Bullet Points: Heavy on Nostalgia Edition

• A much-deserved accolade, mentioned yesterday in Literary Hub: “John le Carré, perhaps history’s greatest spy novelist, was this morning announced as the latest recipient of the $100,000 Olof Palme Prize, an award given for ‘an outstanding achievement in any of the areas of anti-racism, human rights, international understanding, peace and common security.’ In their citation, the prize organizers praised le Carré ‘for his engaging and humanistic opinion-making in literary form regarding the freedom of the individual and the fundamental issues of mankind,’ and called his career ‘an extraordinary contribution to the necessary fight for freedom, democracy and social justice.’”

• There are plenty of interesting pieces in the latest edition of Mystery Scene magazine, among them profiles of authors William Kent Krueger and Elly Griffiths, and Kevin Burton Smith’s “2019 Gift Guide for Mystery Lovers” (still worth perusing, even with the holidays now past). However, I was most drawn to Michael Mallory’s retrospective on the 1973-1976 late-night ABC-TV anthology series Wide World of Mystery. As Mallory recalls, that succession of original “mysteries, horror stories, and science-fiction tales”—all of which began at 11:30 p.m.—was ABC’s several-nights-a-week alternative to The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. “While the show’s stories and settings ran the gamut,” Mallory writes, “other things remained constant. One was the 90-minute length—actually 70 or so minutes plus commercials. Another was the fact that they were all recorded on videotape rather than being filmed, as were then-popular prime-time movies of the week. Because of this, viewers were occasionally treated to the occupational hazard of live-on-tape shows: bloopers.” Ed Asner, Lynda Day George, Christopher Reeve, Susan Sarandon, and Tom Selleck were all cast in WWoM installments, only a handful of which are available on DVD (with one—1975’s “Alien Lover,” introducing Kate Mulgrew, to be found on YouTube). I wasn’t a big late-night TV viewer as a boy, but I do remember seeing a few of those teleflicks, notably the March 14, 1975, presentation “Nick and Nora.” An unsuccessful “backdoor pilot” for a separate ABC series, it starred Peter Gunn’s Craig Stevens and small-screen fixture Jo Ann Pflug as Dashiell Hammett’s tippling snoops, Nick and Nora Charles, who in this movie “investigated the death of a man found floating in the pool of a posh L.A. hotel,” according to Mallory.

• By the way, The Stiletto Gumshoe notes that in this new issue of Mystery Scene, “publishers Kate Stine and Brian Skupin officially announced the magazine’s switch to a quarterly starting this year. It’ll be tough to wait longer between issues, but the promise of an increased page count while keeping the subscription price untouched was welcome news.”

• Found recently among my mail, too, was the fifth edition of Down & Out: The Magazine. This was long overdue: the previous issue came out in August 2018. In his editor’s note, Rick Ollerman chalks this delay up to multiple personal mishaps—which wouldn’t have been as big a problem at a larger publication, where other employees could have filled in for the recuperating editor, but at shorthanded Down & Out, it spelled trouble. The sad part is that this tardiness probably cost the periodical subscribers, who thought they could no longer trust in its regularity and future. I can only hope that enough readers will give Down & Out: The Magazine a second chance, because it’s new issue is guaranteed to please, with fiction from the likes of Walter Satterthwait, April Kelly, and Brendan DuBois, plus a column I wrote about Erle Stanley Gardner’s Doug Selby mysteries.

• The original 1968 Ford Mustang GT driven by Steve McQueen in the Warner Bros. film Bullitt, was sold at auction recently for a whopping $3,400,000. That car is renowned for having participated in this thrilling on-screen chase scene.

• In 1985, author Ross Thomas won the Edgar Award for Best Novel with Briarpatch. Now that standalone thriller has been adapted as a USA Network series, set to premiere on February 6. Taking the lead in Thomas’ novel was Ben “Pick” Dill, a white former reporter. However, the gender and race of the protagonist in USA’s series have both been flipped, with Rosario Dawson starring. The Hollywood Reporter explains: “Briarpatch follows Allegra Dill (Dawson), an investigator returning to her border-town Texas home after her sister is murdered. What begins as a search for a killer turns into an all-consuming fight to bring her corrupt city to its knees. The series is described as a blend of crime and pulp fiction.” If you’re interested, you can watch a short trailer is here. (Hat tip to Craig Pittman.)

• Also headed for television: Jonathan Lethem’s first novel, 1994’s Gun, with Occasional Music. “The novel,” says Deadline, “is a blend of sci-fi, noir and satire, set in the near future in a trippy world. Evolved animals are part of society, the government placates its citizens with free mind-numbing drugs, and the police monitor people by their karma levels. The protagonist is Conrad Metcalf, a down-and-out P.I. on a loser of a case. His last client—a prominent doctor—just turned up dead, and in order to clear his name and stay out of the deep freeze, the P.I. works for free to get to the bottom of it all. Turns out there is no bottom to this one, though, and Metcalf soon finds there’s nothing simple about this murder.” Deadline adds that “The series will be produced by Aggregate Films’ Jason Bateman, Michael Costigan and Daniel Pipski, along with Francey Grace.”

• Better late than never, let me direct your attention to the second annual Charlie Chan Family Home newsletter. Ohio Chan fan Lou Armagno notes that the newsletter (available here as a PDF document), addresses “two new book releases; a fall ‘Chan’ class taught at the University of Las Vegas, NV; ‘The Other Guys,’ an article on Mr. Wong and Mr. Moto; a recap of my first year blogging at The Postman on Holiday; and a ‘very special’ narrative by Charlie Chan Family Home webmaster, Rush Glick, on his adventure (20 years ago) to pursue the four lost Chan film-scripts. Finally, [there’s] a look at the upcoming Chinese New Year (The Year of the Rat, January 25) and three Charlie Chan events happening at various locations in 2020.”

• Among the “artists, innovators, and thinkers” we lost in 2019, The New York Times honors Peggy Lipton, co-star of The Mod Squad.

• The blog Up and Down These Mean Streets points out that Angel Eyes, Ace Atkins’ recent novel starring Boston private eye Spenser, features a few nods to the work of Dashiell Hammett.

• Speaking of Hammett, Nick Kolakowski records the multiple efforts over the decades to adapt 1929’s Red Harvest for the silver screen. “Red Harvest,” he opines, “seems doomed to remain the Schrödinger’s cat of noir adaptations: often made—and yet never made.”

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

The Audio Publishers Association announced that they will be presenting bestselling author Stephen King with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Audie Awards in March in New York City. King is known for his horror novels such as The Shining and Carrie but also for his crime novels, the Mr. Mercedes Trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch), The Outsider, The Colorado Kid, and Joyland.

