A Gumshoe’s Multiple Guises

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up on a meme started at the Web site Weekly Geeks that asked bloggers to search out multiple covers for a particular book, those that have appeared on that work over time. I targeted covers from Turn on the Heat, the second installment in the classic Bertha Cool and Donald Lam detective series, written by novelist Erle Stanley Gardner under the pseudonym “A.A. Fair.”

Well, with all the recent hoopla surrounding the publication of Joe Gores’ Spade & Archer--an accomplished, if not perfect prequel to Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel, The Maltese Falcon--I decided to engage in a bit more sleuthing, this time searching out old Falcon jackets. In addition to the front of the September 1929 edition of Black Mask magazine (shown at left), in which the first part of Hammett’s original Sam Spade yarn was published, I tracked down 10 different covers from the United States and Britain, as well as (third row) Germany, and Italy:








Personally, I like the 1930 Alfred A. Knopf hardcover edition (top row, left) the best. However, the two covers in the fifth row down are definite rivals. My own library features the 1972 Vintage paperback shown in the fourth row, on the left. And the one just to the right of that (published in 1975 by Pan Books), which features a hand reaching for a falcon statue behind corrugated glass, boasts considerable style, too. The others--including the 1945 Pocket edition, with femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy seen waiting behind a curtain, while Spade searches her clothing--are merely passable.

But wouldn’t you know it: Shortly after I finished compiling this collection of handsome covers, I discovered a page of Mike Humbert’s excellent The Dashiell Hammett Web Site where an abundance of other Maltese Falcon covers can be found.