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.

Chronicles of Nana

What is one to make of Pocket Books’ 1941 edition of Emile Zola’s Nana with its lurid cover of a torch singer in a transparent white dress? It’s back-cover blurb declared, “she squandered fortunes, ruined lives, with sublime contempt and abandon -- yet her disease-ridden days were spent in squalor and oblivion.” Is this art or trash?

   -- Paula Rabinowitz, Black & White & Noir : America’s Pulp Modernism, pp. 81-82.

  

Emile Zola’s classic novel Nana has been well served by the publishing industry [1]; even the most cursory glance at LibraryThing or Google Images reveals covers which likely number in the hundreds. Classic era vintage, modern, and all shadings in-between have gotten into the act, but for vintage pb buffs the sine qua non are the two, alas anonymous, ‘scandalous’ covers from the unlikely source of Pocket Books, which was usually conservative in its cover art. Both versions depict the title character in all her (more or less) unclothed glory, and it's debatable which one is actually the more risqué cover. The 1945 printing is particularly effective with all those voyeuristic, tuxedoed silhouettes in the darkened theater. A nice creepy touch.

Anyway, perhaps the folks at Pocket thought better of the racy treatment and reverted to form in the 1954 Pocket Cardinal reissue, which is pretty tame in comparison. Avon's take on Nana’s Mother is similarly bland [2], the décolletage-rich depiction of the title character notwithstanding. And speaking of restrained, there are a couple of James Avati sketches (later used for Bantam 2811) posted by the redoubtable Piet Schreuders. While technically proficient they fall far short of the Pocket covers in sizzle.

[1] A good sampling of Zola covers can be found here. 

[2] Avon returns to lurid form, however, with Piping Hot, a (spurious?) Nana-esque title from the Zola oeuvre. 

Pocket 601 (1949)

Title : Lani

Author : Margaret Widdemer

Cover art : Robert Graves

  [New York, Pocket, 1949. No. 601. Fourth printing. "Tense drama unfolds against the colorful backdrop of the flaming tropics."]

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  For this steamy plantation romance in Old Hawaii, artist Robert Graves [1] gives us a cover in a quasi-expressionistic style that’s a nice contrast to the hyper-realistic vintage covers in favor in the late 1940s. Pocket 601 features the main characters in the novel, rendered in a rather cartoon-like fashion, with the title character being the the well-coiffured, fully dressed, Eurasian(?) woman on the left. 


  More interesting, however, is the depiction of the half-naked native woman on the right. It’s a good example of an obscure but important unwritten rule which contributed to the spicy brew that was vintage paperback cover art in its golden age. This was the practice of presenting selected, usually female, character types -- artists’ models, sci-fi amazons, mythological characters, and ‘native’ (i.e. non-Anglo) women -- in more risqué fashion, up to [sometimes] fully unclothed [2]. In contrast, Caucasian women - even femmes fatales - had to be treated somewhat more discreetly. Artists usually opted for the suggestive approach : various states of dishevelment and undress, or tight fitting clothes which emphasized the subject's décolletage charms.

[1] Presumably no relation to the famous author.

[2] oops! apparitions & hallucinations, too; see Maguire’s famous cover for Black Opium, with the vision of a naked blonde emanating from an opium pipe.

Pocket Books 6042 (1960)

Title : The Case of the Angry Mourner
Author : Erle Stanley Gardner

Cover art : uncredited
   [N.Y. : Pocket Books, 1960. #6042. Fifth printing]

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 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.

Pocket 643 (October 1949)

Title : The Case of the Drowning Duck
Author : Erle Stanley Gardner
Cover art : Louis Glanzman

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"Complete and unabridged." Louis Glanzman's depiction of floating heads of two women & a claw-like left hand holding a baby duck is a primo example of the ca. 1950 lurid phase of this usually reticent publishing house. The lively cover art of Pocket 643 has an  unsettling creepiness to it with the combination of the forlorn looking women, the menacing hand, but mostly the bright colors of orange and yellow, to suggest : the fires of Hades? an out-of-control sun? nuclear explosion? Whatever, it's a terrific, more-or-less one of a kind cover effort from little known artist Louis Glanzman.

Pocket 6043 (5th printing, 1960)

Title : The Case of the Fan Dancer's Horse
Author : Erle Stanley Gardner
Cover art : uncredited

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The cover art for Pocket 6043 is done in the 'Charles' style, but no artist is credited. A shapely blonde wearing exotic dancer garb seems to be sitting on some kind of wall. Or is she suspended in mid-air? BTW love all that red on the cover! Anyway, the evidence suggests that Fan-Dancer’s Horse has been rather well served by vintage cover art; a glance at LibraryThing and ABEBooks reveals at least six pb editions which appeared during the (more or less) classic years of 1940-1968, all with pretty tasty cover designs. The most direct comparison is of course the somewhat more risqué Pocket first printing (no. 886) of 1952. In this version cover art legend Earl Bergey depicts in most tantalizing fashion a naked brunette wearing only red high-heeled shoes hiding behind a fan.

Pocket 896 (1952)

Title : Miami Murder Go-Round
Author : Marston La France
Cover art: Morgan Kane  


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"The complete book; not a word missing."

 In this 1952 reprint, Miami Murder Go-Round gets the full pulp treatment by the usually conservative Pocket Books. Murder Go-Round benefits in particular from the high intensity front cover art by Morgan Kane -- bright red colors frame a view from the top of a 3-D stairs, with bad guy at bottom, knife in hand. The Spillane-esque fun continues on the back cover with the blurb:

  “This private eye, Rick Larkan, is really tough and needs to be. He’s got a blonde in his apartment, a blonde with half a million bucks in cold cash belonging to someone else. The blonde’s girl friend has been tortured and murdered. His own buddy has been killed. His clients want him to turn up another murderer, and the police want his help in cracking a gang of smugglers. And all this in America’s most lush playground, Miami … a town where vicious people often play too rough at vice and smuggling, and swollen citizens come floating in from Biscayne Bay … dead and stinking.”

This is the only novel by the rather obscure author Marston La France (1927-1975). His mystery writer credentials are on the curious side: one source lists him as a farmer in New York in the 1950s, another says he wrote Miami Murder Go-Round to finance his college expenses. Fun to compare the cover art for the Pocket version with the original 1951 hardback printing by World. Both are strong covers but for me the Pocket's in-your-face immediacy carries the day. 

Apparently there was an Italian translation [Girandola a Miami, Verona: Editore Luciana Agnoli, 1954; tr. Luciana Agnoli Zucchini]. Would love to get hold of this one; love that title!

Pocket 651, 1950

Title : The Fourth Postman
Author : Craig Rice
Cover art : Harvey Kidder
   [N. Y. : Pocket, 1950. No. 651. First printing, March 1950. Pseudonym of Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig. “Why in hell would anyone want to kill a postman.” Gorgeous cover art by Harvey Kidder in the montage style that would become popular later in the decade.]

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