“Holocaust,” by Anthony McCall

Holocaust, by “Anthony McCall,” aka Henry Kane (Pocket, 1968). Published originally in hardcover in 1967, this appears to be one of only two novels Kane—the creator of swingin’ New York City private eye Peter Chambers—published under his McCall pseudonym. The other was Operation Delta.

Cover illustration by Harry Bennett.

An Abundance of Bennetts

So here’s how it happened: A couple of weeks ago I was strolling past the bookshelves in my wife’s home office, when I spied a 1971 Berkley Highland paperback reprint of The Girl Inside (1968), Jeannette Eyerly’s short tale about “a teenage girl’s painful trek to emotional stability and maturity after her parents’ deaths and her attempted suicide.” I wouldn’t have thought twice about that book, except its cover illustration looked familiar. Sure enough, upon closer inspection I found the signature “Bennett”—as in Harry Bennett (1919-2012)—in the lower left-hand corner of the novel’s front.

Ever since late 2017, when I wrote the first in what would become a lengthy series of Killer Covers posts about Bennett and his artistry, I have been on the lookout for further examples of his work. Quite by accident, I’d came across a trove of additional Bennett-painted paperbacks while I was helping to clear out my wife’s late parents’ home (see here, here, and here). And now I had encountered one more, just resting casually among my wife’s books, a holdover from her childhood that I had not previously noticed.

Then two days later, another Bennett composition crossed my vision, this time buried in a post on the Facebook page Vintage Paperback & Book Covers. Titled Last Hope House, that 1968 Fawcett Gold Medal edition was penned by one Williams Forrest, who apparently contributed to a variety of fiction genres, from sexy suspense (Seeds of Violence, 1957) to westerns (White Apache, 1966).

Possessing a generous inclination, I wanted to share both of these recent finds with Killer Covers readers.

Three More for the Bennett Files

Most readers of this blog probably already know what a fan I am of painter and paperback cover artist Harry Bennett (1919-2012). It was just two years ago that I produced a months-long tribute to Bennett’s work. And ever since, I have kept my eyes peeled for additional examples of his artistry. Just this week, I found three.

Embedded atop this post is his cover for the 1975 Fawcett Crest paperback edition of These Cliffs Are Dangerous, a “sophisticated Gothic” novel attributed to “Lindsay March,” which the back-cover copy says is “the pseudonym of a famous Fawcett author.” (I haven’t yet learned her real name by searching the Web, but perhaps one of Killer Covers’ readers knows that info.) You can see Bennett’s signature in this book front’s lower right-hand corner.

Below and on the left is Bennett’s distinctly different illustration for Beyond Time (Pocket, 1975), a collection of science-fiction short stories edited by Sandra Ley. Beside it is his front for The Children at the Gate, by Lynne Reid Banks (Pocket, 1969). These latter two images were provided to the Today’s Inspiration Group Facebook page by Bennett’s youngest son, Tom.

My quest for more of Harry Bennett’s artwork continues!

Ending the Great Book Hunt

For those of you who have been keeping track of progress toward cleaning out my late in-laws’ residence (see previous posts here and here), I thought I’d better offer a final accounting. After a year’s consistent—and frequently frustrating—labors, and way too much dust ingested along the way by everyone participating in this endeavor, the job has finally been completed. And the house has been put on the market. It’s a small but fairly cute suburban abode, really, though the buyer will likely have to spend a good chunk of change replacing the antiquated wiring, fixing up spots where water leaks occurred over the years, and tearing out all of the damp and worn carpeting. (My in-laws apparently thought that ignoring the problems with their living conditions for a few decades would magically make them go away.)

(Right) Crime and mystery fiction scholar Howard Haycraft

In addition to just lifting and hauling overfilled boxes, many of them stuffed to the brim with garage-sale items that had been once acquired and then never used, my job throughout this project was to gather together the thousands of books we found inside the house and garage (mostly boxed and packed away, rather than on display), and divide those I thought might be worth selling from those that were best given away or—in the case of moldy works—thrown out with regret.