• I’m not usually a Marie Claire reader, but this recent piece in the magazine had me at the headline: “Megan Abbott Wants You to Feel Everything,” with a subhead reading, “With the premiere of her TV series ‘Dare Me’ on December 29, the novelist-turned-showrunner is taking her knack for humanizing the dynamics of gender, rage, and power beyond the page.” Good job, Megan!

• In the blog Mystery*File (which last month celebrated its 13th anniversary), critic Michael Shonk identified his favorite TV series of the last decade, mostly crime dramas, a couple of which I’d never heard of before. So what was his top 2010-2019 pick? “The underrated Person of Interest” (2011-2016).

• Have you seen these Bonnie and Clyde photos?

• Almost a year ago, I mentioned on this page that the 1978 CBS-TV pilot for an unsold series titled The Jordan Chance, starring Raymond Burr, had been posted on YouTube, but that a previous Burr pilot, 1976’s Mallory: Circumstantial Evidence, remained unavailable. Suddenly, though, that latter movie has popped up on the video sales site Modcinema. Here’s its plot synopsis: “Raymond Burr stars again as a lawyer, this time named Arthur Mallory. No Perry Mason here, Mallory has been on the outs since being falsely accused of encouraging a witness to lie on the stand. Eventually cleared, Mallory lives hand to mouth as a public defender, with a heightened sense of fair play when it comes to the downtrodden. In this pilot film for the never-sold TV series Mallory, the attorney defends a jailed car thief (Mark Hamill) who has been framed for the killing of another prisoner.” You can buy the video here.

• It’s hard to believe that California-born actress Karen Valentine will turn 73 years old this coming May. As an early birthday present (to the rest of us), Comfort TV blogger David Hofstede has compiled briefs on some of her most prominent small-screen roles, including in Room 222, her short-lived eponymous TV series from 1975, and an ABC Movie of the Week titled The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped (1974)—that last being a flick I recall liking, but hadn’t thought about in years. Here’s Hofstede’s description of the story: “A magazine publisher (Richard Long) receives a bikini-clad girl (Karen Valentine) as a birthday present. Sounds like a set-up for a skit on Love, American Style. But there’s a lot more going on in this surprisingly touching (and funny) TV movie with a wonderful cast—Farrah Fawcett, Tom Bosley, Dave Madden, and Reta Shaw. This may be the best remembered of Valentine’s TV movies—and that’s not a bad choice if it is.” Sadly, you can’t watch The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped online; but I see that Modcinema (again, a site after my own heart) has copies for sale here.

• Incidentally, I glanced through Karen Valentine’s IMDb page and discovered that she was cast not only in comedies, but also in a number of crime, mystery, and legal dramas as well—everything from Eischied and The New Mike Hammer to Murder, She Wrote and Family Law. The site says her last TV performance was in the 2004 teleflick Wedding Daze, in which she co-starred with John Larroquette.

• Before we venture too deep into 2020, let’s look back for a moment at 2019’s “best” book covers, as judged by the sites Literary Hub, Spine, and The Casual Optimist. What do you think?

• Hah! Just as we thought all along: “Why Do So Many Book Covers Look the Same? Blame Getty Images.”

• “Craig Stevens discusses his life and career, including his classic role on Peter Gunn, as well as his long marriage to Alexis Smith, in this 1993 interview with cable TV host Skip E Lowe.”

• If you missed Killer Cover’s end-of-the-year tribute to Anglo-Scots painter and book-cover artist Tom Adams—who created iconic fronts for novels by Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, among others—you can catch up with that whole series here.

• David Zucchino recalls the notorious, long-ago white-supremacist takeover of Wilmington, North Carolina. He writes:

Throughout that summer and autumn, white men had been buying shotguns, six-shot pistols, and repeating rifles at hardware stores in Wilmington ..., a port city set in the low Cape Fear country along the state’s jagged coast. It was 1898, a tumultuous mid-term election year. The city’s white leadership had vowed to remove the city’s multi-racial government by the ballot or the bullet, or both. Few white
men in Wilmington intended to back their candidates that November without a firearm within easy reach. There was concern among whites in Wilmington, where they were outnumbered by blacks, that stores would run dry on guns, and that suppliers in the rest of the state and in South Carolina would be unable to meet demand.

• Chicago-born author Mike Resnick died this last Thursday of lymphoma at age 77. Although he’s most often thought of as a prolific and multiple award-winning producer of science-fiction stories, The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura observes that Resnick also penned “several mystery novels and fantasy novels with mystery elements. John Justice Mallory is a hard-boiled private detective in a fantastical New York, where humans co-habit with vampires and fairy tale beasts such as dragons. Mallory was introduced in Stalking the Unicorn (Tor, 1987) and featured in two more novels and a collection of short stories, Stalking the Zombie (American Fantasy, 2012). The Eli Paxton series features a Cincinnati private eye who appeared in Dog in the Manger (Alexander, 1995) and two more novels.”

• And while I had my attention turned elsewhere, The Rap Sheet somehow registered its 7,600th post.

Bullet Points: Media Medley Edition

• Argentina-born pianist and composer Lalo Schifrin, who has scored such films as Cool Hand Luke, Bullitt, and Dirty Harry, and created the theme music for TV productions including Mission: Impossible, Petrocelli, and Mannix, was honored this last weekend with a Governors Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In addition to the 86-year-old Schifrin, two other recognizable Hollywood figures received Governors Awards: 93-year-old actress Cicely Tyson and Marvin Levy, a longtime public relations exec who was once a member of the AMPAS board of governors. You can watch Schifrin accept his award on YouTube.

• The Classic Film and TV Café calls producer-writer Stirling Silliphant “the poet laureate of 1960s television” in this tribute looking back at his scripts for the 1960-1964 CBS series Route 66. “Silliphant, who co-created the series with producer Herbert B. Leonard, wrote an incredible 73 of the 116 episodes over the show’s four-year run,” observes the blogger known as Rick29. “In terms of entertainment value, the plots were consistently above-average, but it’s Silliphant's dialogue that gave Route 66 its unique voice. As David Mamet would do later, Silliphant embellished his characters with dialogue that would never pass for natural—but which conveyed a singular poetry all its own.” In addition to Route 66, Silliphant (shown on the left) is remembered for his work on the TV programs Naked City and Longstreet, and his screenplays for such pictures as In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Marlowe (1969), which starred James Garner as Raymond Chandler’s justly famous Los Angeles private eye, Philip Marlowe.

