Geoffrey O'Brien, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir, New York: Da Capo Press, 1997. Expanded edition. 197 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. (some col.) ; 23 cm. Front cover design: Trudi Gershenov [adapted from James M. Cain, Sinful Woman, Avon 174, c1947; cover artist unknown]. [Originally published, 1981, as Hardboiled America : the Lurid Years of Paperbacks]. Contents : Chapter 1. Icons on Yellow Paper; Chapter 2. Origins of the Paperbacks; Chapter 3. A Disposable Gallery; Chapter 4. Mythologists of the Hardboiled; Chapter 5. The Paperback Detective and His Discontent; Chapter 6. Afternoon of the Fifties; Epilogue - The Long Morning After. Appendix - The Hardboiled Era: A Checklist, 1920-1960.
Mirroring the plethora of riches offered by the vintage pb originals is the ever-growing critical literature on the topic. Indeed it seems that hardly a year goes by that we're not blessed with another deluxe volume with ever more vivid graphics and atmospherics. Most of these volumes are of the coffee table variety and they subsequently – and rightly – emphasize the visual elements, i. e. many high quality cover reproductions. Some of these have sprightly texts which focus on the ironic and camp qualities present in the covers.
Standing out, however, for its historical sensitivity and polished style is O'Brien's classic tome, which lovingly talks of all things paperback. The small book also surveys, somewhat less compellingly, the great practitioners of the hardboiled art, the usual suspects of Hammett, Chandler, Goodis, Woolrich et al. In one sense this slim volume is little more than an extended essay, to be precise the aforementioned two essay topics in one. The first three chapters in particular on the history and aesthetics of the paperback are where the true stylistic nuggets and critical insights reside. Like pearls on cushiony velvet, O’Brien’s mots justes roll off his pen in seemingly effortless fashion:
It is easy enough to see them as farcical relics of an earlier generation’s suppressed desires, monsters safely declawed and defanged. But those passionate stances and the artfully rendered settings in which they are framed – alley, tenement, motel room, barroom – were linked, at their origin, to the real feeling of a particular place and time . . . . it is their fate to be perceived as lurid and absurd by the skeptics who came after. Yet, if we look hard, we can still discern in these toylike figures the heroes and demons of a generation, the enduring archetypes of an era haunted by all-too-real violence and tormented by desire it could not quite fulfill.
The people on the paperback covers lived in a single image, frozen forever in a moment of violence or in a sullen calm preceding the outburst of some unimaginable passion. What came before? What would come after? . . . . Against a murky background of menace or erotic suggestion, the human creatures stood out with stunning clarity, sculpted, motionless.
What surprises in the end is how much of the paperback art of the Forties and Fifties conveys a sense of reality and a warmth of emotion. Even the fantasies have a homespun texture, and the most unreal of them are brought down to earth, if only by the crudeness of their execution . . . . when the bright lights and synthesized soundtracks of today's conglomerate marketing merge into a single vast blur, it is comforting to rest a while in the clear lines of the ramshackle porch on the cover of Erskine Caldwell's Journeyman, or to sit with Studs Lonigan in the park on a warm summer night. In retrospect, it is hard to believe that such simplicity once sold books.
One could cite many such passages, but what is most important is that O’Brien’s florid yet eminently accessible style is always in the service of the subject matter, and as a result the whole is the equal to the sum of its disparate parts. In short, Hardboiled America is a veritable gold mine of information on a surprisingly broad range of topics - art and graphic design, literary criticism, popular culture, film noir, gender studies, among others - and will richly reward repeated readings.
Along the way there were intriguing confluences and connections [1]. The exuberantly subversive aesthetic of the vintage cover art style paralleled its cinematic equivalent film noir [2], and also anticipated any number of developments as far ranging as men’s magazines in the 1950s, blaxsploitation and sexploitation films of the 1960s and 70s [3], the James Bond craze, sci-fi & fantasy art, and graphic novels. Even today there are publishers who try to emulate the old style [4]. But somehow the special alchemy of the originals remains just out of reach and untranslatable, their photographic, flash of lightning style a perfect metaphor for their brief candle in publishing history.
We look back today and marvel at how such sordidly unpleasant content, however poetically expressed, could have existed [5]. The subject matter of the cover art was no less than a voyeuristic, dystopian paradise of crime, lust, sadism, paranoia, weapon brandishing, greed, and numerous other less than uplifting themes and emotions [6]. What did it all say to us then? Was there a dark, undercurrent message that all is not well? And what to make of its re-emergence nearly fifty years later? Do our troubled times in some way mirror the post-WW2 years? Or . . . .
Does this kind of analysis read more into the picture than is actually there? Are such concerns merely a way of protesting too much and not seeing the obvious? Things like, well, what’s inside the books : the stories and the writing style itself [7]. To be sure, Chandlerian repartee, fast-paced plots, and ambiguous characters are cool once again and offer an alternative to today’s mega-blockbusters. Yes, the writing is good, even glorious, most of the time anyway. But the literary merit argument can only take us so far. After all, do a particular book’s qualities not carry over into many different editions, printings, bindings, design styles, and even translations? Well, maybe, and maybe not. In any case, it all gets us back to the primacy of the covers. Ultimately the cover designs and the phenomenon of vintage paperbacks are so intertwined as to be virtually synonymous. And perhaps it’s best simply to marvel at the bravura and cheek of the cover illustrators and indulge ourselves in a little guilty pleasure at the general naughtiness of it all. Even today, in spite of (perhaps because of) their undeniable kitschiness and quaint sensibilities, they endure and fascinate, even thrive, in our all too modern, unquaint world.