Because my wife’s birth father was a big reader of crime and mystery fiction, I was rewarded during this “excavation” with occasional discoveries of long-buried, primarily paperback copies of yarns by big-name writers such as Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, M.E.Chaber, and Ian Fleming. However, since my last post on this subject, I also managed to find among the clutter a two-volume, hardcover set called A Treasury of Great Mysteries, edited by Howard Haycraft and John Beecroft, and published in 1957 by Simon & Schuster. In addition to full novels by the likes of Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express), Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep), and Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca), it contains novellas by Ellery Queen and Rex Stout, and short stories penned by Georges Simenon, Patrick Quentin, Ngaio Marsh, and others. I already own many of these yarns in different editions; and the condition of the two volumes isn’t perfect (the covers will require plastic jackets in order to extend their life, and the pages smell a bit musty). However, A Treasury of Great Mysteries seems to be regarded as something of a landmark publication, and Haycraft (1905-1991) is celebrated as an early authority on this genre, his 1941 anthology, Murder for Pleasure, being much-prized. So I’ll add this pair of volumes to my personal library and, when I get a chance, read the stories in them that I have not already enjoyed. (You can see the full jackets here.)

Worth saving too, I think, are what appear to be a first-edition hardcover copy of Queen’s Cat of Many Tails (Little, Brown, 1949), though it’s missing its original jacket; a 1942 Sun Dial Press reprint of Charteris’ The Saint vs. Scotland Yard; a 1969 Bantam Books release of the James Bond novel Colonel Sun, by “Robert Markham” (aka Kingsley Amis), with cover art by Frank McCarthy; and Fannin, a retitled 1958 Unibook edition of David Markson’s Epitaph for a Tramp, with cover art attributed to Ron Lesser. (When contacted about this illustration, Lesser responded: “It looks like mine from that period; however the poses [and model] photography do not look familiar. I am not sure either way. Your guess is as good as mine.”)

Of course, not all of the books salvaged from my in-laws’ house fall into the categories of crime, mystery, or thriller. Rescued, too, was a 1973 Beagle romance paperback titled Pool of Dreams, by “Lucy Walker” (aka Dorothy Lucy Sanders), with a cover painting signed “W. Popp” (which I presume to mean Walter Popp); a 1967 Dell edition of Madeleine L'Engle’s adult standalone novel, The Love Letters (its illustration credited only to “Thomas”); 1973’s Making U-Hoo (Dell), a soft-core porn novel by Irving A. Greenfield; and a 1974 Fawcett Crest reprint of The Devil on Lammas Night, by British author Susan Howatch (with art by the great Harry Bennett).

Sadly, my wife’s mother and stepfather, along with her birth father, have now all passed away, so I can’t learn who purchased and read these various works. While I understand that her mother was a prodigious consumer of romances, and her father laid claim to most of the crime and westerns/historicals (we found lots of Louis L’Amour novels stored away and a full but rather mildewed set of Dana Fuller Ross’ Wagons West series), I remain curious as to who left behind the bawdier stories that kept turning up. In all likelihood, nobody who lived in that house would ever admit to having such tastes.

“Operation Delta,” by Anthony McCall

After having composed a variety of posts for this page about American artist Harry Bennett (1919-2012), my eyes are now alert for examples of his work that I haven’t previously spotted. I was, therefore, thrilled to see the cover above, from Operation Delta (Pocket, 1968), appear yesterday on the Today’s Inspiration Group Facebook page. It sure looked like Bennett’s work to me!

So last evening I sent off an e-mail note to Bennett’s youngest son, Tom (who I interviewed just over a year ago), asking whether he could confirm that his father painted the front of Operation Delta. “I do not specifically recall this book or cover,” he responded, “but can confidently say I recognize this as my father’s work. Yes, this is his.”

Not familiar with the writer “Anthony McCall”? That was a pseudonym used by Henry Kane, creator of swingin’ New York City private eye Peter Chambers (A Halo for Nobody, Fistful of Death, etc.). Operation Delta was one among many standalone novels Kane produced during his career. Of its plot, Kirkus Reviews explained back in 1966:

Taking advantage of two timely topics, Civil Rights and Espionage, Mr. McCall integrates them successfully for some split second suspense. Maurice Lauriac, Negro Nobel Prize candidate, is undergoing the southern comforts of jail after a Civil Rights demonstration and the subsequent murder of an NAACP worker. Lauriac, an epileptic, is about to be cut off from medicine by Sheriff “Bull” Hauptner and Co. Meanwhile, up North, Lauriac’s co-workers are mysteriously dying off and the sophisticated anti-missile system they’ve been developing is about to be grounded. It’s up to “Golden Boy” Christopher Prescott Adams (public image-Playboy) to resolve the crisis. Shazam!