• While we’re on the subject of bygone boob-tube shows, check out Michael Shonk’s new Mystery*File post about Gavilan, a 1982-1983 NBC series that featured Robert Urich (later of Spenser: For Hire fame) as a former intelligence operative who has gone to work for an oceanographic research organization called the Dewitt Institute, but keeps trying to help people—especially attractive young females—in trouble. Shonk opines:

The series had its good moments, but it also had many of the flaws of 1980s television. The plots were better than average but had to really stretch to connect to the Institute. In “By the Sword” the brilliant beautiful woman was a scientist working on a project to study the krill as a food source, but the plot was about an ancient samurai sword she stole from the Yakuza to regain her family honor.

The stories were entertaining but mindless, predictable and too willing to sacrifice story and character for a joke or twist. In “By the Sword,” the female scientist is trained in the martial arts and had done something her entire family had not done in over a hundred years, got her family’s ancient honored Japanese sword back from the Yakuza. So in the final confrontation for the sword it is Gavilan—as she watched—who sword fights to the death for the sword and her family honor. Of course, Gavilan out duels the unbeatable Master Samurai.

Shonk’s piece includes two episodes of Gavilan found on YouTube. A few of my own thoughts on this show can be found here.

• NBC-TV has reportedly made a script commitment for The Bone Collector, a series based both on Jeffery Deaver’s 1997 psychological thriller of the same name and on the 1990 Denzel Washington movie already adapted from that novel. According to Deadline Hollywood, NBC’s project “hails from writers V.J. Boyd and Mark Bianculli (S.W.A.T.), Universal Television and Sony Pictures Television … Written by Boyd and Bianculli, The Bone Collector follows Lincoln Rhyme, a retired genius forensic criminologist left paralyzed after an accident on the job. When a harrowing case brings him back to the force, Rhyme partners up with an ambitious young detective, Amelia Sachs, to take down some of the most dangerous criminals in the U.S.” There’s no information yet on who might star in this series, but plenty of speculation on what it could draw from Deaver’s 14 existing Rhyme novels, the latest of which is 2017’s The Cutting Edge.

• The Killing Times says that America’s Audience Network has renewed the Stephen King-inspired, David E. Kelley-developed crime drama, Mr. Mercedes, for a third season.

• I’m not surprised by news that Netflix’s Tony Danza/Josh Groban “dramedy,” The Good Cop, hasn’t been picked up for a second season. While I really wanted to like the series—in part because its creator-showrunner was Monk mastermind Andy Breckman—it came off as way too cute too much of the time, with an excess of thin plots and ridiculous turns. I did, however, like Danza’s portrayal of a disgraced ex-New York City policeman as part con man, part reluctant troubleshooter; and dancer-actress Monica Barbaro consistently brightened up the screen playing Grogan’s ballsier partner, Cora Vasquez. I’ve only seen half of the 10 episodes of The Good Cop, but their performances will keep me watching through to the end.

• I’d heard about this before, and was convinced that I’d mentioned it here, but evidently I was wrong. Anyway, Mystery Tribune notes that Christopher Huang’s debut novel, A Gentleman’s Murder—which featured in my recent CrimeReads piece about nine post-World War I mysteries—has been optioned for TV adaptation.

• Deadline Hollywood brings word that Tom Shepherd, who scripted Robert Downey Jr.’s forthcoming The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle, has been signed to pen Matt Helm, based on Donald Hamilton’s long-running series of spy thrillers. Bradley Cooper will star in this Paramount project, with George Clooney, Grant Heslov, Alex Kurtzman, and Roberto Orci all serving as executive producers.



• Continuing The Rap Sheet’s series on “copycat covers,” book fronts that employ artwork previously displayed on other titles, we offer—above—the façades of Blow Out the Candles and Say Goodbye (Lamplighter Suspense), Linda S. Glaz’s 2017 novel, and 2016’s Stealing People (Europa Editions), the third entry in Robert Wilson’s series starring kidnap consultant Charlie Boxer.

• A new book suggests that Arthur Conan Doyle based the character of Professor James Moriarty, sleuth Sherlock Holmes’ principal nemesis, on a brilliant 19th-century professor of mathematics named George Boole. “A thorough comparison between Conan Doyle’s fictional Moriarty and the real Boole,” writes The Irish Times, “reveals numerous persuasive similarities. Both characters held chairs at small provincial universities; both won appointments on the basis of outstanding early work; both had interests in astronomy; the two were of similar appearance—an illustration of Moriarty in Conan Doyle’s work bears a striking resemblance to a photograph of Boole and may well have been based on it. The major discrepancy between Boole and Moriarty is that Boole was a man of high morals and excellent character, a social reformer, religious thinker and family man.” While Moriarty … well, as Conan Doyle put it in The Valley of Fear, he was “the greatest schemer of all time, the organizer of every devilry …”

• Murder & Mayhem picks “11 must-read mysteries set in Los Angeles,” and I’m relieved to discover that I’ve read all but one: Dorothy B. Hughes’ The Expendable Man (1963).

• To his excellent John D. MacDonald blog, The Trap of Solid Gold, Steve Scott has recently added two worth-reading vintage profiles of Travis McGee’s creator—one from Florida’s Tampa Bay Times, dated April 26, 1981; and the other from a 1978 edition of the Canadian news magazine Maclean’s (you’ll find that second piece here).

• Authors are generally quite reticent to reveal which books they prefer among those they have written, so it’s interesting to see Max Allan Collins identify his two favorite entries in his rapidly expanding series about the hit man known as Quarry.

• Which reminds me, I wasn’t aware before reading this piece in The Guardian, that Agatha Christie’s 1967 novel, Endless Night, was her favorite. Sam Jordison says more about that standalone here.

• A weekend spent organizing my late in-laws' long-forgotten boxes of books turned up some surprising and welcome literary gems.

• I am, of course, an enthusiastic follower of the Web site Pulp Covers, with its ever-growing abundance of classic book and magazine fronts. And one of the reasons for my interest is that the site’s unidentified editor frequently posts links to full issues of periodicals such as Dime Mystery Magazine, Detective Book Magazine, Manhunt, and New Detective. Those issues are easily downloaded and can be wonderfully entertaining.

• So much has already been said about the demise, late last week, of 87-year-old novelist and screenwriter William Goldman, that I fear I have nothing to add. Obituaries in The New York Times and in the British Guardian covered the highlights of his career: his scripting of movies such as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Maverick, and Paul Newman’s Harper; his penning of novels that included Marathon Man, The Princess Bride, and Magic; and his late-life success with a memoir titled Adventures in the Screen Trade. CrimeReads adds to those encomia a collection of notable Goldman quotes. My own first experience with Goldman was way back in high school, when I was introduced to Magic … which put me off of ventriloquist’s dummies for the remainder of my mortal life. I’ve often watched Goldman’s motion pictures, with Harper—based on Ross Macdonald’s 1949 private-eye novel, The Moving Target—and Butch Cassidy being my favorites. I never met the man, but the power and precision of his prose, and the pleasure I’ve derived from listening to his dialogue and reading his stories made me care about him nonetheless. Really, a storyteller could hope for nothing better than that.