[1] The vintage cover art, as well as the writing, was imitated by publishers in other countries. Alas, the results were at best uneven, a case of something being lost in the aesthetic translation. A look at the slightly different British and Euro approaches to Peter Cheyney mysteries is instructive. For an Australian take on the tough style see : Toni Johnson-Woods, Pulp : A Collector's Book of Australian Pulp Fiction Covers, Canberra, National Library of Australia, 2004. Along these lines see also the Australian Pulp Fiction blog. Then there’s the Spanish take on the vintage style, and for somewhat more risqué material, try the companion French site. There's also Finnish and Danish takes on the tough formula. The whole area of exporting the vintage aesthetic to other countries is a ripe one for further research; I see a dissertation or two in the making! A interesting recent book which considers 'pulp fiction's' influence on, and reflection of, broader currents in American society in the 1940s and 1950s is: Paula Rabinowitz, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street, Princeton Univ. Pr., 2014. A recent book that focuses on fiction cover design, with good coverage of the vintage paperback era, is: Peter Mendelsund, The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers and Art at the Edges of Literature, Ten Speed Press, 2020.
[2] Film noir was a cinematic style famously known for its black and white look, in contrast to vintage cover art’s bright, near-hallucinatory colors. However, the film studios’ publicity departments were never above borrowing a little color if it was good for box office : the poster art style employed to hype the noir movies recalls, indeed directly imitates, the highly spiced colors and hard sell lettering of the vintage cover art style. (See : Eddie Muller, The Art of Noir: the Posters and Graphics from the Classic Era of Film Noir, Woodstock, Overlook, 2002). In fact the basic aesthetic is so similar that’s it’s hard to determine which influenced which more, an artistic/historical case of the chicken or the egg. As we generally accept the primacy of the cinematic art form we assume that the film posters carried more influence than paperback covers, but it may actually be that the opposite is true (See also O'Brien, 1997, pp. 122-125, for more on the movies' influence on the vintage pb aesthetic). Incidentally, both vintage pb cover art and film noir coincided with the Red Scare peak years (roughly 1945-1955), and indeed both used Cold War and Red Scare themes for material. But these various issues, as they say, are another story, and a subject for further research.
[3] The influence extended to ‘respectable’ films as well, a classic case in point being the ‘Girl Hunt’ tough guy parody ballet from The Band Wagon, an otherwise quintessential bit of 1950s MGM-musical fluff.
[4] Hard Case Crime Publications in particular does a good job of capturing the old style. See also the Megan Abbott retro vintage covers.
[5] All the more surprising given the official line of bland optimism in the post-WWII years. Kemp’s pithy commentary of the gestalt of film noir might well be invoked to describe the essentially subversive aesthetic of vintage pb’s and expecially their cover art : “From this viewpoint, film noir can be seen as a riposte, a sour, disenchanted flip-side to the brittle optimism and flag-waiving piety of much of Hollywood’s ‘official’ output of the period.” (Philip Kemp, "From the Nightmare Factory : HUAC and the Politics of Noir," Sight & Sound v55, 1986, p. 270).
[6] For all the complaints about the covers being a come-on with little connection to the book itself, a case can be made that the vintage covers more often than not mirrored the tone – if not always the exact letter – of a book’s contents. “Sociopathic heroes, unpunished crimes, and depressive endings were not only allowed in these paperbacks, they were encouraged.” Server, Over My Dead Body, p. 15.
[7] A forceful argument for the importance of the writing is made by : Lisa Morton, Smart Broads and Tough Guys : The Strange World of Vintage Paperbacks.
Gardner, Erle Stanley. The Case of the Backward Mule. N. Y. : Pocket Books, 1951. # 855. First printing, September 1951. Mystery about a man who gives his girl a Chinese statue which is later used in a murder. The cover art [by Frank McCarthy] of a guy in a tuxedo punching out a girl in a green dress is an exceptionally pungent example of the tough school of vintage cover illustration, all the more so in coming from the usually conservative Pocket Books. Just in case we don’t get it, an additional point is made by the cover blurb, which graphically and literally spells out what many other covers of the era had only implied : 'Killer or not - she had it coming!'
Becker, Stephen. Shanghai Incident. Greenwich, Conn., Fawcett Gold Medal, 1960. #994. Cover art : Robert McGinnis. [First published by Gold Medal Books in 1955 (#456).] Robert McGinnis was an incomparable portrayer of barely clad women who graced paperback covers in the 1950s and 1960s. He also did several of the James Bond film posters in the early and mid sixties. Some of his more risqué covers venture perilously close to soft-core porn, but not this one. The cover art for Gold Medal 994 is a model of restraint and delicacy. The exotically dressed woman who stares out at the viewer is a personification of Eastern mystery and understatement; her persona is spiced by the yellow dress, orange umbrella and high heels. For more on McGinnis see : The Paperback Covers of Robert McGinnis, compiled by Art Scott and Wallace Maynard, Boston, Bond Press, 2001.
