Wrapping It Up in Fine Style

It’s always hard to predict how The Rap Sheet’s annual Best Crime Fiction Cover competition will shake out. 2015, for instance, brought significant disparities in the number of votes received by what turned out to be the top three book jackets and their raft of rivals. This year—the ninth time the blog has sought what is admittedly an unscientific consensus on book design—the spread wasn’t quite so dramatic. Yet there was still a trio of novel fronts that attracted the greatest attention and acclaim from our readers.

Because of ballot-stuffing antics the last time around, I changed the polling procedures for 2016. Instead of allowing everyone to cast votes for as many covers as they wished, as often as they wanted, I restricted participants to a single chance at choosing their favorites from among 12 nominees; however, they were allowed to register their support of more than one cover on that sole occasion. Although this led to a reduction in the total vote count (as recorded by Polldaddy) from last year’s completely abnormal high of 6,941 to a more typical 1,067, I believe it was a fairer method of collective judgment.

With all of that background conveyed, let me now move on to announcing our five winners for 2016. (You can click on any of the images below to open enlargements.)

Earning first-place honors with a fairly decisive 233 votes (or 21.84 percent of the total) is … Razor Girl (Knopf), the 14th amusing crime novel for adults penned solely by Florida journalist and author Carl Hiaasen. Here’s how I described that book’s story line last August in a fall preview column for Kirkus Reviews:

One can only marvel at Carl Hiaasen’s consistent ability to turn outlandish plot ingredients into bewitching fiction. His latest novel, Razor Girl, begins when Tinseltown talent agent Lane Coolman, wheeling his rental car from Miami, Florida, to Key West—where he’s planning to tighten the reins on Buck Nance, the unpredictable star of a redneck reality-TV series called Bayou Brethren—is rear-ended by pretty young Merry Mansfield, whose attention to the roadway had apparently wavered while she gave herself a bikini shave in the driver’s seat of a Firebird. Turns out, Merry is a serial crash-scam perpetrator, and she and her partner kidnap Coolman, having mistaken him for a beach-repair contractor whose bamboozling behavior has put him on the wrong side of a local criminal bigwig. Without Coolman’s guidance, Nance manages to launch into a racist public rant that inspires a psychotic would-be apprentice and leaves the TV star a suspect in a front-page homicide. Meanwhile, disgraced sheriff Andrew Yancy (from Bad Monkey) thinks he can restore his reputation by solving the aforementioned murder—with a bit of help from the Razor Girl herself, scheming Merry.

Razor Girl’s cover illustration and design represent the first-rate talents of Mark Matcho, with art direction by Alfred A. Knopf’s Carol Carson. According to this brief biographical note, Matcho is a Pasadena, California, resident who’s “been an illustrator since 1985, or thereabouts,” and whose work “appears regularly in Esquire, Los Angeles, and BusinessWeek, among many other fine publications.” You can appreciate more of his artistry at the portfolio site Illoz.

Matcho’s cover for Hiaasen’s book, showing a slender young woman in a bikini top and jeans shorts, riding a giant straight razor, is certainly eye-catching when faced outwards on bookstore shelves. It’s particularly so because of its bright yellow background. Yet that front is very much in keeping with the “signature style” of this author’s books for Knopf. There’s a comic-book character to these covers, which Matcho—who also created the dust-jackets for two previous Hiaasen titles, Bad Monkey and Dance of the Reptiles: Selected Columns—has no trouble replicating. The challenge in following such a pattern, observed author Zoë Sharp in a comment on the announcement of this year’s cover tournament, is to make each new book wrapper in the series “just familiar enough that the reader can spot [it] on the shelf, but not so familiar they think it’s something they’ve already read.”

My guess is that both Hiaasen fans and newcomers to his oeuvre recognized Razor Girl for the fresh—and predictably funny—offering it was.

