Paperback 341: Crooked House / Agatha Christie (Pocket Books 753)

Paperback 341: Pocket Books 753 (1st ptg, 1950)

Title: Crooked House
Author: Agatha Christie
Cover artist: Paul Kresse

Yours for: SOLD! (10/10/10)

Best things about this cover:

• Extreme Close-Up!
• The needle—beautifully rendered, with fantastic detail. Has an apparent weightiness and heft, a solidity, that makes it really stand out. The indentation of needle on skin is a wicked little touch. Nice.
• The talons—nothing accentuates a hypo cover like sexy/sinister blood red nails.
• I guess "Crooked House" is a more mass-market-friendly title than "Granddad's Heroin Addiction"

Best things about this back cover:

• Well, there's one "Who?" for each of the listed suspects, but somehow piling them up in a line there at the end diminishes their rhetorical effect / makes the imagined narrator sound like a psychotic owl.
• Someone named her child "Clemency?" "And this is my brother, Parole, and my sister, NoloContendere."
• Most enigmatic description I've seen in a while: "Death meant something special to weak-looking Laurence." With that kind of set-up, Laurence better be a carrion-devouring zombie or I'm going to be Very disappointed.

Page 123~

"My dear Sophia, do you really think an old gentleman of over eighty is the best judge of a child's welfare?"

Judging by the cover, grampa's got bigger problems than being 80.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 321: Wicked Women / ed. Lee Wright (Pocket 1263)

Paperback 321: Pocket 1263 (PBO, 1960)

Title: A Butcher's Dozen of Wicked Women
Editor: Lee Wright
Cover artist: Morgan Kane

Yours for: SOLD!


Best things about this cover:

• If they'd just get rid of the text and let me see what she's looking at, this cover would be perfect.
• Great Girl Art, Girl With Gun, Gams Galore, all overlooking a cityscape. I live for covers like this. Subtle, sexy, delicious. Her arm position, her hip cock ... perfect. If I woke up in a hotel room and *this* is what I saw when I looked over at the balcony, I could die a happy man.
• Problem: the painting gives off an urban, hard-boiled vibe. Those authors ... do not. I mean, they're fine, if you like more traditional mysteries, but the ones I recognize are somewhat cozier than authors I tend to read. There *is* a Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald) story inside. Not sure why he's not on the cover, as he is pretty well established at the time of this book's release.

Best things about this back cover:

• Cool '60s design — vaguely rectangular swatches of different bright colors arranged in asymmetrical relationship to one another — continued from front cover.
• I'm torn between the practical Lucy and the vengeful Daihili.

Page 123~

from "Suspicion," by Dorothy L. Sayers

He sipped it thoughtfully, standing by the kitchen stove. After the first sip, he put the cup down. Was it his fancy, or was there something queer about the taste? He sipped it again, rolling it upon his tongue. It seemed to him to have a faint tang, metallic and unpleasant. In a sudden dread he ran out to the scullery and spat the mouthful into the sink.

I read one novel by Sayers and the mystery (or rather, its solution) was So preposterous that I never read another. I will say, however, that the woman knows her way around a sentence. She translated Dante, after all.

~RP

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]

Paperback 175: Murder After Hours / Agatha Christie (Dell 5922)

Paperback 175: Dell 5922 (1st ptg, 1965)

Title: Murder After Hours
Author: Agatha Christie
Cover artist: William Teason

Yours for: $9


Best things about this cover:

• Worst Weapon-Hiding Place Ever
• "Hey, watch me make the horse shoot bullets out his butt!"
• This cover was painted using primarily leftover "Exorcist" vomit
• Teason specializes in these odd little still lifes featuring unlikely groupings of objects. There appears to be, in addition to the horse sculpture/gun, a riding crop, a rag, a tabloid story about someone who was "MURDERED," and a bent playing card (King of Hearts)

Best things about this back cover:

• They always suck me in with their geometry teasers: "It looked like an ordinary triangle ... but it was scalene!"
• Apparently the "triangle" is a sculpture of human flesh
• "Sculptress"! Remember when the idea of a woman's doing anything of note outside the home, especially anything creative, was so unusual that it required flagging with a suffix? Why they don't call Christie an "authoress," I don't know.

Page 123~

Oh no, thought Midge, it can't be true. It's a dream I've been having. John Christow, murdered, shot - lying there by the pool. Blood and blue water - like the jacket of a detective story. Fantastic, unreal ...

~RP

Paperback 164: The Boomerang Clue / Agatha Christie (Dell D340)

Paperback 164: Dell D340 (1st ptg, 1960)
Title: The Boomerang Clue
Author: Agatha Christie
Cover artist: William Teason

Yours for: $10


Best things about this cover:

• Well, there's something you don't normally associate with Agatha Christie: BONDAGE.
• I love love love how her arms coupled with the back of the chair form a (very ironic) valentine! The red background only heightens the effect. Don't even get me started on how she kinda looks like a Catholic school girl who is at least mildly ashamed of the predicament she has gotten herself into... Or is that a look not of shame, or fear, but of coyness? Clearly, I have my own, private version of the story of how she came to be in that chair.
  