Cushman, Dan. Port Orient. Greenwich, Conn. : Fawcett Gold Medal, 1955. #535. First printing, Nov. 1955. Paperback original. Cover art : Lu Kimmel. Vintage-era pbs were always fond of exoticist themes, especially those with an Asian setting, such as the above mentioned Shanghai Incident. Dan Cushman specialized in ports of call adventure-romances, and his Port Orient likewise is a story of adventure & intrigue in the Mysterious East, this time in Siam and China. The main character of Gold Medal #535’s cover, as rendered by Lu Kimmel, is an attractive, half-dressed, rather forlorn looking woman. Dressed in faux-Asian clothes, she’s apparently the ‘exotic’ element in the cover, but her features are actually quite Caucasian. A nice touch : the murky figure of a guy in foreground holding a gun.
Krasney, Samuel. A Mania for Blondes. N. Y. : Ace Books, 1961. #D-495. “A suspense novel of a sex murderer.” -- back cover. Cover design by Paul Rader depicts a dead, half naked blonde floating head down in blueish-green pool of water [and oil?]. Mania for Blondes exploits another favorite vintage cover theme, that of the sexy dead woman. With its nice combination of reds, blues and greens, the cover art presents the floating dead girl in an image that’s both surrealistically grotesque and strangely beautiful.
Aarons, Edward. Nightmare. N. Y. : MacFadden Books, 1963. #50-171. Originally published in hardcover in 1948. Cover art : Jerry Podwil. MacFadden 50-171 is a late vintage entry with a quasi-expressionist take on the tough style, with exaggerated figures and gloomy atmosphere. Nice touches include the smoke wafting from the guy’s cigarette and the woman’s rather tacky hairdo.
Cheyney, Peter. Ladies Won’t Wait. London, Fontana Books, 1954. #27. “First issued in Fontana Books, 1954.” Also released as Cocktails and the Killer by Avon Books. Fontana No. 27 is a good example of the slightly different British/Euro vintage style : an exotic-looking beauty in the foreground leans on a table; she is flanked by a guy in a tuxedo. The woman seems to be poised to grab the nearby gun which is lying on the table. Nice, understated use of color blue.
Masur, Hal. Murder on Broadway. N. Y. : Dell, 1959. # D298. Front cover : Victor Kalin. 'First Dell printing, July 1959.' First published in hardcover, Simon & Schuster, 1958, as The Last Gamble. Published in the UK as The Last Breath. Variant issue : back cover, advertisement for Paris Belts.Victor Kalin's covers had an incandescent quality which worked well in the context of the vintage style. More Kalin covers can be found here. Additionally, Kalin's daughter Rebecca has compiled a collection of covers here.
Gardner, Erle Stanley. The Case of the Angry Mourner. N. Y. : Pocket Books, 1960. #6042. Fifth printing. Erle Stanley Gardner was well served by Pocket Books’ cover art in the 1940s and 1950s. The cover design for 6042 is a knockout, featuring cheesecake art in the Barye Phillips/'Charles' style [but alas no artist is credited]. Totally or partially unclothed women behind see-through negligees, nightgowns or curtains* were a staple of vintage paperback cover art in the classic era. The present title is primo, presenting a curvaceous blonde behind some sort of scrim that provides her with the strategic covering.
* One of the few examples of a woman being viewed in front of a see-through curtain is the rare dust jacket for the Pocket reissue of The Maltese Falcon (#268, 3rd printing, 1945, Stanley Meltzoff). The cover art rather cheekily depicts a partially unclad Brigid O'Shaughnessy in a scene from the novel which doesn’t appear in the movie. Permabooks later used this cover in an early 1950s printing.
All told, it was a glorious run for these and other publishing houses, but the vintage style and the white hot intensity of its disturbing images could only sustain itself so long, and it vanished almost as fast as it had appeared. By the late 1950s its best years were far behind [1]. Postmortem analyses could cite factors like the public outcries, threats of official intervention, and howls of critical disapproval, all of which were ultimately unnecessary. In a final flurry of self-immolation, the sensational era of vintage paperbacks essentially did itself in, due mostly to other, eminently practical considerations : over-production [2], market forces, different types of fiction being written, a newer generation of illustrators. Most of all, times, and tastes, were changing. It was the New Frontier of the early 1960s and the paperback art both literally and figuratively needed a fresher, more stylish look. Paperback publishers rejected the seemingly old-fashioned, realistic, oil painting-heavy cover art style in favor of a lighter touch [3] – leaner, quasi-abstract covers which favored brighter colors, all as if in a conscious effort to avoid the unpleasant, subterranean realms of their predecessors [4]. The golden age of paperbacks thus quietly passed into history, languishing for nearly half a century [5].
[1] “The cover artists of the postwar period either changed their style or faded from the scene. In either case, by the mid 1950s their variously mesmerizing, haunting and outrageous art was fast becoming a thing of the past.” (Server, Over My Dead Body, p. 68). [2] But competition and over-production had its price – as unsold inventories languished, the desperation to survive drove publishers to even lower standards of promotion, which only reinforced the popular opinion of paperbacks as trashy literature. [3] Consequently, the curvaceous temptresses who had adorned the postwar pb covers gave way to sleek, Audrey Hepburn-ish types who dominated the new aesthetic, a case of the illustrators and art directors literally preferring a lighter, leaner look. [4] One could cite at least four alternative paperback cover art styles of the 1950s which challenged the then-dominant Good Girl Art, or Lurid, aesthetic : 1) the aforementioned lighter, leaner style; 2) a related style which rejected the realistic, action-dominated covers and instead favored a collage-like overlapping of graphic images which showed the influence of abstract expressionism, exemplified in the works of Mitchell Hooks, ‘Darcy’, and – sometimes – Barye Phillips; 3) the earthy, low-keyed James Avati look; 4) the flat, quasi-abstract cover designs of Penguin and Penguin USA. [5] In the ensuing years vintage era paperbacks were largely forgotten except for a small coterie of dedicated individual collectors. (Schreuders, Paperbacks USA, pp. 228-233). To be sure, there were some good publications on vintage pb history (especially Bonn, Schreuders, and O’Brien), but it was the Internet culture of ca. 2005-2010 that allowed a higher public profile, especially for the cover art, with a resultant dramatic increase in both popularity and respectability.