• The Gumshoe Site reminds us that William Goldman’s first mystery novel was No Way to Treat a Lady. In another blog, Tipping My Fedora, Sergio Angelini recalls that that book was “originally published in 1964 under the pseudonym ‘Harry Longbaugh,’ the real name of the outlaw ‘The Sundance Kid.’ Written in just 10 days, this brief novel is 160 pages long and broken down into 53 chapters and is an exciting, blackly comic work reminiscent of the best of the Ed McBain thrillers of the time.” Adam Groves of The Bedlam Files adds that No Way to Treat a Lady “lacks the slickness and polish of [Goldman’s] later novels, with much slapdash prose and an uncertain grasp of tone (it’s difficult to discern if all the comedic elements were meant to be funny). Yet the wit, verve and imagination that characterize Goldman’s best work are very much evident in this suspenseful and macabre novel that predates everything from Dexter to Natural Born Killers in its furiously inventive account of the fortunes of a mass murderer.” Concludes Groves: “I say it’s one of William Goldman’s finest books.”

• By the way, No Way to Treat a Lady was made into a 1968 film starring Rod Steiger, Lee Remick, and George Segal. As I’ve never read Goldman’s original book, or seen the movie, I guess I have some serious catching up to do.

• Want to learn more about classic New Zealand mystery writer Ngaio Marsh? CrimeReads’ Neil Nyren provides a bit of background as well as recommendations of four works from her oeuvre.

• Here’s something I didn’t know before: Wisconsin-born, Japanese-American crime novelist Milton K Ozaki (1913-1989)—who often wrote under the moniker Robert O Saber—was not only “a newspaperman, an artist, and the operator of a beauty parlor” (per Bill Crider), but also something of a con man, according to Paperback Warrior.

• In The Spy Command, Bill Koenig traces the complicated roots of the 1964-1968 NBC-TV spy series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and its connections to James Bond creator Ian Fleming. This is a continuing series, but you can find Part I here, with Part II here.

• The New York Times’ Alexandra Alter recently caught up with Megan Abbott, whose commitments both as an author and as the executive producer of a TV pilot film based on her 2012 novel, Dare Me, must leave her little time for relaxation.

• Leo W. Banks has claimed another prize for his 2017 debut novel, Double Wide. His publisher’s Web site says Banks “just received the 2018 Best Mystery Novel award from the New Mexico Book Co-op, announced at a gala awards banquet in Albuquerque on November 16th. Along with this latest honor, Double Wide also has received two Western Writers of America 2018 Spur Awards and [the] Best Crime Novel of the Year Award by True West magazine.”

• Finally, I’ve spent several years now trying to procure copies of the four episodes made of Faraday and Company, a 1973-1974 detective series that starred Dan Dailey and James Naughton, and was part of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie line-up. Then, just today, I happened across a Web site called DVD Planet Store, which offers the full run of Faraday for $16. The trouble is, after reading negative online reviews of this Pakistan-based enterprise, I fear I might never receive the DVDs I sought to purchase. Has anybody else tried to buy from DVD Planet Store? What were your experiences with it?

Copycat Covers: Stranger Wings

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



In the Shadow of Gotham, by Stefanie Pintoff (Minotaur, 2009); and Unholy City, by Carrie Smith (Crooked Lane, 2017). Both book jackets employ, as their principal focus, the eight-foot bronze statue of an angel found atop the Bethesda Fountain in Manhattan’s Central Park. That sculpture—designed by Emma Stebbins, who is remembered as “the first woman to receive a public commission for a major work of art in New York City”—was unveiled in 1873.


Stebbins’ Angel of the Waters is shown above. “The base of the fountain,” explains Wikipedia, “was designed by the architect of all the original built features of Central Park, Calvert Vaux, with sculptural details, as usual, by Jacob Wrey Mould.”

Copycat Covers: It Takes a Village

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



Buried in the Country, by Carola Dunn (Minotaur, 2016); and In a Dry Season, by Peter Robinson (Morrow, 1999).

If you click on these images to enlarge them, you will see clearly that the front from In a Dry Season—Robinson’s 10th Alan Banks novel—uses the right-hand portion (only slight modified) of the same Jo Parsons/Getty Images stock photo that decorates the façade of Dunn’s latest “Cornish Mystery.”

Copycat Covers: In the Hood

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



Yours Until Death, by Gunnar Staalesen (Arcadia, 2011);
and The Son, by Jo Nesbø (Knopf, 2014).

Copycat Covers: Shadow Play

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



The Final Page of Baker Street: The Exploits of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, Dr. John H. Watson, and Master Raymond Chandler, by Daniel D. Victor (MX Publishing, 2014); and Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart, and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961, by Curtis Evans (McFarland, 2012).

Copycat Covers: Face to Face

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



The Final Seven, by Erica Spindler (Doubleshot Press, 2016); and Fifteen Minutes to Live, by Phoef Sutton (Brash Books, 2015).

(Hat tip to Lee Goldberg.)

Copycat Covers: So, Which Animal Is It?

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



Think Wolf, by Michael Gregorio (Severn House, 2016); and Rain Dogs, by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail UK, 2016).

(Hat tip to Michael Gregorio.)

Copycat Covers: You Do Get Around, Sir

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



The Detective and the Devil, by Lloyd Shepherd (Simon & Schuster UK, 2016); and Hell Bay, by Will Thomas (Minotaur, 2016).

Interestingly, that same little man with the cane also appeared on what looks to have been an early cover design for Sam Christer’s The House of Smoke (Sphere, 2016), seen below and on the left. But that book was eventually modified as shown below and on the right.




Even with that change, though, Christer’s historical novel about a criminal employee of the notorious Professor James Moriarty (yes, Sherlock Holmes’ archrival) cannot escape charges of imitation. You’ll find the very same tophatted gent, leaning into his cane, on the jacket of Will Thomas’ 2015 mystery, Anatomy of Evil (Minotaur)—only there, the figure conceals a long knife behind his back.

Copycat Covers: Lighting the Way

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



The Missing Piece, by Kevin Egan (Forge, 2015); Murder Boy, by Bryon Quertermous (Polis, 2015). The photograph comes from the stock art agency Shutterstock.

Oh, no! Just when I thought I’d seen the last of this image of a woman in a scarf (at least I think it’s a woman—either that, or an alien descended to Earth), here it crops up once more on Scottish author Ed James’ new police-procedural e-book, Missing.

