Title: Tell It To the Birds
Author: James Hadley Chase
Cover artist: photo cover
Yours for: $12
Best things about this cover:
- You've got a little spinach in your teeth there ... on your right ... *your* right ... here, I'm a mirror ... that's it.
- The '70s brought us a lot of wacky mail-order products: Ginsu knives, Mr. Microphone, and, of course, SureShot, the all-in-one handgun/hairdryer: "SureShot: It'll Blow Your Hair Away!"
- Don't laugh at the "blood." It took a bunch of industrious 7th graders a long time to make that "blood."
- "We should superimpose the bloody hand onto her hair, because that would ... suggest ... ah fuck it, who cares *why*, just do it!"
- I don't have a lot of '70s paperbacks in my collection, but I'm thinking of moving in that direction—they have none of the beauty of the fully painted covers of the '40s-mid-'60s, but they have a Cheese Factor of a million, which I can also admire.
Best things about this back cover:
- Is he wearing an orchid!? Because of his novel No Orchids For Miss Blandish??? Man, that is foppish in extremis.
- Meg Barlowe spoonerizes to Beg Marlowe, which is what Maddox should've done if he wanted to know how to be a real fucking detective.
- I have not read Chase. I do not hear good things. Hence, I have not read Chase.
- Center page of this book is a cigarette ad on stiff paper—Kent cigarettes on one side, Kent Menthol on the others. The cigarette ad insert is a not uncommon feature of cheap '70s thrillers.
Page 123~
"She kept the house like a pig sty. If a woman really loves her husband, she makes an effort to keep his home decent."
Well, now we know whom she shot and why.
~RP
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Tumblr]