The greatest amount of jockeying for position in this year’s covers contest was between Razor Girl and a quite different work: Todd Moss’ latest thriller, Ghosts of Havana (Putnam). Moss’ tale achieved an early and seemingly solid lead, but over the week-and-a-half polling period, it eventually slipped into second place, earning 183 votes (or 17.15 percent of the total). Ghosts is the third novel by Maryland writer Moss, who served as U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs during George W. Bush’s administration, and is now a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. Like its predecessors, The Golden Hour (2014) and Minute Zero (2015), Ghosts stars college professor-turned-State Department crisis manager Judd Ryker. Of its plot, Publishers Weekly explained:

When four friends from the D.C. suburbs agree to go deep-sea fishing off Florida, two are unaware that one of them, a descendant of a Bay of Pigs invader, has a secret agenda; the fourth is in on the game. When their boat strays into Cuban waters and gets captured, Judd’s boss sends him to Havana, to run a back-channel operation to free the “Soccer Dad Four” before they become tokens in a political badminton game between the U.S. and Cuba. Meanwhile, Judd’s wife, Jessica, a former black-ops CIA agent, seeks out the guy who rented the fishing boat to the four Americans.

Interestingly, Ghosts of Havana reached print a little less than two years after U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro finally agreed—following a “54-year stretch of hostility”—to normalize relations between the two countries, and just six months after Obama became the first American chief executive to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge sailed there in 1928 to address the Pan-American Conference of Western Hemisphere leaders. As Moss writes in a prefatory note to Ghosts, Obama’s diplomatic triumph in the Caribbean “prov[ed] yet again that even the most intractable foreign policy logjams can break at any time.”

Also notable is that Moss’ novel carries the only straightforward photographic cover to find a spot among this year’s top five contenders. In response to an e-mail inquiry, Alexis Elmurr, a publicity assistant with Penguin Random House (the parent company of Putnam), told me that “the jacket of Ghosts of Havana was designed by Eric Fuentecilla, and the jacket photograph is credited to Peeter Viisimaa/Getty Images.” Fuentecilla is an associate art director at Penguin, whose previous book façades include those of The Intuitionist, by Colson Whitehead (2000), and The Day the Leader Was Killed, by Naguib Mahfouz.

Ghosts’ dust cover combines a beautifully lighted nighttime street in what I presume is Havana—its buildings mirrored in the wet pavement—with an elegant title combining sans serif and serif typefaces, both of which appear distressed, as if reflecting the romantically disheveled nature of the Cuban capital. Fuentecilla’s effort here definitely makes me want to follow his designs in the future.

Despite Thomas Mullen being American—a resident of Atlanta, Georgia, in fact—his fourth novel, the historical murder mystery Darktown, was released in Great Britain (by publisher Abacus) a full seven months before it reached U.S. bookstores. And while the latter edition’s cover (fashioned by Laywan Kwan for Atria/37 INK) conveys a suspenseful air, the UK version puts forward a more thought-provoking countenance. Created by Craig Fraser, a freelance graphic designer in London (who has also produced fronts for yarns by Michael Connelly, Viet Thanh Nguyen, John Lescroart, and others), it takes a vintage, sepia-toned photograph of Atlanta, turns it 90 degrees, and uses the city’s irregular skyline to echo the ugly racial divide that Mullen explores in Darktown, reversing the title type to show up best on either side of that border. Darktown was one of my favorite crime novels of 2016, as it was among the top picks of Rap Sheet contributor Kevin Burton Smith. And it became the third-place finisher in this year’s best-cover rivalry, scoring 86 votes (or 8.06 percent of the total).

Here’s my Kirkus Reviews plot synopsis of Mullen’s novel, which is set in the Georgia capital in 1948:

Darktown introduces Lucius Boggs and Tommy Smith, two of the city’s eight newly employed black police officers. They’re supposed to patrol only “colored neighborhoods” and leave any investigations to their paler brethren. Yet abiding by those restrictions becomes difficult, after this pair witness a Buick plow into a lamppost, and then fail to prevent the inebriated white driver from wheeling away into the night beside a battered young black woman. When that female passenger’s corpse is later discovered, Boggs and Smith want to figure out what happened. But they must do so covertly, lest they enrage the force’s “real” members, one of whom—a corrupt and violent white supremacist—will do almost anything to purge his department of its latest hires.

Darktown is the opening entry in a new series from Mullen. Its sequel, Lightning Men, is due out in the States in September. I have not seen a notice yet that there will be a separate, British edition of the book. But if there is, I hope Fraser will be assigned to fabricate its jacket: I’d like to see what more he can come up with.

