Time to Help a Fellow Reader

You may recall that a couple of months back, a large portion of Independent Crime blogger Nathan Cain’s library was sacrificed in an apartment fire. Now, he’s asking readers for ideas to help him rebuild and enhance his collection.

“I have money to spend on 250 paperbacks and 150 large paperbacks,” Cain wrote earlier today. “It will be reimbursed by my insurance company up to a point. What I’m asking you to do is make comments on what you think I should buy. I have an opportunity here to build a new library from the ground up, so I just don’t want crime fiction suggestions (although I do want crime fiction suggestions). I want to know what you think I should own.”

You can leave your recommendations here.

And That’s Just the Beginning

Happy birthday to Nathan Cain’s fine crime-fiction blog, Independent Crime, which celebrates two years of publication today.

Now Hear This

Berkeley, California, writer Seth Harwood--who’s in the midst of podcasting Jack Palms II: This Is Life, his second novel to feature actor-cum-sleuth Jack Palms--sits down with Independent Crime’s Nathan Cain to talk about why he chose to go the podcast route, the coming print publication of his first Palms novel (Jack Wakes Up), and his preference to write without an outline. The results of their exchange are here. If you would like to catch up with the dozen podcast installments so far of This Is Life, click here.

Best Face Forward

Nathan Cain of Independent Crime knows how fond I am of vintage “paperback porn”—jacket fronts of a more than subtly seductive nature—so when he points to a new catalogue of such art on the Web, as he did yesterday, he can rest assured that I’ll visit the site without noticeable delay.

Responsible for this latest trove is William Smith of Hang Fire Books, “an online bookseller located in Park Slope, Brooklyn.” He’s put together a generous collection at Flickr of what he calls “Sex/Cheesecake/Good Girl Art”—mid-20th-century, illustrated covers for books such as Give the Little Corpse a Great Big Hand (1953), by George Bagby; I’m Cannon for Hire (1958), by Curt Cannon (aka Ed McBain); Assignment: Mara Tirana (1960), by Edward S. Aarons; Anything But Saintly (1963), by Richard Deming; and The White Bikini (1963), by Carter Brown. Many of these are crime-fiction titles, but there are also several early lesbian novels (1960’s A Twilight Affair, by James Harvey, for instance) and others that were obviously designed to titillate shoppers (1961’s The Window, by Leonard Huish; 1962’s Triangle of Lust, by Fletcher Bennett; and 1963’s Never Leave My Bed, by Joel Townsley Rogers). Smith says he already has 170 of his “favorite pulp fiction” jackets in his online collection, but “will add to it regularly.”

This makes an excellent companion to Bill Crider’s own Flickr albums of men’s action novel jackets and covers by the great paperback illustrator Robert McGinnis.

Talk the Talk

Here are three new interviews worth checking out: Elizabeth Zelvin takes on author and prostate cancer survivor Jeremiah Healy at Poe’s Deadly Daughters. (Read their exchange here.) Meanwhile, Independent Crime blogger Nathan Cain submits to a telephone grilling by Ben LeRoy as part of Bleak House Books’ “The Future Is Bleak” podcast series. (Listen to that here.) And, finally, Sons of Spade honcho Jochem van der Steen quizzes Michael Koryta in anticipation of the latter’s latest book, A Welcome Grave, being released next month. (Read more here.)

Sex and Stalin--Not Your Usual Combo

Can I first say how much I am digging Nathan Cain’s Wednesday picks of vintage “paperback porn” covers over at the Independent Crime blog? Click here to check see his selections so far.

Meanwhile, Chris Mooney, about whom we’ve written lately, submits his latest novel, The Missing, to Marshal Zeringue’s popular Page 69 Test. And at Zeringue’s My Book, the Movie blog, Kevin Wignall muses on how he might cast the roles in a Hollywood version of his first novel, People Die (2002).

While I’m in this rare mood to gush, let me also direct your attention to Clayton Moore’s latest “Mystery Strumpet” column, at the Bookslut site. “Somehow, this month, the Russians keep creeping up on me like a Cold War bureaucrat in a gray suit in a dark alley, wearing a sleek felt fedora,” Moore writes, introducing his assessment of several new books that use Russia--both its semi-democratic present and its previous, tsarist incarnation--as their backdrops. Included are Martin Cruz Smith’s forthcoming Stalin’s Ghost and The Gentle Axe, by The Rap Sheet’s own R.N. “Roger” Morris.

“Strange Cult of Lechery!”

Nathan Cain begins his Wednesday tradition of posting sexy, spicy, vintage paperback covers (an idea for which I take modest credit) with the front from Charles Willeford’s High Priest of California (1956). Writes Cain: “I chose Willeford because he’s one of my favorite authors, and because I find it amusing that he was originally published by Beacon, which published sleaze novels. It just goes to show, you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, or it’s publisher.” Bask in the cover art here.

Covering Uncovered Covers

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been enjoying Nathan Cain’s periodic coverage at Independent Crime of “book cover porn”--his term for classic novel-front illustrations of a spicier, sexier nature. Now, if I were in the business of giving suggestions to other bloggers, I might well propose to Mr. Cain that he make examples of this often excellent art a regular, weekly feature of his site, in the same way that Lee Goldberg posts a “TV Main Title of the Week” every Monday morning on his own blog.

That is, if I were in the business of handing out advice, which of course I’m not ...