It’s hard to tell, judging solely by that reviewlet, whether I would enjoy reading Operation Delta. However, I sure do appreciate Bennett’s cover. I might track down a copy for that reason alone.

(Hat tip to Tim Hewitt.)

Curious Gems Amid the Jumble

Last November, I mentioned on this page that I was helping to clean out the phenomenally jam-packed residence formerly occupied by my wife’s mother and stepfather, both of whom have now passed away. Well, we’re now in the seventh month of that project—and probably halfway through, at best, though we’ve at least moved out of the garage and into the heated house. There’s just so much stuff to sort through and dispose of, and only a limited number of free hours that members of the family can devote to the cause. I can’t believe how many boxes we have already gone through of items—glassware, picture frames, stuffed toys, hard-to-recognize knick-knacks, etc.—that my mother-in-law purchased at garage or estate sales over the years, then stored away in corners of the house and never used. (The price tags are still on them!) And we haven’t yet touched the basement, which is stacked shoulder-high with boxes, containing 80 years of possessions from multiple households.

What makes this arduous experience bearable, is that I enjoy the other people who have volunteered to share the task. And every once in a while, I chance upon an item, usually squirreled away among well-thumbed magazines and other random clutter, that makes all of the lifting and hauling and dust-incited sneezing worthwhile.

Take, for instance, the copy I unearthed this last weekend of Ted Mark’s I Was a Teeny-Bopper for the CIA. I’d heard of this 1967 Berkley paperback novel, but never imagined that a copy (with its cover illustration by Stanley Borack) might someday fall into my hands.

“Ted Mark” was a pseudonym used by Theodore Mark Gottfried (1918-2004), a magazine editor and prolific author of non-fiction books for schoolchildren. Under the Mark moniker, though, he is most widely recognized for having penned a 15-book comedy spy-porn series starring sex researcher-cum-espionage agent Steve Victor, “The Man from O.R.G.Y.” (the Organization for the Rational Guidance of Youth). Teeny-Bopper was a standalone work, but no less steamy than its predecessors. In Black Gate, Sean McLachlan calls it “a fun bit of ’60s pulp with lots of cultural insights into a ‘square’s’ view of the anti-war movement and suburban spouse swapping.” Here he synopsizes the novel’s plot:

Vance Powers [is] a recently divorced corporate lawyer whose boring life gets turned upside down when a Congressman he knows hires him for a secret mission—infiltrate his local suburban amateur theatrical group in order to find some missing CIA money. Amateur theater, you see, is a front for the Commies, and the CIA operative who was investigating this group, Arch Fink, died recently. A bunch of CIA dough disappeared with him.

Powers joins the theater group and meets a menagerie of suburban types, most of whom are hopping into bed with one another. He soon hops into bed with Joy Boxx, a bored housewife and one of the many characters with joke names. The titular teeny-bopper is named Lolly Popstick! Anyway, Powers doesn’t get much joy from Boxx because his ex-wife has an almost psychic ability to call him long distance when he’s just about to have some fun. This happens all through the novel, meaning the sex scenes are all played for laughs. While this may have been a racy book for its day, it would barely get an R rating today and the sex is watered down even more with all the witty banter and slapstick acrobatics.

While Teeny-Bopper was definitely the weekend’s most unlikely discovery, it was not the only one worth mentioning.

In the course of digging through an upstairs bedroom, I found two small bookcases, the first of which revealed a 1947 Sun Dial Press reprint of Rogues’ Gallery, an Ellery Queen-edited anthology of stories built around crooks, rather than crime fighters—“the first of its kind,” according to the jacket copy. Among the authors represented in this thick volume: Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy L. Sayers, Leslie Charteris, Agatha Christie, and less-well-remembered writers on the order of Roy Vickers, H.B. Marriott Watson, and Arnold Bennett. Not far from the Queen release was a 1977 Doubleday hardcover copy (the book club edition) of Stephen King’s The Shining. I have to confess that, while I have watched the big-screen adaptation of King’s first best-seller, I have never read the original tale. So naturally, I scooped this one up for my own library.