Sterling, Stewart. Nightmare at Noon. N. Y. : Dell 693; May 1953. [pseud. Prentice Winchell]. Front cover : Bob Hilbert. Sterling was considered the ‘king of the specialty detectives,’ with Nightmare at Noon being a mid-range entry of the Fire Marshall Pedley series. Bob Hilbert's gloriously over-the-top cover art is a memorable contribution to the fire/explosions vintage subgenre.
Levin, Ira. A Kiss Before Dying. N. Y. : Signet, 1954. No. 1147. First printing, September 1954. Cover art : uncredited. Features an exceptionally intense cover depiction of a guy kissing a beautiful, terrified(?) woman while he strokes her throat with his fingers menacingly. Love that bright red lipstick the girl’s wearing! No credit is given for the knockout cover : there's what appears to be a signature just above the word 'year,' but it's too small to make out.
Coates, Robert M. Wisteria Cottage. N.Y. : Dell, 1948. Mapback. # 371. "A novel of criminal impulse." Also released as : The Night Before Dying. Front cover art : uncredited. Back cover : map of Wisteria Cottage (of the Hackett family), near Port Jefferson, Long Island, New York. This one sure delivers the goods for a psychological thriller-with-a-touch-of-psychosis genre. What a cover! My favorites: the guy’s eyes (surely the look of a madman), the figure of the girl in his forehead, and the Dell trademark keyhole, always a great creepy touch. The, alas anonymous, design is representative of Dell’s fondness for quasi-surrealist covers in the 1940s. BTW the novel’s psychotic villain works in a bookstore and fancies himself a writer – I like it! Adapted, twice -- once for TV, in 1950-51, for Suspense, and later, in 1958 as the film Edge of Fury.
Shallit, Joseph. The Case of the Billion Dollar Body. N. Y. : Avon, 1954. #558. Cover art : uncredited. "She looked for thrills -- and found murder!" -- front cover. Mystery about an athletic instructor & judo expert who takes a job as a bodyguard for a rich man's mistress. Features another gloriously sensationalist cover [unattributed, alas] in Avon’s best style : a tough guy grabs a blonde in yellow dress by the hair and yanks her head back as he’s about to slug her with a pistol. On the back cover, she turns the tables, biting the guy’s arm as he’s trying to strangle her. Fun to compare the Avon cover to a new Ramble House reprint. I like the Avon cover (quite a bit) better!
Peter Cheyney. Dark Street Murders. N. Y. : Avon, [1957]. #764. [Released earlier by Avon, #93, 1946, with a different, somewhat blander cover design]. The first Mr. Quayle mystery. Also released as Dark Street. Cover artist is uncredited. Avon 764 is another classic example of the mysterious, not-so-clearly defined figure lurking in the shadows with a beautiful woman in the foreground, in this case part of a woman, anyway! Covers depicting women’s legs, especially when they were adorned with high heels, were a staple of the vintage era, but seldom have they been done with such panache as here, by yet another anonymous artist from the Avon stable of uncredited cover artists. It’s hard to go wrong with hot pink high heels and matching skirt!
The packaging as well as the stories then had to reflect male tastes [1], and this largely accounts for the trend to more sordid, i.e. violent, content, along with the sexed-up cover designs. As a result the cover style ante was upped, year by year, book by book, envelope by envelope pushed ever further [2]. After all, the primary vehicle to sell the books was the cover art, and it never seemed to matter that the actual contents of the books seldom lived up to the covers’ spicy promises – sales were booming and ever more publishers seemed only too happy to jump on the paperback bandwagon [3].
With such a predominantly male audience, the not-so-secret and hardly surprising weapon of choice in the marketing wars was the front cover portraiture of beautiful and usually scantily clad women. There were plenty of good cover artists around to meet the demand [4], and paperback publishers quickly discovered they had a winning formula with this deft synthesis of sensationalism, elegance, and titillation, with the final result being some of the most imaginative and technically accomplished cover art in the history of book publishing [5].
Each publishing house had its own star artist[s] whose particular style influenced the entire line. Popular Library had a Belarskiesque look to its covers, bright, hyper intense and quintessentially pulpy, the cover art frequently depicting women of strangely glowing flesh. Signet covers, on the other hand, favored a James Avati look, low-keyed and naturalistic with a preference for browns and grays. In dramatic contrast, Gold Medal’s burnished, yellow-and orange-heavy covers were a perfect fit for its most successful author, John D. MacDonald and his Florida locales. The lush romantic style of frequent Gold Medal illustrator and MacDonald cover interpreter Barye Phillips contributed to GM’s overall ambience. Avon Books usually produced uncredited cover art that nonetheless had an uncanny consistency in style and tone, which was a felicitous blend of dark romanticism, emotionalism and sleaze that recalled the old pulp magazine illustrations of two decades prior [6]. Bantam’s and Dell’s oddball, cartoonish covers (many of them tinged with deco and surrealistic touches) were mild aberrations, but competition eventually forced them to come into the lurid fold as well [7].