In addition to Darktown, one other UK edition won placement on this year’s Best Covers roster: Beloved Poison (Constable), by E.S. “Elaine” Thomson, a Scottish fictionist and noted authority on the social history of medicine. The first installment in a succession of Victorian-era whodunits featuring Jem Flockhart, an androgynous young London apothecary, Beloved Poison finds our hesitant heroine investigating a cache of miniature coffins secreted in the 700-year-old London hospital at which she labors, while simultaneously probing the suspicious poisoning of a nonconformist physician who had served as a mentor to her. The British dust jacket, conceived by South Africa-born illustrator-artist Jordan Metcalf (with art direction from publisher Little, Brown’s Hannah Wood), is a meticulously detailed composition displaying items suggestive of Jem’s expertise—a skull, an old-fashioned syringe, herbs, bottles of medicine, etc.—around a highly stylized banner containing the book’s title in a decorative serif typeface. If you take a quick tour through Metcalf’s online portfolio, you will realize that he makes a specialty of custom lettering, so it is hardly surprising that the type fronting Thomson’s debut mystery should be its most engaging element.

That British cover of Beloved Poison—which I think superior to the U.S. edition (designed for Pegasus Books by Tim Green, a senior art director at Faceout Studio)—captured 82 votes in this year’s survey, or 7.69 percent of the total count. A sequel, Dark Asylum, set to go on sale in the UK in early March, boasts a similar design style.

Finally, completing our top-five list of vote-getters is The Far Empty (Putnam). Penned by J. Todd Scott, a real-life agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, this novel is set in America’s Southwest and builds around authoritarian Sheriff Stanford “Judge” Ross, who eschews the discovery of unidentified skeletal remains on his patch as likely belonging to either an “illegal” Mexican laborer or a drug runner—no one who demands much regard. However, his new deputy isn’t satisfied with leaving the matter unresolved; and Ross’ teenage son fears the bones might be those of his mother, who disappeared more than a year ago. Together, they’ll challenge Ross’ long-standing control and throw light on some well-concealed local secrets.

The Far Empty, Scott’s debut novel, collected 76 votes, or 7.12 percent of the total cast in this year’s survey. Its façade was created by Tim Lane, a St. Louis, Missouri-based illustrator and graphic novelist who claims to have been “influenced by comic books of the late 1940s and early 1950s, American mythology, and Dick Tracy comic strips.” From a distance, the dust jacket’s focal point is seen as a hand clutching a pistol. Only as one studies the image closer-up is it clear that the hand is skeletal, and that the gun is decorated with human skulls. This reminds me of a novel that won our Best Cover competition back in 2010, Shūichi Yoshida’s Villain, though in that case the gun on the front wasn’t just adorned with bones—it was made of bones.

So, congratulations to all of our 2016 winners! You can click here to see how this quintet of novel fronts stacked up against the remaining seven nominees. As usual, I was impressed by the caliber of contestants this year; all of them were standouts in the field, deserving of public acclaim and demonstrating that book designers haven’t lost their ability to amaze as well as delight. I’ve already begun gathering possible candidates for Best Crime Fiction Cover of 2017 distinction. If, between now and December, you espy any crime novel jackets you think are especially noteworthy, I’d be glad to hear about them. Simply drop me an e-mail note here.

READ MORE: “Notable Book Covers of 2016,” by Dan Wagstaff (The Casual Optimist); “The Best Book Covers of 2016,” by Matt Dorfman (The New York Times); “BOLO Books’ Top Five Covers of 2016,” by Kristopher Zgorski (BOLO Books); “2016 Book Covers We Loved,” by Vyki Hendy and Eric Wilder (Spine); “32 of the Most Beautiful Book Covers of 2016,” by Jarry Lee (BuzzFeed).

Your Vote Counts: Best Crime Covers, 2016

One of the first things I do at the start of every year now is create a fresh computer folder into which I begin depositing scans of especially creative and interesting covers taken from new works of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. Twelve months later, I extract from that folder what I believe (and what other folks in the publishing business have suggested) were the genre’s most engaging book fronts, released both in the United States and Britain. Occasionally, as in 2015, the candidates are especially numerous. In other years, the picks are fewer—not necessarily as a result of less artistic talent being demonstrated in this field, but as in 2016, because there were so many novels styled quite similarly to one another, employing what have become all-too-familiar components: shadowy figures, running figures, and men or women photographed from behind.

From a preliminary lineup of almost three dozen choices, I culled out 15 finalists for The Rap Sheet’s Best Crime Fiction Cover of 2016 competition. Some of these contenders are built principally around photos, while others deserve attention for their typographical innovation or the appeal of their illustrations. Several are deliberately ominous, while others are considerably more playful in their conception. Every one of them, however, catches the eye, whether being displayed on a bookstore shelf or a Web page.

