Can We Retire These Photos Yet?

Ever since we started posting about copycat covers on crime novels, we’ve become extra sensitive to the appearance of such replications. We’ve also noticed that some photographs aren’t used just one or two times, but may illustrate the fronts of three or four novels, if not more. Even accepting that book designers on tight budgets can’t be expected to have seen how every stock photo on the market was employed previously, and thereby avoid repeating use of those images, shots that threaten to become ubiquitous should certainly also become familiar to folks whose careers depend on their paying more attention to these matters than the rest of us are obliged to do. And those overused photographs ought then to be dumped from the pool of acceptable artwork--if not retired by the stock agencies that own them, then at least given a wide berth by designers.

One of the most hackneyed images appears on the forthcoming Walker paperback edition of Reggie Nadelson’s Disturbed Earth, her 2004 novel starring Russian immigrant-turned-New York City private eye Artie Cohen. This photograph is credited to Richard Olenius and the National Geographic Image Collection (#394824). It’s not a bad nighttime shot of Chicago, Illinois, with the foreground and shadowy image of a man crossing what may be an open-air skyway or building balcony. Unfortunately, though, this is the very same likeness that decorated the hardback edition of British novelist H.R.F. Keating’s A Detective in Love (2002) as well as the 2002 front of Sam Reaves’ Dooley’s Back. Oh, and it was also employed on the 2006 mass-market paperback edition of George Pelecanos’ terrific Drama City. (Incidentally, of those books only Reaves’ is actually set in Chicago.)

That photo has now graced the jackets of four American crime novels, and nobody but those of us here at the Rap Sheet have so much as noticed? Gimme a break. Readers are more intelligent than that, and publishers and designers ought to be, too. Was there no other stock shot that could have substituted in at least one of these cases? And was there no money available for an original photograph, if only to avoid the embarrassment associated with duplications such as these?

Another instance of egregious overuse involves the image of a seemingly young brunette, dressed in a full-length skirt and holding a birdcage in her left hand. I first noticed this lass when she appeared on the 2006 U.S. paperback edition of John Crowley’s Little, Big. But she then proceeded to insert herself--with a little Photoshop help, no doubt--into the cover of Pearl Luke’s 2006 novel, Madame Zee, this time with what looks like a beach background, rather than a roadway and imposing residence behind her. More recently, she elbowed her way onto the cover of Joel Rose’s The Blackest Bird, a historical suspense novel (featuring author-cum-investigator Edgar Allan Poe) that was released earlier this year. Only on this occasion, she and her cage are found in what might be a European backstreet.

A little Web detective work reveals the genesis of that cover-hopping babe. The shot was taken by Lorraine Molina and is available from Seattle-based Getty Images (#6421-000003). The original photo shows Molina’s subject standing in what might be a country lane, and bears the closest resemblance to the Crowley cover.

After shaking our heads over those two repeat performances, it seems almost insignificant that--with the help of Tom Nolan, editor of The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator--we should have tumbled to yet another example of copycat covers, this time involving a photo that’s only been used twice (that we know of, anyway). It doesn’t take a frickin’ genius, glancing over the pair of covers on the right, to tip to the fact that the same fedora-wearing gent who fronts the 1996 Vintage Crime/Black Lizard paperback reprint of Ross Macdonald’s The Chill also appears (though in reverse) on the jacket of the U.S. hardcover debut edition of British novelist John Baker’s first P.I. Sam Turner novel, Poet in the Gutter. And both books were published in the same year. Talk about regrettable coincidences!

We won’t delude ourselves into thinking that, by pointing out these duplicate applications of stock art, publishers on either side of the Atlantic will suddenly cease relying on photo agencies and go back to their previous practice of paying for fresh artwork to use on book fronts. Very few publishers nowadays (with the notable exceptions of Hard Case Crime and a few other comparatively small houses) go to the trouble or expense of commissioning unique cover images. Nonetheless, it should give designers and their bosses pause to realize that by overexercising stock shots, they are making their products not more distinctive in the public marketplace, but instead less so. And that cannot be good for sales.

READ MORE: “Are Publishers Cheap?” by Peter Rozovsky (Detectives Beyond Borders).