Copycat Covers: Identity Crises

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



The Revenant, by Sonia Gensler (Ember, 2013); and The Real Mary Kelly: Jack the Ripper’s Fifth Victim and the Identity of the Man that Killed Her, by Wynne Weston-Davies (Blink, 2016).

The Return of Copycat Covers

With the approach next weekend of The Rap Sheet’s 10th anniversary, I’ve been thinking about all the subjects this blog has covered over the course of its now almost 6,400 posts. Some things I’d change if I could, and there are instances where I think we our coverage could have been more focused or fun; yet most of what we’ve accomplished here, I believe, has been done well. But one area of personal interest that I realize hasn’t been mentioned of late is “copycat covers.” You know, book fronts that employ the same photographs (usually stock art) or paintings that can be found on one or more others.

For several years I posted somewhat regular pieces about this subject. However, the last time I addressed it was in a minor way in 2015. I still have plenty of copycatting instances, and my computer file of them continues to grow. So beginning today, I’m going to resume highlighting examples of such look-alike book façades, though I shall do so one or two at a time, without writing a great deal about them. (I think it was my self-imposed requirement of creating longer posts, with several covers under consideration, that proved daunting before and caused me to stop writing about copycat covers). I hope you enjoy this resurrected venture. And if spot any more duplicated fronts in your travels through bookstores or across the Web, please drop me an e-mail note here. On to our first two specimens …



Killer Pursuit, by Jeff Gunhus (Seven Guns Press, 2015); and Leave Her Hanging, by Harry St. John (Cheeky Minion, 2013)—which was among our nominees for Best Crime Fiction Cover of 2013.

Bullet Points: ... And the Kitchen Sink Edition

• It has been far too long since I last put up a “copycat covers” post here in The Rap Sheet; I hope to resurrect that series in the near future. Meanwhile, though, I can’t help but mention the pair of book fronts shown above. The one on the left comes from the 1999 Orion UK edition of Dead Souls, Ian Rankin’s 10th John Rebus novel and one of those that was current at the time I interviewed him back in 1999. The façade on the right appears on Tell Tale (Avon UK), the new, fourth Detective Inspector Charlotte Savage novel by Mark Sennen. It seems that lowly, windblown tree on both is much in demand. But then, tree fronts have always been very popular in the crime-fiction field.

• Peter James, the UK author best known for penning a series of novels about Brighton-based Detective Superintendent Roy Grace (Want You Dead, You Are Dead, etc.) is “the best crime author of all time”? Yes, according to a recent poll conducted by bookseller W.H. Smith. A post in that British retailer’s blog reports the 66-year-old James “has effortlessly stolen the crown with an incredible number of votes.” Effortlessly? Really? That seems unusual, given the caliber of his rivals for this honor. Here’s the top-20 list of vote-getters:

1. Peter James
2. James Patterson
3. Val McDermid
4. Ian Rankin
5. Agatha Christie
6. Martina Cole
7. Sheila Quigley
8. R.C. Bridgestock
9. Karin Slaughter
10. Tess Gerritsen
11. Mark Billingham
12. Patricia Cornwell
13. Ruth Rendell
14. Karen Rose
15. Chris Carter
16. Lee Child
17. Simon Kernick
18. P.D. James
19. Thomas Harris
20. Stuart MacBride

Obviously, this wasn’t a scientific survey, but a popularity contest--and a British-centric one at that. Still, I’m rather shocked to spot a couple of the names featured among these 20 (remind me who they are again?), and to see how many writers well deserving of reader approbation didn’t make the cut. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came in at No. 21, while others find places even further down in the roster: Dennis Lehane (24), Michael Connelly (39), Raymond Chandler (47), Louise Penny (58), Dorothy L. Sayers (61), Stieg Larsson (68), John le Carré (87), Ellis Peters (89), John Harvey (103), and James Lee Burke (104). What of Ross Macdonald, though? Or Dashiell Hammett and Georges Simenon? Or Rex Stout and Philip Kerr? How about Elmore Leonard, Robert B. Parker, and Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö? Or James McClure, Max Allan Collins, and Robert Wilson?

• Next week will offer the “Classic TV Blogathon” (February 24-26), comprising retrospectives on series ranging from The Avengers and Ellery Queen to Moonlighting and Blacke’s Magic. You’ll find the schedule of posts and essential links here.

• Dynamite Entertainment’s new line of Shaft comic books, by writer David F. Walker and artist Bilquis Evely, is among five finalists for the first Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity. As the blog Hero Complex explains, “The honor is named after ... a prolific writer who co-founded Milestone Media and its popular menagerie of heroes. … He died in 2011 at age 49 of complications after undergoing emergency heart surgery.” The winner will be announced on February 28 during the Long Beach Comics Expo in Southern California.

• Speaking of Shaft, did you know that New Line Cinema has acquired the movie rights to Ernest Tidyman’s black private eye, John Shaft, and is planning to reboot that blaxploitation series begun in the 1970s? Sigh … Why can’t we simply be happy with Richard Roundtree’s original three Shaft films or, better yet, Tidyman’s seven Shaft novels? Must Hollywood try to squeeze another ounce of blood from the character once hailed as “hotter than Bond, cooler than Bullitt”? Samuel L. Jackson’s effort to reinvigorate the franchise in 2000 was painful to watch. Do Shaft fans (myself included) have to cringe again at whatever New Line might present?

• In a BBC Radio documentary, novelist William Boyd (Restless, Solo) investigates the case of Helen MacInnes, a renowned author of mid-20th-century espionage fiction. Unfortunately, this segment will be available for only the next three weeks, so click here to listen. Now!

• The opening sequence from Dog and Cat, a short-lived 1977 ABC-TV crime drama starring Lou Antonio and Kim Basinger--embedded

on the right--is just one of several new additions to The Rap Sheet’s YouTube page.

• A year and a half ago, the blog Criminal Element brought to readers an e-book collection of abbreviated crime stories called Malfeasance Occasional: Girl Trouble. The M.O., as its editors called it, was supposed to be a thrice-yearly publication, but after that initial issue, it dropped off the map. Now, though, it’s back--sort of. Rather than trying to assemble short-story anthologies, it sounds as if the blog’s editors want to solicit short fiction several times annually and ask Criminal Element readers to choose their favorites among each set of submissions. The first deadline for stories under this new arrangement is Friday, March 6. Entries should run no more than 1,000 to 1,500 words in length and be built around the theme “Long Gone.” If you’re interested in contributing a story, read the guidelines here. A tally of finalists should be announced on March 20, at which time online voting will begin. The tale receiving the most votes will be known by April 3, and posted on April 17 for free reading. After which this submission/review/voting process will begin again.