This is the ninth year The Rap Sheet has asked its discriminating readership to judge crime novel façades. Below, you will find all of the 2016 nominees—arranged alphabetically—followed by a simple electronic ballot on which you can vote for the cover you think deserves top honors. As a consequence of suspected ballot-stuffing shenanigans last year, I am limiting each poll participant this time to one chance at choosing his or her favorites; however, you can register your support for more than one cover on that single occasion. So make this opportunity count! We’ll keep the voting open here for the next week and a half, until midnight on Wednesday, January 25, after which the results will be announced.

Click on any of the jackets below to open an enlargement.

ONE THING MORE: If you think we have neglected to mention some other crime-fiction cover from 2016 that is also deserving of widespread acclaim, please post a comment about it at the end of this piece. Just be sure to include a link to where on the Web other Rap Sheet readers can see that additional cover for themselves.

Image Conscious

2016 is more than a month and a half spent, but because this has been a remarkably busy time for me, I’m still wrapping up a couple of matters from last year. For instance, back in early January I posted The Rap Sheet’s roster of 20 nominees for Best Crime Fiction Cover of 2015, but only today can I finally announce the winners.

This is the eighth time we’ve asked our discriminating readers to choose which one, out of a group of mystery, crime, and thriller covers issued during a 12-month period, they found to be particularly eye-catching and handsome. (The first such survey was conducted back in 2007, but we skipped 2012 for reasons explained here.) In previous years the vote total has been somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500. But this time, things were rather different.

Generally, I set these polls up (through Polldaddy) with very few restrictions, allowing participants to select one or more book fronts on their first visit, and then perhaps come back on a later occasion to make their second thoughts known. I have not, in the past, prevented readers from voting more than once. I would like to believe that people are essentially honest, and that the stakes involved in this sort of informal canvassing in The Rap Sheet are not so important or life-changing that anyone would resort to ballot stuffing as a way to falsely drive up their numbers. Yet over the latest two-week survey period (and especially near its conclusion), there were occasions when the tallies for one or more books suddenly executed extraordinary jumps. And in the end, the vote total was an incredible 6,941—much higher than in previous years. I don’t believe that any book undeserving of acclaim wound up among the top five vote-getters, but this experience has made me reconsider my relaxed posture toward allowing people the opportunity to vote more than once.

With all of that said, let me now move on to our five winners. (Click on the covers below for enlargements.)

Having amassed a whopping 2,549 votes (or 36.75 percent of the total), this year’s first-place finisher is … Scratch the Surface (280 Steps), the opening installment in Illinois author Josh K. Stevens’ “pulp noir trilogy” about Deuce Walsh, “a former gangster trying to keep his past hidden in the middle of [the] nowhere Midwest.” (Stevens’ follow-up volumes are Delving Deeper, which reached booksellers last August, and To the Core, which is due out this coming April.) I wasn’t all that familiar with 280 Steps—an independent publisher headquartered in Oslo, Norway, of all places—and haven’t yet received any of its releases (which include both vintage and new works, by authors ranging from A.I. Bezzerides and Jonathan Ashley to Bill S. Ballinger and Eric Beetner). But I am definitely impressed with 280 Steps’ taste in cover illustrations.

As publisher Kjetil Hestvedt let me know in a recent e-mail note, Scratch the Surface’s front—with its minimalist, in-your-face illustration of a man (dare we guess it’s Walsh himself?) pointing a pistol toward what might be your right ear—represents the work of Risa Rodil, a young and “incredibly talented freelance designer who has designed most of our covers previously.” (She created all of the fronts for Stevens’ trilogy.) Separately, Rodil tells me she has a very collaborative association with 280 Steps. She says the imprint’s managers “provided me with a clear and specific direction of how they want[ed] the cover to look … My role [was] to translate their ideas visually. … For Scratch the Surface, after I submitted the initial design, they only asked for minor revisions … Such revisions included shadow and scale fixes for the face and the hand, and additional color scheme options.” The finished paperback boasts a sharp, distinctive façade that pops out from bookstore shelves cluttered with photographic covers, too many of which employ similar bland, stock imagery.

