Did They Really Think Nobody Would Notice?

One of the very first posts I wrote for The Rap Sheet blog had to do with publishers and book jacket designers who, probably through inattention, reuse photography that’s previously fronted one or more other books. Ever since, I’ve been keeping track of these “copycat covers,” and now present two more examples, from UK publishers.

This first pair of jackets come from Shifting Skin (Orion, 2006), Manchester author Chris Simms’ fourth thriller (after Killing the Beasts, one of January Magazine’s favorite novels of 2005), and Cruel Poetry, a suspenser penned by Florida novelist Vicki Henricks and just released this month by Serpent’s Tail. It doesn’t take any brand of genius to recognize that the naked woman sitting on a bed, barely hidden behind Venetian blinds, on the Simms cover is the same lithesome lovely shown (beneath what appears to be the streetscape of Miami’s South Beach neighborhood) on the front of Hendricks’ new book. Sure, this woman bears drooling over, but couldn’t Serpent’s Tail’s designer have come up with some other fair femme to front Cruel Poetry?

Meanwhile, the second set of novels here is a reader submission. Perhaps the unobservant book buyer wouldn’t discern that the very same pathway bench lit up at the bottom of Sheila Quigley’s Run for Home (Century, 2004) is also featured on the cover of Borkmann’s Point (Macmillan, 2006), by Swedish crime novelist Håkan Nesser, but others certainly did. And that may include the graphic artists who changed both covers when these books were printed in paperback editions (see here and here).

If you spot more examples of copycat crime covers, please don’t hesitate to e-mail me.