• Congratulations to The Thrilling Detective Web Site! It’s creator and editor, Kevin Burton Smith, claims that almost 17-year-old invaluable online resource for crime-fiction enthusiasts now has “over 3,000 fictional private eyes” in its listings.

• I was sorry to read, on The Gumshoe Site, that 58-year-old author Tony Hays “died on January 25 in Luxor, Egypt, where he fell ill on vacation.” Blogger Jiro Kimura goes on to explain that

He was working in Saudi Arabia teaching English. He [had] published two Who’s-Who-Dunit novels featuring known literary characters: Murder on the Twelfth Night (with William Shakespeare) and Murder in the Latin Quarter (with Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce; both from Iris Press in 1993). After the standalone novel The Trouble with Patriots (Bridgeworks, 2002), which features a Tennessee-native journalist like the author, he launched the four-book Arthurian series featuring Malgwyn ap Cuneglas, counselor to King Arthur, starting with The Killing Way (2009) and ending with The Stolen Bride (2012; all four from Forge). His last novel, Shakespeare No More, will be published in September by Perseverance Press. It was supposed to be the first of a projected series featuring Shakespeare’s friend, a Stratford constable.

Hays was kind enough to contribute a “forgotten books” essay to The Rap Sheet in 2011, looking back at Ellery Queen’s The Egyptian Cross Mystery (1932). He will be missed.

• A belated R.I.P. to Lizabeth Scott, the Pennsylvania-born actress heralded by novelist and movie historian Eddie Muller as “one of film noir’s most indelible dames.” According to Wikipedia, Scott starred in more pictures of that sort than any other female performer, including Dead Reckoning (1947) with Humphrey Bogart and Too Late for Tears (1949) with Don DeFore. Later, she took roles in such TV series as Burke’s Law and Adventures in Paradise. Scott is said to have died of congestive heart failure on January 31. She was 92 years old.

• Brash Books’ recent reissuing of Mark Smith’s 1973 novel, The Death of the Detective, a National Book Award finalist, has prompted the Los Angeles Review of Books to publish a lengthy and very interesting reconsideration of Smith’s best-known work. Michael Barry concludes, “The Death of the Detective is a disturbing, challenging, sometimes demented novel, but it is a gloriously ambitious one. It won’t be to every taste, but it clearly doesn’t expect to be.”

• If you’re planning (or just hoping) to attend next month’s Left Coast Crime convention in Portland, Oregon (March 12-15), note that a fuller schedule of panel events has been posted.

• Meanwhile, life appears to have stirred once more in the Bouchercon 2015 blog, after a year-and-a-half-long silence. Stacy Cochran, chair of that convention set to take place in Raleigh, North Carolina, from October 8 to 11, has posted a panel request deadline, info about hotel reservations, and news that “We’re presently at 660 registered attendees, and so we are on target to hit our window of 1,300-1,500 attendees by our convention dates.” If you haven’t already signed up to attend, you can do so here.

• This trailer for Guy Ritchie’s big-screen version of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. suggests the film, scheduled for release on August 14, may not be precisely what fans of the original Robert Vaughn/David McCallum series had in mind. But it still looks like a stylish, lighthearted flick. Let’s hope all the best parts aren’t in the trailer.

• And it’s too bad neither Vaughn nor McCallum was asked to take on a cameo role in the picture. It would have been a respectful touch.

• It’s good to see that Loren D. Estleman’s ambitious 2013 standalone novel, The Confessions of Al Capone--one of my favorite crime novels of that year--is finally due out in paperback next week. As I remarked in Kirkus Reviews, “Confessions [is] something special among historical crime yarns.” Check it out.

• Given the plethora of Star Trek fans in the world, this book seems destined to become a best-seller in early September.

• The pop-culture site Buzzfeed hails “15 TV Shows You Should Totally Be Watching But Probably Aren’t.” That list includes 12 Monkeys, Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce, Forever, and Man Seeking Woman, none of which I’ve seen. However, it also champions ABC’s Agent Carter, an eight-episode action-adventure series, set right after the conclusion of World War II, that I have so far watched all the way through, with pleasure. Inspired by a character in Marvel Comics’ Captain America series, this program stars British-American actress Hayley Atwell (Any Human Heart, Falcón, Restless) as uncommonly capable U.S. government agent Peggy Carter. But it is also made highly watchable by James D’Arcy, playing a butler with a hidden well of talents, Lyndsy Fonseca as a fast-talking waitress who befriends Peggy, and Shea Whigham as Peggy’s sexist boss. The final episode of this debut season for Agent Carter will be broadcast next Tuesday, February 24. If you haven’t been watching, but appreciate entertaining historical espionage series with comic edges, it may be time to binge-watch this show online in anticipation of next week’s finale. I only hope Agent Carter will return for additional seasons.

• By the way, Jake Hinkson has written some good posts about Agent Carter for Criminal Element, one per episode. You’ll find them here.

• Hinkson has also posted, in that same blog, the opening entry in what’s supposed to be “a series celebrating the career of one of mystery fiction’s true giants,” Margaret Millar, who was born 100 years ago this month. Click here to read his look back at Do Evil in Return, which Millar first saw published in 1950.

• Following up on his announcement earlier in the week of nominees for New Zealand’s 2015 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, Craig Sisterson points me at this piece from Wellington’s Dominion Post that recounts the confusion Marsh’s moniker provoked in readers, especially in America. “Had I guessed the trouble my name was going to cause a lot of people on the other side of the world,” said the author--who died 33 years ago this week--“I would have changed it to something easier when I began writing books.”

• As a young boy, I would have loved to own this lunchbox. Heck, I wouldn’t mind having it now, either.

• You probably didn’t notice, but Bill Koenig’s The HMSS Weblog--which embarked on its own course last September, after its associated Web site, Her Majesty’s Secret Servant, ceased publication--was recently renamed The Spy Command. And earlier today it posted a terrific short piece about the failed 1967 pilot for a Dick Tracy series. That pilot’s producer, William Dozier, had already had already hit it big with Batman and The Green Hornet.

• As the blog TV Obscurities noted previously, Eve Plumb, the child actress who would go on to fame in The Brady Bunch, was to have played detective Tracy’s daughter, Bonnie Braids. She was “shown in the opening credits but otherwise never appear[ed].”

• Britain’s ITV Network is preparing “a new adaptation of George Simenon’s novels about Parisian sleuth Jules Maigret,” reports Euro Crime. Rowan “Mr. Bean” Atkinson is “set to play Maigret in two stand-alone, 120-minute films for the channel. Both dramas will be set in 1950s Paris, with screenwriter Stewart Harcourt adapting the books Maigret Sets a Trap and Maigret’s Dead Man.” Frankly, I can’t imagine Atkinson’s portrayal surpassing that of Michael Gambon in the 1992-1993 series Maigret (opening titles shown here).