Those same shelves offered a handful of entries from the early 20th-century Motor Boys series. I’d never heard of that Stratemeyer Syndicate line before. Wikipedia says it comprised 22 volumes (published between 1906 and 1924), all popular adventure yarns for boys, and all starring the trio of Bob Baker, “son of a rich banker”; Ned Slade, “son of the proprietor of a large department store”; and Jerry Hopkins, “son of a well–to–do widow.” The books were credited to “Clarence Young,” but that was apparently a Stratemeyer house name behind which labored several authors, principally (in the case of the Motor Boys) Howard R. Garis.

Because it was stuck away at the shadowy end of a bookcase’s bottom rack, I nearly missed spotting the pocket-size, red-covered 10th volume of The World’s Best One Hundred Detective Stories, edited by Eugene Thwing and published by Funk & Wagnalls in 1929. Sadly, I didn’t also locate the preceding nine volumes of that collection. However, the 10th includes short stories by the Baroness Orczy, Herbert Jenkins, and the “largely forgotten” Karl W. Detzer. It also boasts an author and title index to the whole collection, so I know what I’m missing. Among the other stories deemed the “best 100” are works by G.K. Chesterton, Octavus Roy Cohen, Anna Katharine Green, Freeman Wills Crofts, Marie Belloc Lowndes, and Vincent Starrett. There’s no Hammett here, but then the Black Mask bunch were often overlooked by literary critics in those days, and Hammett’s first novel, Red Harvest, had only just come out in 1929.

The balance of my latest surprise finds are all paperbacks: the 1969 release of Charlotte Armstrong’s The Balloon Man, with cover art by Harry Bennett; a distinctive 1970 Fawcett Crest edition of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, also with a Bennett illustration; a 1958 copy of Divine Mistress, by Frank G. Slaughter (cover artwork by Charles Binger); Cardinal’s 1959 version of Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow (again fronted by a Binger painting); Pocket Books’ 1961 release of Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Green-Eyed Sister; and a 1966 edition of John D. MacDonald’s Cry Hard, Cry Fast.*

As I said before, we still have a long way to go before my in-laws’ house is clean, so there may be plenty of odd treasures yet to excavate. I’ll let you know what else I come across.

* Several sources around the Web claim the cover art on this Fawcett Gold Medal edition of Cry Hard, Cry Fast was painted by Robert McGinnis. But McGinnis expert Art Scott says that identification is incorrect.

Forsaken No More!

My wife’s stepfather died in September, about two years after her mother passed away. Over the last couple of months, members of the family have been prudently cleaning out the small but overstuffed house in which those two resided for so long, trying to make sure that the rest of us take whatever we want or can use, before the remainder is dispensed through an estate sale or hauled off to Goodwill. One of my jobs has been to cull and clean all of the books on the premises, many left packaged and stored in a cold, rat-infested garage ever since my wife’s parents divorced four decades ago.

I spent most of this last Saturday opening boxes, setting aside books I thought would be of interest to individual family members, and dividing the surplus majority into piles of works that (1) were in good shape and of potential interest to a local used bookshop, or (2) were less presentable or belonged to genres (romance novels, westerns, and politically incorrect joke books, etc.) that might attract buyers’ eyes only if severely marked down for immediate sale. I was surprised at how many books had survived, given the negligent conditions under which they’d been preserved.

From the thousands of books I went through—many of which had originally belonged to my wife’s father, a crime-fiction fan—I pulled out perhaps a dozen works of interest to me. For instance, I snagged a 1944 Pocket edition of Leslie Charteris’ Enter the Saint; one of Erle Stanley Gardner’s early Perry Mason novels, The Case of the Howling Dog (1934); and a hardcover edition of Joe David Brown’s Paper Moon (originally published in 1971 under the title Addie Pray). I also happened across a 1971 Bantam paperback edition of Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale—shown atop this post—featuring cover art by Frank McCarthy. (You can see the back of that book here.)