• Most of my Teason covers (lots of late 50s/60s Dells) don't have people on them. Clearly he should have done more people. The hands alone are gorgeous.

Best things about this cover:

• More broken windows!
• Random rope - did she escape!?
• I love how the copy on the back cover is typeset as if it were a poem

Page 123~

"To begin with," said Bobby, plunging [ed.: !?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!], "I'm not really a chauffeur although I do work in a garage in London. And my name isn't Hawkins - it's Jones - Bobby Jones. I come from Marchbolt in Wales."

The story of a golfing legend gone deep, deep undercover.

~RP

Paperback 125: Sad Cypress / Agatha Christie (White Circle n.n.)

Paperback 125: White Circle [no number] (1st ptg, undated, c. 1944)

Title: Sad Cypress
Author: Agatha Christie
Cover artist: Who Knows?

Yours for: $25


Best things about this cover:

• It's like Art Deco meets Evil - "Help, I'm being attacked by the Chrysler Building!"
• I like how "Sign of a good / detective novel" is so shabbily printed. Did they not have the technology to, say, center things in the 1940s?
• White Circle books are really hard to get hold of in the States. They are Australian, I think. There seems to have been a White Circle publishing out of Canada too. Maybe it's a Commonwealth imprint. At any rate, this book was published in Sydney.
• So basically this is a story about two ghosts who really hate trees ...

Best things about this back cover:

• EVERYTHING - do you know how rare it is to get a full-page ad on the back cover? Very. I think I have one other book with such a cover - that cover has an ad for men's belts (!?). This one, however, has cartoonery and poetry and disease paranoia and I'm gonna say quackery. So so so awesome.
• I can't decide if that officer is breaking up a fight or enforcing a quarantine.

Page 123:

Poirot waved a hand.
"There is nothing much to that! It might easily have been written by an educated person who chose to disguise the fact. That is why I wish you had the letter still. People who try to write in an uneducated manner usually give themselves away."

~RP

Paperback 117: Bodies and Souls / ed. Dann Herr & Joel Wells (Dell 0656)

Paperback 117: Dell 0656 (1st ptg, 1963)

Title: Bodies and Souls
Editors: Dann Herr & Joel Wells
Cover artist: Teason

Yours for: SOLD 9/18/10


Best things about this cover:

• Finally, a paperback that deals seriously with the lingering problem of the Manichean Heresy.
  
• "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him, [Willard / Ben / Templeton / other rat name you can think of]"
• Hmmm ... uh ... I guess this cover's got a rat. And a skull. And a candle. Those elements hold a certain visual interest.
• If you like brown, this is the book for you.
• This book is another good example of why paperback design starts sucking some time around 1960. Art becomes more like stock footage. Text starts dominating the cover in un-thought out and ugly ways. Quit shilling for the "Doubleday Crime Club" and give me the beautiful cover art I deserve! 50 cents for a paperback?! What am I, a Rockefeller?

Best things about this back cover:

• When I want an authoritative literary opinion, I always turn to [squints to read fine print] the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer!
• This reviewer is sadly and humorously unaware that "catholic" in fact means "universal." I know the reviewer meant "Catholic" in religious terms ... but precision of word choice matters, even if you do only work for the Columbus Daily Muffin.

Page 123~

from "The Finger of Stone" by G.K. Chesterton

"Have you heard the news I say," rapped out the doctor. "Boyg is dead."

Gale stopped in a sentence about Gothic architecture, and said seriously, with a sort of hazy reverence:

"Requiescat in pace. Who was Boyg?"

~RP

Paperback 26: Avon Books 245

Paperback 26: Avon Books 245 (1st ptg, 1950)

Title: The Big Four
Author: Agatha Christie
Cover artist: Uncredited


"Steve Manley really, really hated to lose at chess..."

Best things about this cover:

• The Floating Head of Fu Manchu! - and check out the Asian-y lettering on the title. You can almost hear the gong.
  
• Chloroform - you don't see that on paperback covers nearly enough. Usually it's all guns and knives with these guys. Nice to see someone mixing up the violence.
• Again, I have to ask, who dresses these people? She's decked out for some kind of fiesta, while he appears ready for Jeeves to bring him his pipe.
  
• A pinkish robe with quilted cuffs and collar? And a white handkerchief with matching ascot? His far-off gaze suggests he's being controlled by the Floating Head of Fu Manchu. Maybe he's chloroforming the woman because she dared mock the fancy bedtime garb that is sacred to the Head.
  

RP

Paperback 19: Cardinal C-362

Paperback 19: Cardinal C-362 (1st ptg, 1959)

Title: A Murder Is Announced
Author: Agatha Christie
Cover artist: Harry Bennett

Yours for: $7


Best things about this cover:

Not much, except the fact that this woman can apparently make the phone magically float up to her face. Otherwise, this is a pretty generic late 50s cover.

RP