Paperback 930: Beyond the Night / Cornell Woolrich (Avon T354)

Paperback 930: Avon T-354 (PBO, 1959)

Title: Beyond the Night
Author: Cornell Woolrich
Cover artist: Uncredited

Estimated value: $35 (slightly scuffed but essentially unread; beautiful)

Best things about this cover:

• Double Fear Hand!
• It's like a flood light is 8 inches from her head. No wonder her left eye exploded out of its socket.
• The Ghost Was An Undertaker Who Wore a Virtual Reality Headset!

Best things about this back cover:

• Your lips are sealed, eh? Well MY LIPS DESTROY!
• "When she beckoned, dick had to follow." Wow. That is one powerful seductress.
• SOMEBODY'S CLOTHES!—the tale of a woman who has seriously had it with doing your fucking laundry.

Page 123~ (from "The Number's Up")

She was a blonde, good-looking and mean-looking, both at the same time.
"C'mon," she said huskily. "Let's go while the going's good."

As opposed to the blonde who alternates dizzyingly back and forth between good- and mean-looking. *That* girl's hard to be with.

~RP

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Paperback 926: The Doom Stone / Cornell Woolrich (Avon T-408)

Paperback 926: Avon T-408 (PBO, 1960) (serialized in Argosy in late '30s)

Title: The Doom Stone
Author: Cornell Woolrich
Cover artist: Uncredited

Estimated value: $15 (tight and complete but super-water-damaged)

Best things about this cover:

• Vampires shower too.
•  "I said MOOD RING, mom. What am I supposed to do with a DOOM STONE?" "I thought you and your little friends could summon the dead, dear."
• No pupils, no nipples, no problem!

Best things about this back cover:

• Skeletor Eastwood and his international gang of the undead want their goddman doom stone back.
• Aw jeez, why are the men always selling their souls and the women giving their bodies. Can't we, just once, reverse that?
• "Insult to Southern womanhood"!? How? I hope the Doom Stone insults some lady's cornbread.

Page 123~

The Chinese girl in the ricksha said, in an astonishingly genuine Cockney accent that must have rubbed off on her from long association with merchant-mariners and limey tars, "Don't tyke too long, byeby. We imes to get there before the plyce closes down, doncher knaow." 

I think I will add Dr. Doncher Knaow to my list of aliases.

~RP

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Paperback 902: The Black Curtain / Cornell Woolrich (Ace H-104)

Paperback 902: Ace H-104 (1st thus, 1968)

Title: The Black Curtain
Author: Cornell Woolrich
Cover artist: Stan Hunter [signature]

Estimated value: $12

Best things about this cover:

• Conjoined twins connected at the forehead are pulled apart like taffy. The good twin becomes a stock broker, while the evil twin becomes someone who shoots squirrels with a shotgun. The stress of all this causes their mother to have a stroke that lands her in a wheelchair. I hate covers that give away the whole plot.
• The one-mass-of-images style of cover art was, unfortunately, a popular thing for about five years in the '60s. It's as if, as the amount of real estate for images on covers shrank, the images that should have filled a whole cover decided to huddle together in a kind of amorphous glob. Rather than give the cover art room to breathe, or simplifying the art concept, the cover designers give us ... this.
• My favorite part of this cover is the astonishingly legible full-name signature of the cover artist. Now I know whom to be mad at.

Best things about this back cover:

• Text. Boring. Boo.
• "You've heard of amnesia victims." Have I? How do you know? You don't know me.
  "An average person, like you..." Hey, that stings. YOU DON'T KNOW ME!
• Frank Townsend would eventually find out he's spent three years pretending to be Dick Nixon.

Page 123~

The awful propinquity was over.

~RP

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Paperback 812: The Black Curtain / Cornell Woolrich (Dell 208)

Paperback 812: Dell 208 (1st ptg, 1948)

Title: The Black Curtain
Author: Cornell Woolrich
Cover artist: George Frederiksen

Yours for: $30


Best things about this cover:

• Me: "Why is the right side of the cover all blacked out? … oh, that's the black curtain. I see…"
• The Michelin Man stalks his next victim.
• The Michelin Man is ready for his midnight duel.
• The Michelin Man feels deep satisfaction at how thoroughly he has painted the town red.

Best things about this back cover:

• Mapback!
• 3=trees; 4=trees; 5=darker trees; 6=shrubs…
• Architectural blueprints! 
• You have to go through the pantry to get from the kitchen to the dining room?
• "Don't go in that room." "Why, what's in there?" "Old man." "O dear god!"