There’s nothing bland, though, about the photo front for the paperback release of Jamie Mason’s Monday’s Lie (Gallery), a novel about “a woman who digs into her unconventional past to confirm what she suspects: her husband isn’t what she thought he was.” A superior visual grabber to the earlier hardcover edition of Mason’s thriller, this reprint version—which took second place in The Rap Sheet’s cover contest (collecting 1,928 votes, or 27.78 percent of the total)—is credited to Lisa Litwack, the creative director at Gallery Books. Litwack’s work has earned her acclaim before. Her design for the 2015 edition of He Killed Them All: Robert Durst and My Quest for Justice, by Jeanine Pirro, found a spot among Bookish’s favorite covers of 2015. She was also responsible for the cover of 2012’s Romeo Spikes, by Joanne Reay, and paperback reprints of Stephen King novels that came out early in the last decade.

For Monday’s Lie, Lithwick delivers a front that elegantly communicates this yarn’s basic plot line. It shows a young woman with her hands held over her face, yet her physiognomy revealed clearly through those fingers. As if she can’t hide from what’s right there in front of her. Just as the protagonist in Mason’s novel, Dee Aldrich, can’t avoid acknowledging the obvious—that (as publicity materials put it) “her marriage is falling apart and she’s starting to believe that her husband has his eye on a new life … a life without her, one way or another.” This is Mason’s second novel, following 2013’s Three Graves Full, which was also brought to market by Gallery, and the covers for both have been quite haunting. I look forward to seeing whether the presentation of her next work can top that of Monday’s Lie.

Capturing third place in our competition is The Fury of Blacky Jaguar (One Eye Press), a novella by Angel Luis Colón, who has written for Web publications such as the Los Angeles Review of Books and the ambitious but late site, The Life Sentence. Colón is said to be finishing up a debut novel called Hell Chose Me, and he serves as an editor for the flash-fiction site Shotgun Honey.

In reply to an e-note I sent his way, Colón reports that the “design work [for Blacky Jaguar] was done by my publisher, Ron Earl Phillips. The guy’s amazing. Glad he’ll get some long-overdue credit.” Indeed, West Virginia resident Phillips—who also happens to be Shotgun Honey’s managing editor—deserves plenty of kudos for the powerful black, white, and red imagery fronting Colón’s paperback novella. The story inside is built around the eponymous Mr. Jaguar, an “ex-IRA hard man, devoted greaser, and overall hooligan,” who “is furious” because “someone’s made off with Polly, his 1959 Plymouth Fury, and there’s not much that can stop him from getting her back.” Phillip’s cover arrangement puts said Detroit gas-guzzler front and center, like a great bull with a chrome-plated grin, waiting impatiently to charge. Not a cover that’s easily ignored, and one that gathered 1,360 votes (or 19.59 percent) in this year’s match-up.

Our fourth-place champ is in sharp contrast with Blacky Jaguar. The front of True Grift, by Jack Bunker (Brash), is all about softness and grace, rather than strength and grittiness. Reviewing this debut offering from attorney-turned-author Bunker, Bookgasm called it “a comedic romp through a scam gone wrong. … J.T. Edwards, a bankrupt lawyer, meets Al Boyle, a greedy insurance adjuster, in the coffee shop of the golf course they both frequent in the land-locked ‘Inland Empire’ section of Southern California, several miles southeast of Los Angeles. After sharing their mutual financial and professional woes, the two devise a quick-cash personal injury scam.”

True Grift’s façade (which won 203 votes, or 2.92 percent of the total) nicely captures this tale’s comedic quality. You have the cartoonish bomb, with sputtering fuse and the book’s title, floating in the upper left-hand corner. You have the fedora-topped golfer photographed in the midst of his follow-through. And, of course, that linksman is standing in what appears initially to be a golf course bunker (aka “sand trap”—a nice allusion to the author’s moniker). But if you spread the cover out enough to appreciate its entirety, you recognize the bunker for what it actually is: the lumbar curve on a very beautiful, bikini-wrapped young woman. Praise for this composite artwork is owed generally to the New York-based design company Damonza, but specifically to a freelance designer who goes by the name Momir. By the way, Momir’s artistic skills have earned him more than a bit of attention over the last several years, especially from a blog called The Book Designer, which showcases a variety of his e-book fronts here.