• Finally, Ruth and Jon Jordan, the familiarly energetic and convivial editors of Crimespree Magazine, won some favorable attention this week in their hometown newspaper, Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, linked to the Raven Award they are set to receive during the Edgar Awards presentation on April 29.

Duped Again

It seems I can’t walk into a bookstore anymore without spotting instances of the same artwork having been employed on different book covers. The latest instance of duplication to catch my attention comes from Eye of the Red Tsar (Bantam), a debut novel by American fictonist Sam Eastland.

Eastland’s story holds plenty of drama, building as it does upon the legendary assassination of Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918. A decade after that gruesome act of rebellion, the Tsar’s former trusted secret agent, Pekkala--now imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp--is told there’s a way to earn his release. What does he have to do? No less than catch the killers who terminated Russia’s monarchy with bullets, and retrieve the Romanov child said to have survived that massacre. As the flap copy on Eastland’s book reads: “Find the bodies, Pekkala is told, and you will find your freedom. Find the survivor of that bloody night and you will change history.”

Unfortunately, this thriller’s jacket promises less novelty. The principle photograph comes from Getty Images, a prominent stock photo company based in Seattle, Washington, and is titled “Snowy entranceway to an estate near Saint Petersburg.” It’s the same illustration that was used in the composite cover for the 2008 paperback edition of another Russia-set historical work, R.N. Morris’ The Gentle Axe. As far as I’m concerned, Axe’s cover--with its bloody footprints and running boy--does a superior job of using this shot. Designer Joe Montgomery’s front for Eye of the Red Tsar, while it adds a scarlet tint to the trees outside that St. Petersburg estate, is considerably less dramatic, with its foreground image of a slowly walking figure.

As it happens, my file of copycat covers contains yet another Russia-related example: the front from Grand Central Publishing’s brand-new paperback edition of The Secret Speech, the sophomore novel from young British writer Tom Rob Smith (Child 44). The photo of a person strolling with a bag through Moscow’s Red Square on The Secret Speech is the identical one that graced the jackets of Stray Dog Winter (MacAdam/Cage), by David Francis, and the Penguin hardcover edition of The Unpossessed City, by Jon Fasman, both released in 2008.

I’ve said it before, but I shall say it again: If you spot additional examples of copycat covers, especially on crime novels, please e-mail them to me. I’ll post more such fronts as they become available.

The Match Game

Can it have been seven whole months since the last installment of The Rap Sheet’s copycat covers series? That’s an indication of how busy I’ve been, not only with regular blogging responsibilities, but also with work on end-of-2009 wrap-ups, contributions to a couple of crime-fiction-related books, and the ongoing editing of a voluminous biography of one of America’s Founding Fathers. This isn’t to say, though, that I haven’t been keeping track of examples of egregious book cover duplication--I have been, and other readers of this blog have sent their own discoveries my way, as well.

Let’s begin this round of look-alikes with the newly released Vintage Crime paperback edition of Spade & Archer (2009), by Joe Gores, a prequel to The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett’s classic 1930 private-detective novel. I rather liked the old-fashioned, shadowed cinema-style typography that fronted Alfred A. Knopf’s original hardcover version of Gores’ book. I also thought Gores’ yarn was consistent with Hammett’s vision, and it was certainly dramatic in the telling. I was bothered only by Gores’ occasional inside-baseball allusions to other Hammett tales and his oddly repeated mistake of writing “would of” when he actually meant “would’ve” or “would have.” (Why a copy editor didn’t fix such glaring errors is beyond me!) Much less imaginative, though, is the design of Vintage’s paperback reissue. The cover photograph (above), taken by Barnaby Hall, of a man in an overcoat and brimmed hat, with a smoking cigarette between his lips, is a stock shot from Getty Images. It positively screams “private eye”--which is probably why it also fronted The Goliath Bone (2008), the first of Mickey Spillane’s posthumously published Mike Hammer novels, finished by Max Allan Collins. The image has been flopped on Spade & Archer, but there’s no mistaking the resemblance.

On the whole, Spade & Archer has been poorly served by cover designers. The British hardback edition (left), released last year by Orion, carries the exact same image of an indistinct, topcoat-wearing figure with an elongated shadow that can be spotted here on the jackets of Olen Steinhauer’s 2005 Eastern Bloc thriller, 36 Yalta Boulevard, and the 2003 U.S. edition of Robert Wilson’s excellent Spanish series introduction, The Blind Man of Seville.

Why do publishers and designers think that readers aren’t going to notice these instances of blatant duplication? Do they really think we’re stupid, that we don’t care that their efforts to save the cost of original artwork diminish the novelty of new books?

And it really is appalling to see how frequently stock images are manipulated--composited, flipped, and recolored--in order to give readers the impression that they’re looking at something original, when they’re not. Take these next two jackets, for example. The first comes from the Century UK edition of Frank Tallis’ 2009 Dr. Max Lieberman novel, Darkness Rising (recently released in the States as Vienna Secrets). The central image of a berobed holy man ascending a flight of stone steps comes from Spain-based Arcangel Images. That identical figure shows up again--only this time behind an archway--on the front of Neal Stephenson’s 2008 novel, Anathem.

Then consider the 2005 Picador paperback edition of Martin Booth’s “creepy psychological suspense novel,” A Very Private Gentleman. The Getty Images photograph at the bottom of that cover shows a man lighting a cigarette and standing before a river railing with what looks like an old-fashioned steamship of some sort in the background. It’s quite obviously the same individual employed on the 2006 Putnam hardback edition of Philip Kerr’s fourth Bernie Gunther crime novel, The One from the Other--only in the latter case, a shot of the clock tower in Munich, Germany’s Marienplatz (taken by Owen Franken and purchased from the stock company Corbis) has been inserted behind the smoking gent. (Click on these and other covers for enlargements.)

These next two jackets bookend well together, though neither is particularly distinctive. The cover on the left comes from Murder Short & Sweet (Chicago Review Press), a 2008 anthology of mystery-fiction short stories edited by Paul D. Staudohar and featuring prose by such pros as Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ruth Rendell, and Stanley Ellin, as well as outside-the-genre stars on the order of John Updike and C.S. Forester. Meanwhile, on the right is displayed the front of Knopf’s 2008 hardcover edition of Louis de Bernières’ A Partisan’s Daughter. The typeface used is different in each, and there’s a polychromatic strip running down the left side of the De Bernières cover. However, the main photograph--a partial side shot of a woman with a burning cigarette in her fingers (lots of flaming coffin nails in these covers, eh?)--is the same in both. The image has been reversed, but not altered appreciably otherwise.