Page 123~

"How is it that don't have the estate fenced in?" he asked. "Leave it open like this for anyone to trespass—"

Pretty sure that first question is missing a word. Also pretty sure "We'll have to feel out way through the rough" (on the same page) contains a typo. So … no more blaming the internet for shitty editing.

~RP

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Paperback 807: Night Has 1,000 Eyes / William Irish (George Hopley) (Cornell Woolrich) (Dell 679)

Paperback 807: Dell 679 (1st ptg, 1953)

Title: Night Has 1000 Eyes
Author: Cornell Woolrich, writing as William Irish, writing as George Hopley
Cover artist: Tommy Shoemaker

Yours for: $15


Best things about this cover:

• Pretty classic stuff here—from the highly regarded suspense / crime writer so prolific his pseudonyms had pseudonyms, to the sensational paranoid title, to the panicked sideglance of our barefoot bridge walker. This book is the broken, bruised, beating heart of the vintage paperback era.
• Book is warped and well read, but tight and complete. The collector in me likes a fine copy, but the pulp enthusiast in me loves a book in distress.
• I really want to capitalize "has" and put a comma in that "1000."
• I see your "Thriller" and raise you to "SUPER-THRILLER"!

Best things about this back cover:

• Mostly dull, but I like the way the left margin follows the contours of the moon.
• Whoa. "1000" has become "a THOUSAND"! This *is* super-thrilling!
• Everything in red is balderdash. Fantastic, turgid, red balderdash.

Page 123~

I don't know what my lips said, but my heart said to him, it's human not to be able to bear knowing when you are to die.

I often don't know what my lips said.

~RP

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Paperback 580: The Black Angel / Cornell Woolrich (Avon Murder Mystery Monthly 27)

Paperback 580: Avon Murder Mystery Monthly 27 (1st ptg, 1944)

Title: The Black Angel
Author: Cornell Woolrich
Cover artist: Uncredited

Yours for: $30

Best things about this cover:

• She-Bat!
• I do love Skeleton Warhol.
• This book's kind of beat up, but it's complete, it's intact, and a 1944 Woolrich is a 1944 Woolrich (this was part of a stash of books I pulled out of a coastal Oregon bookstore this past summer—the rest of the stash to be covered in the books that follow)

Best things about this back cover:

• That's a pretty rare Chandler right there. I don't really have anything else to say about this back cover. You can see the foxing and tanning near the spine there ("foxing" and "tanning" being fun words I learned in the process of collecting).

Page 123~

"Don't ever call me that name," I said shakily. "Don't even say it over a second time now to remind yourself what ti was. Don't use it again, Ladd, or I'll — you'll never see me again. Call me any other name, anything you want. Anything but that."

Rejected lyrics from Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al."

~RP

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Paperback 328: Nightmare / William Irish (Readers-Choice Library No. 12)

Paperback 328: Readers-Choice Library No. 12 (1st thus, 1950)

Title: Nightmare
Author: William Irish
Cover artist: Wayne Blickenstaff

Yours for: $35


Best things about this cover:

• It's effectively creepy, combining puke colors and swirly, dizzying effects with a Joker-faced floating lady-head, a blot-like specter, and some dude re-enacting the dance from the "Thriller" video in a fun house hall of mirrors.
• William Irish = Cornell Woolrich = kind of a big deal. This book has some mild smashing at the lower spine, and someone's had at those pupils with a pencil, but it's square and solid and pretty rare (see range of prices here).
• Readers-Choice Library is an uncommon imprint. You may remember their work from this fabulous, pot-smoke-smothered cover a while back.

Best things about this back cover:

• "I said TOWARD HIM!"
• The writing here is not good.
• "Here, take this ... sharp-pointed bore!" (!?)
• "His victim's button...?" I really don't understand the premise of this write-up.

Page 123~

"Tom, what's wrong?" she said anxiously. "You look all white and disturbed! You haven't—you haven't lost your position, have you?" She caught him by the sleeve and stared up into his face.

She added, "Because I will fuckin' cut you, Tom. You hear me?"