Finally, taking home fifth-place honors in The Rap Sheet’s 2015 Best Crime Fiction Cover contest, is The Strings of Murder (Michael Joseph UK), the first novel by Mexico-born author Oscar De Muriel. Since De Muriel’s plot revolves around the locked-room murder of a violinist in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1888, it’s no surprise to find the virtuoso’s instrument incorporated into this work’s face. However, the art is considerably more complicated than that. Created by Roberlan Borges, a Brazilian graphic designer and illustrator with a fondness for vintage imagery, it combines classic-style typography with elements suggestive of both music and the unknown. “I wanted to give the cover several layers of images,” Borges has written, “like different nuances, and give the impression of a mystery being unfolded.” Layer atop all that embossed titles, and you get a book cover that, when held, delights your eyes as well as your fingertips.

The Strings of Murder bagged 151 votes, or 2.18 percent of all those cast. I’d have expected it to do even better, but as I said earlier, this wasn’t a typical surveying year. We will have to see how things go when we assemble our Best Crime Fiction Covers of 2016 nominees 10 months from now. Meanwhile, congratulations to all of this year’s winners! To find the complete survey results, click here.

Distinction by Design: Best Crime Covers, 2015

OK, so I’m behind in getting together The Rap Sheet’s contest to select the Best Crime Fiction Cover of 2015. Blame it on the fact that I accepted too many daunting editorial projects during this last holiday season. Or that I followed the pattern established in 2014, and invited readers to submit some of their own favorite book fronts—which lengthened the nominating process. Or that there was simply a profusion of handsomely designed choices this year, and winnowing them down to a manageable number was onerous, indeed. In the end, I culled just 20 finalists from a longlist of some 50 contenders, knowing that any of the castoffs might have done as well in this competition as those that remain. The shortlist represents not only a wide variety of authors, but also a good span of large and small publishers.

This marks the eighth year we’ve asked readers to weigh in on the subject of which crime, mystery, or thriller novel, published on either side of the Atlantic during the preceding dozen months, best demonstrated a blend of creativity, cleverness, drama (or humor), and typographical elegance. Last year’s victor, the jacket belonging to the UK edition of Benjamin Black’s The Black-Eyed Blonde, seemed like an obvious choice from the outset. But previous races, including 2013’s (which wound up favoring Death Was in the Blood, by Linda L. Richards), have been far harder to call early. I suspect 2015’s rivalry will be equally unpredictable. Which should make it fun.

Below you will find this year’s 20 nominees, followed by a ballot that you can use to register your opinions. Please feel free to select as many or as few covers as you think deserve praise. We’ll keep the voting open for the next two weeks, until midnight on Friday, January 22, after which the results will be announced.

Click on any of the jackets here to open an enlargement.

(Above: Half of a front-and-back spread.)

ONE THING MORE: If you think we have neglected to mention some other crime-fiction cover from 2015 that is also deserving of widespread praise, please post a comment about it at the end of this piece. Just be sure to include a link to where on the Web other Rap Sheet readers can see that additional cover for themselves.

Becoming Attractions

During the seven years The Rap Sheet has held its annual Best Crime Fiction Covers competition (ever since 2007, though we wound up skipping 2012), I have never once guessed which book jacket would win. This time, however, I not only pegged the victor, but I was confident of my choice even before the year began.

Allow me to feel awfully smug for a moment.

OK, now, let’s recap: This last December 9, I posted 20 covers from crime, mystery, and thriller novels--all released over the last 12 months, on both sides of the Atlantic--that I said offered “more than the usual complements of expertise, cleverness, subtlety, and freshness.” Some of those jackets I’d had in my files for months, while others were suggested more recently by Rap Sheet readers. As part of the December 9 post, I invited everybody who was interested in participating to fill out a ballot identifying their favorites among the bunch. We received 1,192 votes, which was down somewhat from last year’s tally, but not by much. (2013 attracted 1,329 votes, spread between 15 nominees.) As has often been the case in the past, the closer we got to the cut-off date--which was December 21 this year--the more votes were registered each day. It was interesting to watch the swift jockeying back and forth of the top contenders, as ballots poured in. And at the finish line, it proved to be a tight race, with only 38 votes separating the No. 1 pick from the No. 3 choice.

Finally coming out on top was the darkly evocative front from the British edition of The Black-Eyed Blonde (Mantle), the latest high-profile Philip Marlowe pastiche, written by Benjamin Black (aka Booker Prize-winning Irish wordsmith John Banville). Receiving 171 votes, or 14.35 percent of the total, that cover was the work of Jonathan Pelham, a senior designer for UK imprints 4th Estate and William Collins (and a former “middleweight” designer with Pan Macmillan and Picador).

