title : Cobra Venom
Author : John B. West
Cover art : Jerry Allison 
  [New York, Signet, 1960. No. 1755].

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John B. West's Rocky Steele was a lively entry into the crowded field of private eye fiction in the late 1950s. According to one source, Steele was a P.I. so tough he made Mike Hammer look like Liberace [1]. But what was probably most interesting about this series was that author John B. West was a black physician practising in West Africa [2], as well as a part-time owner of a broadcasting company, manufacturing firm, and a hotel/restaurant chain, when he wrote the Steele thrillers. A good summary of the Rocky Steele aesthetic can be found here and here. 

Fittingly, the John B. West novels were rather well served by vintage cover art; even the mid sixties reissues, while lacking perhaps the naive, visceral charm of the Signet originals, nonetheless have a beguiling elegance of their own. 

For the featured title of Signet 1755, Jerry Allison's incredibly intense cover art nicely captures the grittiness of the character in dramatically chiarscuro-esque fashion. But for sheer over-the-top visuals nothing can compare to the usually restrained Barye Phllips' ultra-exploitative take for Taste for Blood.

[1] Max Allan Collins, History of Mystery, p. 148.

[2] Liberia, to be exact.