Bad Company

When I first began looking for book jackets that employed identical artwork, I had no idea how rampant were examples of this practice. The Rap Sheet has since followed up with three more batches of “copycat covers” (see here, here, and here), and other bloggers have brought forth additional instances of such duplication. (Take a gander here and here.) It’s great to see others finally paying attention to this annoying trend. Publishers and art directors ought to strive for more originality than they demonstrate by relying on stock photography in this manner.

The latest examples of copycat covers come from two sources at different ends of the globe. The first pair, showing British editions of Olen Steinhauer’s The Vienna Assignment (a book published in the States as 36 Yalta Boulevard) and William Landay’s The Strangler, were brought to my attention by Australian crime fictionist Daniel Hatadi. It’s pretty obvious that the same photo has been used on both jackets, though The Strangler takes in more of the original shot, while The Vienna Assignment focuses on the woman in the image. The nighttime backdrop is just vague enough to work for stories set in the Austrian capital and in Boston, Massachusetts.

Our second set of jackets was highlighted by UK novelist John Rickards, who’s already been the victim of one such copycat snafu. Now, incredibly, it’s happened to him again. It doesn’t take a genius to spot that the lonely house in a forest featured on a British edition of John Saul’s In the Dark of Night is the very same one fronting Rickards’ Burial Ground. But maybe it would’ve been better had we not brought this duplicating trend to Rickards’ attention. As he explains in his blog, he has now “retired to [his] Fortress of Hatred to plot death, revenge. Also to suggest to publisher that maybe just slapping text on the same fucking Corbis image library pics that every other company under the sun uses may not be such a great fucking idea.”

We couldn’t have said it any better.

If you happen upon any more examples of copycat crime-fiction covers, don’t hesitate to e-mail us. We’ll post more examples as they become available.

READ MORE: “Reusable Cover Art in Historical Novels: A Gallery,” by Sarah Johnson.