Consul Books #1133, 1962

Title : The Men in My Life

Author : Marthe Watts

Cover art : uncredited

[London : World Distributors, 1962. Consul Books edition, #1133. First published in hardcover by Christopher Johnson Publishers Ltd, July 1960. Printed in Great Britain by C. Nicholls & Co. Ltd. "The wickedest woman in London." Memoir of a French prostitute who worked for the Messina vice ring in London's West End in the 1940s and 1950s. The Consul reprint benefits from the anonymous cover art which depicts the author in a late vintage neo-realist style]. 

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Digit Book No. R772, 1963

 
Title : Beyond Tolerance

Author : Hank Hobson

Cover art : anonymous

  [First published in hardcover, London, Cassell, 1960]

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I’d never heard of author Hobson before coming across this obscure British reprint. My immediate reaction was that ‘Hank Hobson’ is a better name for a private eye than an author. And it turns out that I wasn’t too far off the mark, in a roundabout sort of way. Evidence is sketchy but it appears that Hank Hobson is a pseudonym for one Harry Hobson, aka Stephen D. Frances, aka Hank Janson. The latter is both the author and detective hero of a series of British pulp novels in the 1940s and 1950s which are probably best remembered today for their unforgettable cheesecake cover art by lingerie specialist Reginald Heade. This cover’s not by Heade, in fact not by anyone in particular. Actually it’s executed in a very different style from Heade’s – a strikingly etched combination of gloominess and brightness. The sharply composed foreground figure in black contrasts nicely with the murky depiction of a body nearby, and all are framed by the vague, quasi-surrealist landscape which seems to suggest a moonlight-reflecting river in the distance. Altogether, a refreshingly different, late vintage British take on the tough formula. 

Four Square 341, 1959

Author : Henry Kuttner (ghosted by Cleve Cartmill?)
Title : Man Drowning

Cover art : Josh Kirby*

Josh Kirby's cover art for Man Drowning depicts a shapely, glowing blonde who seems to be floating in mid-air, and wearing a tight-fitting green dress with green high heels. Also in the cover are a giant undersea beast [a scorpion? or a bizarre rendering of seaweed?] and a figure of a dead man [at the bottom of the ocean?]. The style of the cover art represents a curious, Britishised attempt at a late vintage hard-boiled style, with strangely surrealistic results and a decidedly different look and feel from the prevailing American practice at the time.** The use of the rare color of green for the woman's dress and shoes is a nice change of pace. Man Drowning is sometimes attributed to ghost writer Cleve Cartmill.


* Any relation to Jack Kirby?
** Though to be sure there are overtones of the Mitchell Hooks collage style popular in the late 1950s.