These Blondes Are No Joke

Back at the start of this month, in a post I wrote about Hard Case Crime, the highly regarded publisher of pulpy paperback hard-boiled fiction, I quoted HCC honcho Charles Ardai on the subject of what is and is not permissible on modern book jackets.

“It’s ironic,” said Ardai. “You could show a completely naked woman on a paperback cover in the 1950s, as long as she was facing away from the viewers, but today, covers that risqué wouldn’t fly with at least some retailers.”

I was reminded of that comment just recently, as I was fishing through an online collection of cover illustrations by renowned artist Robert McGinnis. Among the many wonderful--dare I say “alluring”?--jackets I discovered was that of a 1967 Signet paperback called The Blonde, by Carter Brown (the pseudonym of Australian writer Alan G. Yates, whose myriad works were always big on sex, action, and humor). Sure enough, it shows a naked woman facing away from her viewers (click on the image at left to enlarge it). Brown’s story, according to his book’s teaser, is plotted around a “party girl [who] was going to tell everything about the Hollywood scandal, the orgies, and so on. Right on TV. But she was scooped--by her own murder.”

Now, as it happens, I’ve just finished reading another novel called The Blonde, this one by Philadelphia writer and newspaper editor Duane Swierczynski, and due out in November from St. Martin’s Minotaur. (One of the perks of being a critic is you get to read books way before everyone else does.) Swierczynski’s yarn is a tumbling-paced thriller that begins with a beautiful young woman--a blonde, as you might’ve guessed--allegedly poisoning the drink of an airport bar patron; leads to a beheading, self-replicating nanomachines, and wild craziness in a Philly swingers club; and concludes with healthy doses of revenge all around. It’s a crackling account of love, loss, and lunacy; and though it requires that the reader accept a rather outlandish premise, once started, The Blonde is as hard to put down as chilled beer on a sultry day.

Swierczynski declares himself thrilled with the “kick-ass cover” of his latest novel, in part because it bears a stylistic resemblance to the jacket of his previous book, The Wheelman. And yeah, there’s something very cool about how the designer has employed handcuffs in spelling out the title. But what might sales have been like, had Swierczynski’s The Blonde been allowed to sport a front as artistically racy as Brown’s older book by the same name? Too bad we live in a time and country where people resign themselves to White House domestic spying and lying about war, but where showing a little skin on the cover of a book will incite protest. There’s something backward about that, don’t you think?

READ MORE: “Blast from the Past #2: The Blonde” (The Nick Carter & Carter Brown Blog).