Two-Timers

Forgive me, readers, for I have sinned. It’s been three months since I last called graphic designers on the carpet for overusing stock photography on the jackets of crime novels (and other books). During that lengthy hiatus, several of you have come forward bearing additional examples of copycat covers that I’d missed seeing. Before my collection grows any further, let us consider some of the more egregious examples of artwork duplication. (Simply click on any of the covers for an enlargement.)

Exhibit A: I like photos of women’s breasts in fishnet shirts as much as the next guy, but when it comes to book jackets, it’s possible to have too much of a good thing. The cover shown here on the left belongs to the 2006 St. Martin’s Minotaur edition of Red Baker, Los Angeles screenwriter and author Robert Ward’s highly regarded and genre-crossing, 1985 standalone about a laid-off steelworker in desperate search for a new identity. Beside it sits the front of Trouble, an erotic romance penned by Canadian Sasha White, published in August of this year. You don’t have to be a Mensa genius to spot that the same basic photograph, taken by Lisa Spindler, is used as the basis for both fronts, though designer Rob Grom has given it a crimson wash on the Red Baker cover, and bled a second image--of factory smokestacks--over the woman’s stomach.

Exhibit B: Cropping a stock photo differently does not an original jacket make. In these examples--the first from Olen Steinhauer’s 2005 Eastern Bloc thriller, 36 Yalta Boulevard (St. Martin’s Minotaur), and the second from the 2003 U.S. edition of Robert Wilson’s The Blind Man of Seville (Harcourt)--both feature the same shadowy male figure on their faces. However, the designer of Wilson’s book did what I think is a better job, by using all of the image, rather than truncating the man’s shadow.

Exhibit C: This duplication I stumbled upon just the other day, while reading through Marshal Zeringue’s Campaign for the American Reader blog. He’d asked Jamie Malanowski, the managing editor of Playboy, to submit his new political satire novel, The Coup (Doubleday), to the by-now-famous “Page 99 Test.” I might not have spotted this case of artistic redundancy, though, had I not happened to have a copy Robert Harris’ new political thriller, The Ghost (Simon & Schuster), sitting right beside me, on my desk. Obviously, the same Getty Images photo (by Mike Powell) is employed on this pair of covers. But Ghost designer Honi Werner has flipped the image, cut it down (so you see only the waving man and the arm of another resting on his shoulder), overlaid it with the representation of a British flag, and planted in the background at its center a red-tinted image of what might well be the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Both jackets work well in their own rights, but should never, ever be placed together on shelves.

Exhibit D: Rap Sheet reader Julia Sevin, from Louisiana’s Creeping Hemlock Press, sent me this last pair of book fronts. The one on the left comes from Pocket’s 2002 mass-market paperback edition of On Writing, Stephen King’s autobiography-cum-“tool kit” for aspiring wordsmiths. By comparison, the other jacket is drawn from Tom Piccirilli’s 2006 serial-killer novel, The Dead Letters, a Bantam paperback original. The latter has been darkened, given writing on its wall and a mysterious human silhouette, but there’s no question that it started with the same photo that was used on King’s book. The window, the door, and the wainscoting are all immediate tip-offs.

If you happen across additional cases of copycat crime-fiction covers, please don’t hesitate to e-mail us with the news. We’ll post more selections of this sorry trend as they become available.