As I wrote in Kirkus Reviews last March, The Black-Eyed Blonde finds Los Angeles private eye Marlowe “being hired, in the early 1950s, by a curvaceous and easily bored young perfume heiress to trace her caddish former paramour, who’s supposed to be dead--the victim of a hit-and-run incident two months ago--but who she purportedly spotted just recently up San Francisco way.” Pelham’s design for that novel’s jacket is dominated by the profiles of a smoking man and a red-lipsticked young woman, facing opposite directions but nonetheless appearing to move in tandem, the gent’s cigarette smoke swirling about them both. From the midst of their joined shadows pop bold white titles, rendered in a typeface echoing that used in the trailers for classic black-and-white horror and thriller films.

“The biggest challenge at first was finding stock photography that felt appropriate to the period and mood of the book,” Pelham told me in response to an e-mailed query. “After turning up almost no images that delivered the melodrama I was looking for, I decided to approach the problem from a different angle: find models with strong profiles and fudge the period feel by obscuring them with heavy, noirish shadows. The basic composition built itself after that, though I spent a very long time refining things. I suspect I was subconsciously influenced by the graphics from packets of Gitanes cigarettes, which my father used to smoke.

“Ideally I would have had the lettering hand painted by some professional sign-painter/calligrapher, but due to time and budget constraints that wasn’t possible. Instead I set the type in a comic-book font called Monster Mash, which I warped to fit the space, altered the terminals of each letter in an effort to disguise the fact that it was a font, and then added an inverted drop-shadow. I’m not particularly pleased with the lettering, truth be told--I would have liked it to have had a more fluid feel--although I did enjoy the process of breaking all the rules of ‘good’ typography. The [back cover] blurb copy is set in News Gothic. Support and criticism from other designers and typographers during the process also helped a great deal.”

Regardless of Pelham’s doubts about his work, his design for the façade of Black/Banville’s 2014 novel is far superior to the cover U.S. publisher Henry Holt brought to market.

It’s curious to see that the first-place finisher in this year’s book-cover survey is a novel starring Raymond Chandler’s best-known fictional gumshoe, while the No. 2 spot goes to a far less-publicized book in which Chandler himself plays a substantial role. The Kept Girl, by Kim Cooper (Esotouric Ink), takes place in late summer, 1929, and imagines Joseph Dabney, head of the Dabney Oil Syndicate--a petroleum-drilling enterprise in Southern California for which Chandler once worked as a bookkeeper (and later as vice-president)--asking the future author to help retrieve $40,000 his nephew imprudently gave to a wacky religious cult. As I explained in this Kirkus column from earlier this year, The Kept Girl also brings to the case a resourceful woman based on Chandler’s reported mistress of the time and Thomas H. James, a stalwart member of the Los Angeles Police Department who may have provided Chandler with his inspiration for the Marlowe character.

Credit for the front of The Kept Girl--the first novel by Cooper, co-owner of an L.A. bus-tour company and a “passionate advocate for historic preservation”--belongs to Pasadena artist Paul Rogers. He’s known for his work on posters, as well as advertising and editorial projects, and he developed the striking original look for Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s 2009 edition of Shadow and Light, by Jonathan Rabb. Rogers also designed “The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles,” a fold-out guide to the City of Angels. His collage-like cover for The Kept Girl includes elements drawn from this tale’s rich plot line: L.A.’s towering City Hall, a pipe and pair of round-framed specs that look like those favored by Chandler, a Depression-era automobile, and the mock-up of a newspaper front page featuring a photograph of May Otis Blackburn and her daughter, Ruth Wieland Rizzio, who were behind the cult about which Cooper writes. Behind all of those rises the silhouette of a woman, presumably “the kept girl” herself. It all adds up to a stylish creation that says both “crime fiction” and “period piece.” The Kept Girl collected 157 votes in The Rap Sheet’s latest Best Crime Fiction Covers contest, or 13.17 percent of the total.

