Macfadden 60-351 (1967)

Title : The Yellow Villa
Author : Suzanne Blanc
Cover art : photo [uncredited]
  [New York, Macfadden, 1967. No. 60-351. An Inspector Menendes mystery. First published, Garden City, NJ, Doubleday, the Crime Club, 1964].

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Yellow Villa is a potboiler mystery set in Mexico and arrives a little late for the vintage cycle. Anyway, the Macfadden reissue features a curiously garish 60s style cover with a shapely brunette in a tight fitting spacesuit-like dress brightly lit by a swirling spotlight. Cool yellow lettering for the title and author. Is the model on the cover wearing a wig? Fun to compare this vintage pb interpretation with the Dutch Prisma Detectives' De Diva en de Dood. I like the Macfadden (quite a bit) better.

Site of the month

The Flickering Wall.
   A fun discovery for cinema buffs. Per the author's description, these are capsule films reviews expressed in the style of Leslie Halliwell, but without his talent for pithy prose. The site has been active since 2006, and seems to cover only currently released films.

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.

Quote of the month

"Whenever a new book comes out, I read an old one."
    - William Lyon Phelps, 'Books News and Views,' The Rotarian, March 1937, p. 43.

Avon 126 (1947)

Title[s] : Cold-Blooded Murder
Author[s] : Freeman Wills Crofts
Cover art : Ann Cantor
  [New York, Avon Paperback, 1947. No. 126. Original title: Man Overboard (Dodd, Mead, 1936). “An Inspector French mystery.” – cover].

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This is one of my all-time favorite vintage paperback covers. Ann Cantor's design is over-the-top even by the standards of one of vintagedom's most sensationalist practitioners, Avon Books. The lighting and content – dead man’s [severed?] head, redheaded woman in low-cut red dress, and the bit of blood on cover – are reminiscent of those great Hammer horror films of the 1950s and 1960s, though in this case the book beats them to the punch by at least a decade.

I must confess that I never heard of Freeman Wills Crofts before I came across this book. My research reveals that he was pretty big in the UK in the between-the-wars group of mystery writers. One of his more unlikely admirers was Raymond Chandler. 

Gold Medal 199 (1951)

Title : Sumuru
Author : Sax Rohmer
Cover art : Barye Phillips
   [Greenwich, Conn. : Fawcett Gold Medal, 1951. No. 199. Paperback original. Mystery featuring the Sax Rohmer character, a Fu Manchu-like enchantress with quasi-supernatural powers who enslaves men and can turn people to stone].

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    The character of Sumuru has always benefitted from colorful front cover art (movie posters too). See here for a sampling. The quintessential Oriental villainess with supernatural powers seemed ready-made for the splashy 1950s paperback treatment, especially with Gold Medal as the publisher, whose stable of very capable artists included James Meese and Barye Phillips.

   At the same time there was a there was a burgeoning lesbian paperback surge in the 1950s* - the novels of Packer, Bannon, et. al were very popular at the time (and much commented on today in the print and online literature). But perhaps even more fascinating though much less frequently referenced is the appearance of lesbian themes and ideas in mainstream novels of the time, a case in point being our present title of interest, Sumuru (inasmuch as stories about Oriental arch-enchantresses with super-human powers could be mainstream).

   The Cover art for GM 199 depicts an exotic-looking brunette (presumably the title character) beckoning with a finger to a half-naked, draped (Caucasian?) redhead, who peers from a distance from behind a half-opened curtain. The Asian woman holds a gold chain in he her left hand and what appears to be an opium pipe in her right hand, while smoke from the pipe gently wafts nearby, all providing a nice atmosphere of forbidden Eastern exoticism (and perhaps eroticism, as well). Barye Phillips' cover art takes the Mysterious East theme a risqué step further by subtly suggesting a hint of lesbianism with the depiction of two beautiful, scantily clad women, the Eastern woman's come-hither gesture, and the other woman's glance back at her.

   I’m not qualified to say whether any lesbian themes actually appear in the novel, as I’ve not read the ‘Sumuru’ stories. But my guess is probably not. This was the vintage pb era, and they tended to put more spice on the covers than in the book's contents. -- BCS

   * With the conspicuous exception of the various sleaze publishing houses, the cover art for books by said and other authors tended to be fairly restrained and tasteful, usually far less suggestive than Phillips’ rather daring imagery for GM 199.

Ace Double D-379 (1959)

Title[s] : Drink with the Dead ; Mistress of Horror House
Author[s] : J. M. [Jay] Flynn ; William Woody
Cover art : Paul Rader (Drink with the Dead)

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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.