There were a few other gems, as well: 1970s Paperback Library editions of three Milo March mysteries by M.E. Chaber (aka Kendell Foster Crossen), with fronts illustrated by Robert McGinnis; Dell’s 1958 issue of The Big Country—originally titled Ambush at Blanco Canyon—by Donald Hamilton, creator of the Matt Helm series; and a couple of John D. MacDonald books that I didn’t already own, The Neon Jungle (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1953) and The End of the Night (Fawcett Gold Medal, 1960). Scans of those six are below.







Beyond all of those, I stumbled onto a pair of romantic suspense novels, both boasting cover art by the great Harry Bennett: The Moon-Spinners, by Mary Stewart (Fawcett Crest, 1968) and Snowfire, by Phyllis A. Whitney (Fawcett Crest, 1974).



There are still more boxes for me to go through at my in-laws’ home, so we’ll see what others treasures might present themselves.

Bennett’s Beauties: Cuddled or Cursed

The Wakefield Witches, by Daoma Winston (Pocket, 1975).
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett.

Connecticut artist Harry Bennett (1919-2012) is probably best remembered as an astoundingly prolific painter of covers for paperback detective, thriller, and mainstream novels. However, he may have been equally productive as a creator of artwork in the fiction fields of Gothic romance, romantic suspense/intrigue, and horror. Over the decades, his talents were applied to façades of books by Mary Stewart, Charlotte Armstrong, Dorothy Eden, Virginia Coffman, Barbara Michaels, Phyllis A. Whitney, Victoria Holt, Andre Norton, Joseph Shearing, and others. Bennett apparently painted the first, 1973 paperback cover for Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (a satirical tale originally released in the States in September 1972). He was also kept busy developing imagery for a frequently ignored sub-genre of love stories: nurse romance novels.

For the final installment in Killer Covers’ “Bennett’s Beauties” series, I have pulled together more than 50 of this artist’s book fronts from the romance and horror categories, all issued by one of three publishers: Pocket, Fawcett Crest, and Berkley. You may notice—as evidenced in, say, Susan Howatch’s The Waiting Sands and Holt’s The House of a Thousand Lanterns (both published back in 1975)—that many of the covers displayed below boast a classic, color-rich character that can be quite different from the paintings he supplied for crime novels. Barrymore Tebbs observes in his Gothic-fiction blog, The Midnight Room, that Bennett, “along with Pocket Books’ art director, Milton Charles [1921-2002], … helped create a lushly romantic and easily recognizable style that was often imitated by other artists throughout the genre’s two-decade heyday.”

“Easily recognizable”? Yes, in many instances Bennett’s diverse artistic touch is clear. But the ubiquity of his handsome covers on the Web seems to have left many folks overconfident that illustrations similar to his must, indeed, have flowed straight from his paintbrushes. (The same thing happens frequently with Robert McGinnis.) It’s hardly uncommon to find novel fronts online that have been mistakenly attributed to Harry Bennett.

Knowing how paperback publishers don’t always go to the trouble of crediting cover artists, Bennett sought to make identifications of his efforts easier by prominently signing his paintings. However, “publishers cropped much of the work to exclude signatures,” explains his youngest son, Tom (who I interviewed here). “My father learned to sign in specific places to ensure his name showed up.” (Notice, for instance, on Whitney’s Sea Jade [1965], how the autograph “Harry Bennett” has been neatly integrated into the wharf planking just to the left of the red-dressed woman. There was no neat way to excise that from the picture).

Tom Bennett, himself an artist, was remarkably patient in helping me to cull cover scans from my computer files that did not actually represent the fruits of his father’s labor. If there are mistakes in the selections below, the fault is mine, not his.

Click on any of these images to open an enlargement.

Incidentally, that last cover—from an early 1970s Fawcett Crest edition of Ammie, Come Home, by “Barbara Michaels,” aka Barbara Mertz—was the second of two fronts Bennett painted for the same novel. His 1969 version is shown below, on the left. The same artwork was adapted (with more mesmerized eyes on the floating woman) for the 1973 Five Star release of The Black Dog, by Georgena Goff.