~RP

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Paperback 288: Bianca in Black / Elizabeth Sax Rohmer (Airmont M3)

Paperback 288: Airmont Books M3 (1st ptg, 1962)

Title: Bianca in Black
Author: Elizabeth Sax Rohmer
Cover artist: uncredited

Yours for: not for sale (gift of Doug Peterson)


Best things about this cover:

• First of all, if the cover is to be believed, then the bride wore navy. Second, it appears the bride also wore a wig the color of pink lemonade.
• If Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and Sax Rohmer and Cornell Woolrich wrote a book together, it would be this book. In fact, I'm not convinced "Elizabeth Sax Rohmer" is a real person. Who gives his first name to his daughter as a middle name? Elisabeth Sanxay Holding was very big at the time this pb was published, and many of her book covers have this rain-streaked, pseudo-gothic look to them. Cornell Woolrich wrote "The Bride Wore Black," a great revenge story (though his greatest was probably Rendezvous in Black, one of my favoritest works of crime fiction of all time).
• "Bianca" means "white" in Italian. Cute.
• God, her neck is a hot mess. Looks like a colorful, irregular UPC (i.e. barcode).
• Doug Peterson gave me a bunch of campy old paperbacks when I saw him at a recent crossword tournament I attended. I'll be showcasing them all week. This is the first of four.
  

Best things about this back cover:

• Now they're just patently, blatantly, shamelessly ripping off Cornell Woolrich (who wrote "The Bride Wore Black")
• "Internationally famous mannequin"!? More famous than that chick from the movie "Mannequin?"
• I wish the front cover had more "daring black swimsuit" and less "startling red-gold hair."

Page 123~

"Normally, Natalie has a very good brain."

~RP

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Paperback 278: Savage Bride / Cornell Woolrich (Gold Medal 719)

Paperback 278: Gold Medal 719 (3rd ptg, 1957)

Title: Savage Bride
Author: Cornell Woolrich
Cover artist: Barye Phillips

Yours for: $20


Best things about this cover:

• "Rowrrr! Tigress care not for clothing, or for bed sheets. Tigress eat new husband and leave only giant skull behind!"
• "Uh, honey, when I asked you if you wanted to play a little 'stroke the totem pole,' I didn't mean that literally..."
• This cover has all the "savage" iconography: nudity, writhing ritualistic dance, mysterious carvings, evidence of cannibalism, and miniature tribal elders with flamboyant headwear presiding over it all.

Best things about this back cover:

• Let it be known that I wrote "writhing" re: the front cover before I read this back cover blurb. Prescience!
• Nothing says random exotica like "an ancient tribe." "Which one? Who cares!? It's got human sacrifice and pagan altars, and that's all you need to know. Now writhe!"

Page 123~

They were fed liberally, if monotonously, on an unvarying diet of baked maize cakes [ed. "You call it corn..."], and water was given them to drink from a brackish-tasting pottery bowl.

I like Cornell Woolrich's writing. Rendezvous in Black is one of my favorite noir novels of all time. But this bit from "Savage Bride" is horrible. Liberal use of passive voice ... "they were fed [...] monotonously?" Unless you're at Medieval Times or Applebee's on your birthday, what do you expect? ... and why are they tasting the "bowl?" You're supposed to drink what's *inside*.

~RP

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Paperback 162: The Black Curtain / Cornell Woolrich (Mercury Mystery 64)

Paperback 162: Mercury Mystery 64 (1st ptg, n.d.)

Title: The Black Curtain
Author: Cornell Woolrich
Cover artist: [Stefan] Salter (I think that's his first name...)

Yours for: $40


Best things about this cover:

• The entire book is in pristine condition. OK, maybe "pristine" is pushing it, but for a digest-sized paperback (notoriously flimsy and easy to destroy through negligence) this book is in superhot condition.
• Cornell Woolrich is the father of modern noir. He is an amazing writer (most of the time). His authorship, the elegant if understated Salter cover, and the overall condition of the book are what's driving the price here. If only it weren't for that damned penciled-in "W" (after "Curtain" in the title). What, did some alphabetically challenged librarian need a cue on where to file it? Yeesh.
• Look, a blurb from a real media entity! Most of the books I collect seem to have escaped the NYT's notice (not shocking).

Best things about this back cover:

• This isn't the whole cover, just a close-up of the Mercury Mystery logo (the only thing on the cover - one logo and a whole lot of Brown). The design is superb - love how the flourish on the end of the first "M" spirals into a little dagger handle. Sweet.

Page 123~

A querulous thread of black unraveled from the open magazine; then freed itself, broke off short, went up into nothingness. No more followed.

You gotta love an author who will throw down "querulous."

~RP