[1] In a curious turnaround, the risqué element in 1940s and 1950s vintage cover art* metamorphosed in the mid-1970s into (in its own way the equally sleazy) paperback romance novel,** with its female-dominated market and corresponding cover art depicting a partially or totally undressed male as the object of desire. The style, content and readership had changed but not necessarily the cover artists (McGinnis, Avati, Phillips & Marchetti being prominent examples), who altered their styles to fit the new aesthetic sensibilities.
*Both in the cover art as well as the content, the lurid era paperbacks were (almost) always marketed to predominantly male readers, with the resultant plethora of cover illustrations of disrobing or disrobed sexy woman, often accompanied by fully clothed male.
** To be sure, romance novels and romance novel cover art were not invented in the 1970s but had been around a long time, at least as long as vintage pb’s, as an alternative to the dominant lurid/hardboiled style of the classic era [see : The Look of Love: The Art of the Romance Novel, by Jennifer McKnight-Trontz, Princeton Architectural Press, 2002; see here for a review of the book and a concise history of romance novels and their covers].
[2] The saturation point was reached, ca. 1952, with a corresponding backlash that included Congressional committees and all sorts of public huffing and puffing. One of the results was a gradual toning down of the cover art. “Hardboiled fiction and paperback publishing together created a cultural phenomenon, marked by mass production, mass distribution and finally mass outrage that took Congressional hearings to appease.” (Meriçli, op. cit.). “The government investigations into ‘pornographic materials’ made the paperback industry largely shy away from its more extreme behavior, those covers with leering faces, bosomy babes, and bleeding corpses.” (Server, Over My Dead Body, p. 68).
[3] The uncertain, paranoid times assured a wide spectrum of readership. The hardboiled novel in particular lent itself well to stories involving the threat of the Red Menace on the one hand as well as the evils and excesses of capitalism on the other, thus appealing to readers from both right- and left-wing persuasions.
[4] The women depicted on the covers were presented in many styles and shadings, usually – but not always – rendered within the bounds of prevailing aesthetic propriety. There were all manner of heroines and anti-heroines – femmes fatales, of course, but also : virtuous girlfriends in peril; wives next door; exotic temptresses; belly dancers; slave girls; gypsies; secret agents; carnival girls; gun molls; courtesans; aliens***; high priestesses, princesses and goddesses; ‘Oriental’ villainesses and enchantresses; and, at the farthest extreme, outright apparitions and hallucinations. And they appeared in all the fictional vehicles – mystery and private eye primarily, but also sci-fi & fantasy, spy, adventure, westerns, & general fiction.
Robert Maguire, Barye Phillips and Robert McGinnis are the consensus choices as the best vintage interpreters of women, but other important figures included Rudolph Belarski, James Meese, Mitchell Hooks, Earle Bergey, Walter Popp, Victor Kalin, Stanley Zuckerberg, Lu Kimmel, and British lingerie specialist Reginald Heade. Phillips and McGinnis in particular specialized in beautiful, well-heeled (or well-heeled aspiring) women who wrapped themselves in a Hollywoodish aura of elegance and sophistication. The legendary James Avati was a bit of a contrarian with his more naturalistic, ‘Rembrandtesque’ style and penchant for rather plain-looking subjects. In any case, the various artists’ beguiling renditions of their subjects – an irresistible combination of artificiality, realism, and noirish illicit glamour – still delights collectors and devotees to this day.
*** The strong, quasi-Amazonian women - both alien and human - depicted on paperback covers from this era with such forceful, positive energy, have an almost protofeminist quality to them. This is especially the case in sci-fi stories and novels of the late 40s and early 50s. (Robin Roberts, “The Female Alien: Pulp Science Fiction's Legacy to Feminists,” Journal of Popular Culture, v21 n2 [1987], pp. 33-52).
[5] The somewhat confusing phrase ‘Good Girl Art’ (GGA) is often used to describe this type of paperback cover art. GGA is especially associated with femme fatales, virtuous heroines, and gangster molls in hardboiled crime stories in the late 40s and early 50s. Like paperbacks generally, there are entire Web sites devoted to GGA : Classic Good Girl & Romance Covers; Good Girl Art Paperbacks; Flickr ‘GGA’ tag.
[6] “Avon books were really pulps in paperback form.” (Schreuders, Paperbacks USA, p. 31). Much the same could be said of all paperbacks of this era, but of the larger houses only Avon’s and Popular Library’s covers consistently recalled the pulpy style of the magazines.
[7] Curiously, Pocket Books, the first and most quintessential of paperback publishers, never developed a distinctive cover “look” or style.
Williams, Ben Ames. Death on Scurvy Street. N. Y. : Popular Library, 1949. # 194. Also released as: The Bellmer Mystery. Cover illustration by Rudolph Belarski depicts a thug terrorizing a man while a blonde woman in a low cut red dress hides behind a curtain (actually, isn’t she hiding in front of the curtain?). Whatever. Belarski comes through with another fine cover, with his patented maximum dramatic intensity moment style. Here we have yet another cover with a blonde in a low-cut dress, with great use of two of the artist’s favorite colors, red and green. A nice touch : we see only the bad guy’s forearm and hand gripping his victim’ neck.