More has been done to disguise the resemblance between this other pair of book fronts, sent to me by Brian Lindenmuth of BSC Review and Spinetingler Magazine. The cover on the left comes from the 2007 Serpent’s Tail edition of Heidi W. Boehringer’s Crossing the Dark, the story of a police officer who rescues her kidnapped and sex-enslaved daughter, and then has to deal with the ramifications of those crimes on their respective psyches. It’s a haunting jacket, focusing on a naked young woman who has evidently collapsed on what looks like a roadway, dead or unconscious--it is impossible to know. The cover on the right--from what I believe is a Norwegian edition of Karin Fossum’s Se dig ikke tilbage (published in English as Don’t Look Back)--shows the same woman, only this time she’s been slightly cropped and situated in the foreground, with a somewhat bleak-looking lake dropped behind her.

Even famous folk aren’t safe from today’s cost-cutting book designers. Humphrey Bogart may have been a Hollywood original, but he’s nothing new in this comparison. Although I’ve never read the book on the left--Great TV & Film Detectives: A Collection of Crime Masterpieces Featuring Your Favorite Screen Sleuths, edited by Maxim Jakubowski (Reader’s Digest Association, 2005)--I immediately took a shine to its front, which shows Bogey in all of his trenchcoated, fedora-ed, and steely-eyed prominence. On the other hand, I have read the novel on the right, Bill Crider’s We’ll Always Have Murder (iBooks, 2003). As I wrote shortly after its publication, Crider’s book was supposed to be the first entry in a new series featuring an ex-Marine and 1940s Tinseltown private eye named Terry Scott, but I don’t believe there was ever a sequel. The photograph of Bogart is better displayed on Jakubowski’s anthology, with much bolder typography. Yet it’s incontestably the same piece of art, again from Corbis.

Rap Sheet reader Patrick Lee was kind enough to set up this next, not-so-obvious pairing. The cover on the left comes from The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Short Stories, a delightful and diverse collection of tales edited by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg, and released in 2004 by Carroll & Graf. Beside it is Espionage (Readers Digest, 2006), a non-fiction and “up-to-date guide to the espionage world in all its complexity,” by British science writer David Owen. Who knows how many elements were combined into the Espionage front, but one of them--the lower left-hand image of a shadow-concealed man in a brimmed chapeau--is the same individual shown on the right-hand side of Pronzini and Greenberg’s anthology. Once more, that stock photograph comes from Getty.

While there certainly appears to have been a recent and rampant rash of copycat covers cropping up in the crime-fiction field, the recycling of artwork isn’t a wholly new phenomenon. Nor is it one confined to a single category of works.

Low-budget publishers of the mid-20th-century had a habit of using--sometimes overusing--commissioned illustrations. It isn’t all that rare to come across two pulpy paperbacks of yore, fronted by identical imagery. A particularly good and oft-mentioned example is represented by our next two specimens. Both of these boast a painting by Paul Rader (1906-1986), who, in additional to his more respectable book illustrations, produced an extensive body of sexy work for the publishers of male-oriented “literature.” Initially, this looks like a painting of two women embracing. But when you study it closer, you realize that Rader offers up only a single female, pressed against a mirror. by March Hastings (aka Sally Singer), was released in 1963 by Midwood. Matt Rogers’ The Wicked Never Sleep came out in either 1966 or ’67 from Private Edition.

Sometimes, the original illustrators were complicit in recycling cover ideas. The magnificent jackets shown on the left--from House Hop (1966), by John Dexter, and The Lustful Ones (1973), by Clyde Allison (aka New York City-born William Henley Knoles)--were both painted by Robert Bonfils in the mid-1960s.

These final four copycat covers are drawn from volumes to be found nowhere near the crime-fiction stacks of your local bookshop. I don’t think anyone will miss the similarities between the Random House hardcover edition of Caitlin Macy’s 2009 short-story collection, Spoiled, and the front of Miriam Toews’ 2008 mainstream novel, The Flying Troutmans (Counterpoint). That photograph of a girl with her hands over her eyes is credited to Beate Lie and Millennium Images/UK.

Still more blatant is the relationship between the front of Diane Ravitch’s new non-fiction work, The Death and Life of the Great American School System (Basic Books), and Pacific Northwest writer Ivan Doig’s 2006 novel, The Whistling Season (Harvest). That little wooden schoolhouse with the bell tower looks lonely, but book designers just don’t want to leave it alone.

With publishers endeavoring to slash their costs in these economically troubled times, and the easy availability of relatively cheap stock art, it’s probably too much to hope that there will be a reversal of the trend toward duplicate covers at any time soon. Exacerbating the situation still further are technological advancements that make it particularly easy for book cover designers to manipulate and combine images. I’m hardly the first blogger to post the following video (I picked it up from The Casual Optimist), but it gives you a fairly good idea--in just 55 seconds--of how many designers work these days, compositing and retouching existing art to create a unique-seeming finished product:



It looks as if our work to expose this notorious publishing trend will continue. So, if you can, please lend a hand. When you spot examples of copycat covers, especially on crime novels, please e-mail them to me. I’ll post more such fronts as they become available.

* * *

Just in case you’ve missed previous installments of The Rap Sheet’s copycat covers series, let me direct you to the full set:

• “When Covers Are Two of a Kind” (May 27, 2006)
• “When Two Aren’t Better Than One” (May 30, 2006)
• “Did They Really Think Nobody Would Notice?” (January 10, 2007)
• “Double Faults” (May 20, 2007)
• “Too Much of a Good Thing” (June 13, 2007)
• “Bad Company” (July 3, 2007)
• “Can We Retire These Photos Yet?” (August 26, 2007)
• “Repeat Offenders” (March 13, 2008)
• “Double Exposure” (March 19, 2008)
• “Twin Piques” (July 7, 2008)
• “Imperfect Mates” (August 2, 2008)
• “Seeing Doubles” (December 10, 2008)
• “Run, Buddy, Run” (March 13, 2009)
• “Familiarity Breeds Contempt” (April 9, 2009)
• “Take a Gander” (August 19, 2009)

READ MORE: “Déjà Vu,” by Ben Boulden (Gravetapping); “The Most-Used Cover Image in the World” and “This Damned Necklace Won’t Stay On,” by J.R.S. Morrison (Caustic Cover Critic); “Copycat Cover--Best Foot Forward,” by Karen Meek (Euro Crime blog); “The Great Gamble, The Hidden War, the Same Photo,” by Joseph Sullivan (The Book Design Review).