Author[s] : J. M. [Jay] Flynn ; William Woody
Cover art : Paul Rader (Drink with the Dead)
style ***
substance **
collectibility **
A winning Ace Double, this, arriving rather late in the company’s evolution. Dead has terrific cover art by Paul Rader : a sculpture-like tough guy with impossibly large hands and forearms has a menacing grip on neck of pretty blonde. There's a review at Vintage Hardboiled Reads.
Mistress has an even more interesting if less polished cover: a curvaceous, floating-in-mid-air blonde in see-through negligee and high heels dominates the cover. A Siamese cat lurks at her feet. The background includes missiles and nuclear explosion, and sketchily drawn figures of desperate-looking man and two tussling shadowy figures. It all makes for a wonderfully surrealistic if conceptually scattered design. I’d never heard of the book's author William Woody. In any case this is decidedly the junoir partner of this Ace double production, the fetching cover nothwithstanding. See also the aforementioned review for a brief description of the book.