Kruger, Paul. Message from Marise. Pseud. Roberta Elizabeth Sebenthal. Greenwich, Conn. : Fawcett Gold Medal, 1963. # k1323. Cover : Stanley Zuckerberg. First printing, July 1963. Paperback original. Zuckerberg was among the most accomplished of the James Avati-influenced cover artists who strove for an emotional-realistic style. But his Message from Marise – a rather late entry into the vintage cover art canon – has a splashy, quasi-expressionistic quality which shows how far the lurid style had evolved by the early 1960s.
Phillips, Rog. Time Trap. Chicago : Century Publications, 1949. No. 116. Cover art : Malcolm Smith. Century Books was a second tier golden age paperback publisher with a penchant for sleaze material, and the present title is a fairly representative example. Time Trap is a marginal sci-fi story of two inventors from 1949 who are propelled forward to 1999, and the world is occupied by the Varg Thrott, a mysterious three-eyed race of humans from out of Earth's past. But the plot is incidental; what makes No. 116 primo collectable is Malcolm Smith’s eye-catching cover art which features a scantily clad, shapely blonde with a third eye holding a flash light (or is it a heat lamp? hair dryer?). The quasi-sfumato shading of the girl’s flesh creates a gently glowing quality, which along with her wavy blonde locks, strategically placed scarf, and the flaming red curtain backdrop, combines to create a most felicitous design. By the way, what’s with that name, Rog Phillips? And what exactly is behind the red curtain that she is so coyly opening (or perhaps closing)?
Crane, Frances. The Applegreen Cat. N. Y. : Popular Library, 1951. #344. First printing. “A Pat Abbott mystery.” Cover art : Rudolph Belarski. Sometime New Mexico resident Frances Crane achieved mild success in the 1940s then had an eventual falling off in popularity. Today there are signs of a revival of interest in her work. Applegreen Cat, alas, is not set in NM, but the Popular Library reprint benefits from one of vintage paperbackdom’s most unforgettable cover designs. One of Belarski’s most fetching heroines attempts to grab a pistol but some sort of flying dart (hypodermic?) is [maybe] about to tear into her hands. Ouch!
Louys, Pierre. The Woman and the Puppet. N.Y. : Avon, 1951. #358. Cover art : uncredited. [Cover design originally issued as Avon 135, 1947]. Originally published, 1898, as La Femme et le pantin, and the basis for the 1935 film The Devil Is a Woman starring Marlene Dietrich. Avon Books was fond of the formula cover with the aristocratic woman in low-cut gown being nuzzled by a fawning, somewhat effeminate-looking admirer. (In fact, they liked the formula so well for Woman and the Puppet that they recycled it a few years later as #668). In any case, nos. 135/358/668 are also representative of the vintage era’s predilection for sexing up the covers of a classic and treading right to the edge of borderline sleaze. To wit : is the rather suggestive placement of the “Complete and unabridged” front cover blurb for 358 accidental?
All this was reinforced by paperbacks’ already somewhat tawdry and unsavory reputation [1]. It was no accident then that the vintage cover art style reached its definitive expression with the hardboiled mystery story in the late forties and early fifties. Altogether it was the perfect merging of form and content [2], as Lee Server points out in his broad brushstroke characterization of vintage paperback art which emphasizes the noirish and hardboiled elements :
. . . . . garish oils on canvas, a dreamlike exaggerated realism, the depicted scene an overheated, pheromone-charged moment from the enclosed narrative. With their typically lurid hues and tawdry views of urban modern life, the covers looked like freeze frames from some lost B-movie. Reflecting the most frequent subject matter of the paperback novel in this era, the illustrations offered endless variations on recurring motifs, namely crimson lipped females in lingerie, granite jawed tough guys, blazing .45s, rumpled bedsheets, neon-lit hotel rooms, a blue-gray haze of cigarette smoke, alleyways and streetcorners at permanent midnight [3].
Bonn provides an even more succinct - if less precise - description : “the dominant style of color illustrations at this time was a brooding realism to which a thick veneer of sex and sadism was imposed.” [4] But for pithy conciseness the prize must certainly go to the ultra-conservative Alan Lane, founder and publisher of Penguin Books, who dismissed the American style as “bosoms and bottoms.” [5] No discussion would be complete, however, without considering the significance of the target audience, which was, generally speaking, male, heterosexual, 21-50 years old, urban/suburban, middle- and lower middle-class, and mildly well educated. Or phrased another way, WWII GIs who had just returned home. These guys had gotten a taste for this sort of thing - albeit of less colorful subject matter - during the war with government supplied Armed Services Editions paperbacks [6]. With the war now over, their reading tastes demanded stronger stuff than the standard classics, nonfiction, and British cozies of the early paperback era.