Rounding out the top three spots--having captured 133 votes, or 11.16 percent of the total--is Brash Books’ reprint of Sleeping Dog, by Dick Lochte. This novel, initially released in 1985 by Arbor Press, was the first to feature Southern California P.I. Leo Bloodworth and his self-appointed teenage partner, Serendipity Dahlquist. It won the Nero Award from The Wolfe Pack, a New York-based Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin fan organization, and in 2000 was named by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association as one of its favorite mysteries of the 20th century. Publishers Weekly offered the following plot synopsis:

This thriller outclasses, in many ways, the tales of Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald and other renowned California mystery writers. Raffishly funny incidents, grave dangers and touching moments are described alternately by Serendipity Dahlquist, 14, and Leo G. Bloodworth, a middle-aged private eye. Their search for Serendipity’s stolen dog takes the two up and down the coast, into clashes with operators of cruel dog fights, inept hit men for Mexican gangsters and other menaces. Linked to the plot also are a pushy TV comic, Serendipity’s hippie mother with her current companion, Leo’s partner (who is one of several victims of a faceless killer) and the unsolved robbery of a Los Angeles bank. The novel’s critical point occurs at a huge, mind-blowing punk-rock center where Serendipity lands in a trap set by the villain. Lochte astonishingly builds a host of disparate elements into a corker entertainment, uncontrived and satisfying.

Sleeping Dog has gone through several printings, all differently packaged. Brash Books’ version boasts a front by Zak Erving, who says on his Web site that he’s “equipped to tackle creative hurdles in a variety of mediums. Currently, I design books for Amazon/Createspace, make jigsaw puzzles for an artisan puzzle company, make logos and branding kits for various businesses,” and create user interface “experiences” for the mobile operating system iOS. His colorful, playful artwork for the cover of Sleeping Dog, featuring what must be silhouettes of the hard-drinking Bloodworth, the precocious, roller-skating Serendipity, and her pitbull, Groucho, stands out nicely on bookstore racks. Erving also created fronts for Lochte’s novel-length sequel, Laughing Dog (1988), and his 2014 Kindle-only follow-up, Rappin’ Dog.

Fourth place in this poll goes to Brainquake, by Samuel Fuller. For a while it was leading the competition, but ultimately wound up scoring 77 votes, or 6.46 percent of the total. Fuller, you may know, was an American screenwriter, novelist, and film director who died in 1987 at age 85. His movie credits include The Steel Helmet (1951), Park Row (1952), the Richard Widmark film Pickup on South Street (1953), and The Big Red One (1980). He also penned such novels as The Dark Page (1944) and 144 Piccadilly (1971). As The Dissolve explains, Fuller wrote Brainquake--“about a brain-damaged mafia ‘bagman’ who risks his life and his livelihood to help the widow of one of his colleagues”--in 1993, while living in France. The edition released earlier this year by Hard Case Crime represents its first publication in the English language.

While it’s not unusual for Hard Case paperbacks to figure into our annual covers competition (they’re usually so sexy and fun!), I believe this is the first time one of them has secured top-five placement. The artwork for Brainquake was created by Glen Orbik, a frequent contributor to the Hard Case line. (He has previously worked up the fronts for novels by Stephen King, Christa Faust, Max Allan Collins and others, and he illustrated Thieves Fall Out, a “lost” novel by Gore Vidal, which is due for publication in April 2015.)

Finally, we came out with a tie for the No. 5 position in this year’s contest. The Axeman’s Jazz, by Ray Celestin (Mantle; cover design by Jo Thomson), and Gangsterland, by Tod Goldberg (Counterpoint; designed by Michael Fusco), both received a respectable 60 votes, or 5.03 percent of the total count.

I want to thank everyone who cast a ballot in this year’s Best Crime Fiction Covers rivalry. We had an especially strong field of contenders--mostly illustrated fronts, but a couple that featured photographs. Any of the 20 might have scored top honors. If you’d like to see how all of them did in terms of popularity, click over to this post and then scroll down to study the poll results at the end.

Already I’m looking forward to 2015, collecting fronts from new crime and thriller novels that might ably go head to head in next year’s contest. If you spot any you think deserve to be included, please drop me an e-mail note here. I look forward to hearing from you.

READ MORE: “The 30 Best Book Covers of 2014,” by Liz Shinn and Alisan Lemay (Paste); “The 25 Best Book Covers of 2014,” by Jonathon Sturgeon (Flavorwire); “50 Covers for 2014,” by Dan Wagstaff (The Casual Optimist); “My Year of Reading: Best Book Covers of 2014,” by David Abrams (The Quivering Pen).