[1] “Hardboiled paperbacks of the 1940s can be frightening objects. They are abject, gaudy, dirty-looking and strangely alive. They needed to be stopped, but even Congress could not do it, although they tried.” (Margaret Meriçli, Broken Hallelujah: The Cultural Significance of American Hardboiled Fiction in Paperback, 1940-1955). [2] The vintage cover style extended to other types of fiction* besides hardboiled mysteries, including the usual suspects of Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Westerns, Spy/Adventure, Romances, and British mysteries, but also new genres which appeared in the early 1950s,**whose shocking subject matter seemed ready made for the exotic, unsavory world of paperback fiction: juvenile delinquency; drug addiction***; homosexuality; backwoods nymphomania; the Beat poets; racism, to cite but a few. Not so surprisingly, these offbeat, quasi-forbidden genres are among the most highly prized by collectors today. * Even the most ‘respectable’ authors weren’t exempt from the sensationalist treatment, Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown and the afore-referenced Nana being two of the more notorious examples. See also : Richard Hoffstedt, “Steamy Steinbeck : Paperbacks : 1947 – 1957,” Steinbeck Review v3 n1, Spring 2006, pp. 118-128. ** A new publishing trend of the 1950s, the movie tie-in, wasn’t exactly a genre, or new, for that matter, as the first ones had appeared around 1940. But nonetheless the tie-in paperback hit its stride in the 1950s and reflected the industry’s desire for fresh material and packaging. *** For more on the ‘dope menace’ paperbacks, see : Bill Ott, “Confessions of a Pulp Junkie,” Booklist, v105, n5 (Nov 1, 2008), p 80. [3] Server, Over My Dead Body, pp. 57-58. [4] Bonn, UnderCover, pp. 55-56. [5] Very much a creature of old-school British sensibilities, Lane stubbornly resisted any movement toward the excesses of the American vintage style; both the British and American lines of Penguin Books retained a basic conservatism with highbrow literary material and rather abstract and restrained – if indeed often stylish – cover art. (Alan Powers, Front Cover : Great Book Jackets and Cover Design, London, Mitchell Beazley, 2001, pp. 58-59). [6] Christopher P. Loss, “Reading Between Enemy Lines : Armed Services Editions and World War II,” Journal of Military History v67, n3 : 811-34.
Christie, Agatha. Evil Under the Sun. N.Y.: Pocket Books, 1957. #2285. 6th printing. James Meese delivers another gorgeous design for the late fifties Pocket reissue of Evil Under the Sun. The cover is especially noteworthy for its nice balance of the various hues of orange, yellow and red. Is it just me, or did Meese use the same model again & again -- compare the woman on the present cover with that of the above-cited Ann Avery or the Flickr collection of Meese covers.
Cameron, Owen. The Butcher’s Wife. N.Y. : Dell Books, 1954. # 896. Cover art : William Rose. "Two lovely ladies on his mind, and two dead dames on his hands." – front cover. I confess to not being familiar with author Cameron or cover artist William Rose. However, Rose’s cover for the book is a knockout. The woman in the foreground is rendered in exquisite detail featuring peach and off-orange tints for her dress [which is nicely matched in the lettering], along with a pouting mouth and a defiant upturn of the head. The shadows in the background of a man carrying a [presumably] naked, dead woman, help to conjure up a sinister, macabre atmosphere.
Williams, Tennessee. The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone. New York : Signet Books, 1952. #955. Cover art : James Avati. Another brilliant Avati cover, with much psychological insight into the character despite the artist’s rather subtle style and technique. Mrs. Stone dominates the front cover, glancing warily at the man on the left. The sketchily rendered figures in the background suggest a rather undefined menace.
Hughes, Dorothy. The Candy Kid. N. Y. : Pocket Books, 1951. #845. First printing. Gloriously lurid, un-pc cover art by Edward Vebell from Pocket’s most melodramatic years : a rather elegantly dressed tough guy chokes a woman as she grabs his hair trying to stop him. Great use of bright red and yellow on both front and back covers. The Candy Kid is a thriller set near the Mexican border by sometime New Mexico resident Dorothy Hughes.
Gardner, Erle Stanley. The Case of the Borrowed Brunette. N. Y. : Pocket Cardinal, 1959. #C-380. First printing, November 1959. Cover by ’Charles’. The covers for the Erle Stanley Gardner mysteries are a virtual catalog of changing vintage paperback styles & techniques. Charles’ rendition of a languorous brunette, presumably the title character, reclining on a pillow, is a classic late fifties image of beauty : sleek, sophisticated, well-coiffured, no-nonsense.
Several factors contributed to this new art form, which sprang seemingly full-blown in all its over-the-top glory : greater competition; the Mickey Spillane influence; evolving tastes; changing reader demographics. But even more to the point was the sudden availability of many veteran pulp artists. The old pulp magazines were a near extinct species by the late 1940s [1], and legendary names such as Rudolph Belarski, Norman Saunders, Raphael De Soto and Earle Bergey were only too ready to lavish their talents on the latest publishing phenomenon [2], in turn bringing a vigorous pulp aesthetic to paperback covers [3]. They were not shy about borrowing ideas from themselves. Indeed, art that had appeared on a periodical cover would later turn up on a paperback, slightly varied or reproduced in toto. The artists further benefited from good timing; these were the early, mystery-dominated years of paperback fiction, filled with the sensation-laced stories of writers like Chandler, Hammett, Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Horace McCoy and Erle Stanley Gardner. [Not so coincidentally, many such authors got their start in the pulps in the 1920s and 1930s].
[1] Peter Haining, The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines, Chicago, Chicago Review Press, 2001; Robert Lesser, Pulp Art : Original Cover Paintings for the Great American Pulp Magazines, New York, Gramercy Books, 1997; Lee Server, Danger Is My Business : An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines, San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 1993; Collins, History of Mystery, pp. 32-57.
[2] One important artistic convention which the pulp artists brought to the paperback covers was the portrayal of figures frozen in an instant of maximum dramatic intensity – a tough guy firing a handgun at the muzzle flash moment; a knife plunging into flesh, or a fist tearing into a grimacing face; a terrified heroine captured in mid-scream. Another significant, indeed essential, pulp influence was the depiction of women in various states of dress and undress, mostly the latter (Haining, Classic Era; Lesser, Pulp Art, pp. 97-121; Server, Danger Is My Business, pp. 79-90). “Even the most casual observer of cover designs must have wondered why the shoulder straps of women’s dresses and brassieres were always loose, slipping or undone.” (Bonn, p. 103).
[3] The covers’ lurid-chic flamboyance was rather dubiously spiced by the portrayals of racist, ethnic, and gay & lesbian stereotypes, and the depictions of violence against women. A catalog of these shockingly politically incorrect images* would include : libidinous inner-city blacks**; sinister exotics, especially ‘Oriental’ villains and seductresses; swamp-dwelling Southern White Trash amazons; hot-blooded ‘native’ women; languorous, vaguely sinister lesbian couples; thuggish Slavic torturers and interrogators [a Cold War specialty]; and perhaps most disturbing of all, vivid tableaux of square-jawed tough guys roughing up beautiful women.*** This last example of hardboiled excess was one of the most popular cover themes of the era, and it had a special pungency with its barely concealed delight in the righteous, she-had-it-coming undercurrent. Alas, however unpleasant, un-pc is inevitably a double-edged sword : insensitivity and bad taste are a large part of vintage pb’s charm and camp appeal for today’s audience.
* The insensitivity extended to book titles as well, one of the most notorious examples being 12 Chinks and a Woman (later reissued as the more discreetly titled 12 Chinamen and a Woman).
*** The unpleasantness was dispatched via whips, ropes, fists, butts of guns, chokeholds, yanked heads of hair, and various other means. See : Kiss My Fist! [aka The Dead Stay Dumb] (Eton 112, Harlequin 124)for the ultimate in exuberant tackiness. These types of scenes had a precedent - of a sort - in the earlier 'shudder pulps,' in which scanily clad maidens were constantly menaced with the threat of physical violence and/or torture by arch-fiends, mad scientists, and especially their depraved, barely human (and frequently hypodermic- or knife-wielding) assistants. (Haining, Classic Era, pp. 130-153; Server, Danger is My Business, pp. 105-116). What was different – and unsettling – in the vintage pb depictions was that the character inflicting the violence was not some fiendish ogre or madman, but rather the story’s ‘hero,’ or at least anti-hero.
Farrère, Claude. Fumée d'opium (Black opium). N. Y : Berkley Books Paperback #G-120, 1958. 1st printing. “The shocking ecstasy of the forbidden.” - front cover. Notorious novel of drugs & sex in the Mysterious East, with classic cover art by Robert Maguire of apparition of naked blonde emanating from the smoke of an opium pipe. Arguably Maguire’s signature cover. For more on Maguire see : Jim Silke, Dames, Dolls and Gun Molls : The Art of Robert A. Maguire, Dark Horse, 2009; and, for a great collection of Maguire photos, Illustration Magazine, v1 n3 (Reissue, Summer 2009)pp.4-43.
Kuttner, Henry. The Murder of Ann Avery. New York : Permabooks, 1956. # M-3058. Paperback. A Michael Gray mystery. Cover art : James Meese. “Psychoanalyst solves brutal slaying.” – front cover. James Meese was another of the unsung heroes of golden age paperback cover art; his style combined the glamour of Barye Phillips with the earthy realism of James Avati. His sensitively wrought portrait for Ann Avery gives subtle insights into the subject’s character, and there’s also the wonderful juxtaposition of the beautifully coiffured woman with that of the knife at the center of the table.
Keith, Carlton. Gem of a Murder. N.Y. : Dell Books #1007. First printing, Nov. 1959. Pseudonym of Keith Carlton Robertson. Also released as: The Diamond-Studded Typewriter. Story about four desperate characters in search of a fortune in stolen jewels. Cover art by Harry Schaare depicts a black-haired femme fatale in tight fitting red dress smoking a cigarette as two tough guys tussle in the background next to a car. Schaare was another of the under-rated pb cover artists who were active in the 1950s. His cover for Gem arrives a little late in the classic vintage cycle, but the curvaceous woman in the red dress, along with the generally realistic style, recalls the covers of a decade prior.
Walsh, Thomas. Nightmare in Manhattan. N.Y. : Bantam Books, 1951. #895. Cover art : uncredited. “Complete and unabridged.” The (alas, anonymously produced) cover for Nightmare in Manhattan is a great example of the tough guy school of vintage pb art. Both figures look back at the viewer in an abrupt and obviously startled manner. What are they looking at? The kidnapper? A cop? The setting is rather ambiguous; it could even be a library! And what about the figure in the background with the red cap? Who/what is he? The woman has a classic about-to-scream/shout look, but she is rendered unremarkably and she looks very pale (from fright?). The cover’s highlight is the depiction of the tough guy with the gun and the great detail in the (very intense) left side of his face, dripping blood and all.
Head, Matthew. The Accomplice. N. Y. : Dell, 1949. No. 346. Pseud. John Canaday. Front cover art : ? Back cover : view of 'the strange house of Mimi Decors/scene of weird death' ; i.e. interior decorating shop owned by Mamie Kerr (aka Mimi de Coeur) in Kansas City, Mo. Inset : floor plan of section of the shop. Time of map : 1935. Accomplice is the bizarre story of reincarnation, international intrigue and necrophilia. Cover montage [alas, uncredited] of dead woman with purple hair, with backdrop of Eiffel Tower through window, is one of the most sensationalist covers in the history of vintage paperbacks.
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