Picks of the Pack

Two weeks ago, The Rap Sheet asked its discriminating readers to select the Best Crime Fiction Cover of 2016 from a field of 12 candidates. Earlier today, it announced the top five vote-getters in that survey. How did your own favorite fare? Click here to find out.

Back to Fronts

In case you haven’t been paying close attention, note that The Rap Sheet has posted its 15 finalists for the title of “Best Crime Fiction Cover of 2016.” Over the last week, two of the nominees—Carl Hiaasen’s Razor Girl and Todd Moss’ Ghosts of Havana—have established early leads, though the British fronts of Thomas Mullen’s Darktown and E.S. Thomson’s Beloved Poison are in hot pursuit. You have until midnight next Wednesday, January 25, to make your own preferences known. What are you waiting for?

Rap Party: “Ten Days’ Wonder”

This month marks a full 10 years since I launched my award-winning crime-fiction blog, The Rap Sheet. The actual date on which that anniversary becomes official is May 22—now 10 days away. As part of the celebration, I’ve decided to count down each day between now and then using a series of handsome vintage covers.

Let’s begin with Clark Hulings’ beautifully painted cover for the 1957 Pocket paperback edition of Ten Days’ Wonder. The 19th novel to feature New York City amateur sleuth Ellery Queen, it was written by cousins Manfred B. Lee and Frederic Dannay under the Queen pseudonym, and originally saw print in 1948.



One down, nine more to go ...

FOLLOW-UP: “The Rap Sheet: 10 Years in the Making,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).

Putting on a Good Face

It’s likely you haven’t noticed yet, but The Rap Sheet just posted its nominees for Best Crime Fiction Cover of 2015. There are 20 contenders this year, covering a wide assortment of authors and a range of publishers, both large and small. You’re invited to take part in choosing the ultimate winner. At the bottom of the post, you’ll find a simple electronic ballot. Please feel free to select as many or as few covers as you think deserve praise. Voting will remain open for the next two weeks, until midnight on Friday, January 22, after which The Rap Sheet will announce the results.

Sounds like fun, doesn’t it. But the clock’s running. Vote now!

Best Face Forward

Perhaps you haven’t noticed them yet, but The Rap Sheet’s 20 nominees for “best crime novel cover of 2014” were posted earlier today. You can take a cruise through the gallery here.

I spent the last 12 months gathering possible contenders for this annual competition. To those, I recently added suggestions from Rap Sheet readers, and then cut the list in half (a painful process, believe me). The finalists this year include book fronts produced on both sides of the Atlantic, boasting a wide variety of designs--from covers that emphasize creative uses of type to others on which moody photographs or illustrations are central. Although I have my favorites among the bunch, I think any of them is qualified to win.

But you be the final judge. Click here and choose as many covers as you think are deserving of praise. Voting will remain open until midnight on Sunday, December 21, after which the results will be tallied and announced in The Rap Sheet.

What are you waiting for? Cast your ballot now!

UPDATE: The top six winners of The Rap Sheet’s 2014 Best Crime Fiction Covers contest were announced on December 30.

Image Enhancement

With a record 1,039 votes registered, The Rap Sheet’s Best Crime Fiction Covers of 2013 contest closed at the end of last week. But only today were the results announced. Click here to see the winners.

Which Covers Do You Like Best?

Here’s a chance to make your voice heard! The Rap Sheet today posted a poll asking its many readers to choose their favorites from among a collection of 15 top-quality crime-fiction book covers, all of which were published in 2013. The candidates include works by Stephen King, Arlene Hunt, Max Allan Collins and Mickey Spillane, Michael Gruber, Eleanor Catton, and Derek B. Miller. Study the nominees closely, and then register your favorites.

Voting will remain open for the next two weeks, until midnight on Friday, February 7, after which the results will be announced.

What are you waiting for? Go vote!

Eyeing “Spy”

Jacket from Victor Gollancz’s 1963 first edition

As I mention today in my principal crime-fiction blog, The Rap Sheet, September 2013 marks 50 years since the first publication of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Released originally by UK publisher Victor Gollancz in 1963, it was actually the third Cold War espionage novel penned by real-life British intelligence agent David Cornwell under a pseudonym, John le Carré; both Call for the Dead (1961) and A Murder of Quality (1962) had preceded it into print. However, Spy--with its “portrayal of Western espionage methods as morally inconsistent with Western democracy and values”--drew greater attention than either of those previous works, winning the 1965 Edgar Award for Best Novel, becoming an international best-seller, being condensed in the August 1964 edition of True magazine (see the cover image on the left), and really launching Cornwell/le Carré’s literary career. At the time of this novel’s publication, he was still with the Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6), but he quit no long after to become a full-time author.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold has since been named, by Time magazine, as one of the “100 best English-language novels published since 1923.” Publishers Weekly awarded it the top spot among its 15 favorite spy novels of all time. And Britain’s Independent newspaper chose it as one of the “10 best spy novels.” A film adaptation of this thriller, with Richard Burton starring as le Carré’s disgraced and hate-filled protagonist, Alec Leamas, was released in 1965.

As is the case for many of you, I suspect, it’s been a good long while since I last picked up and read Spy. But Washington Post critic Jonathan Yardley insists that the tale has lost none of its resonance, even after half a century on bookshelves.

What is most satisfying about John le Carré’s first great success--first of many, as it turned out--is how well it holds up on this, its 50th anniversary. The Cold War and the Berlin Wall are long since gone, but the story le Carré constructed around the days when both threatened the stability and even the survival of civilization has lost none of its pertinence. The themes his splendid novel treats--the relationship between the individual and the state, the dangers of ideology, the brotherhood of enemies, the infinite human capacity for deceit and unfaithfulness, and the limited human capacity for loyalty and constancy--are every bit as much with us now as they were in 1963. The cast of characters and the antagonists are quite different, but the essential story is the same.

An even better look back at this yarn’s complexities and place in the history of spy fiction can be found in the Double O Section blog.

During its five decades in print, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold has gone through numerous editions, a few of which I’ve gathered below. One of the popular images you find in looking through those dusty versions is Berlin, Germany’s 18th-century, neoclassical Brandenberg Gate, which once sat next to the Berlin Wall separating the west side of the city from the Communist eastern half. Other book fronts use barbed wire and, in one instance, what looks like a continuous string of code words to represent the difficult, distrustful period of the Cold War, the post-World War II era that pitted the Soviet Union against other Western powers.

Click on any of these images for an enlargement.









BONUS: On April 27, 1964, after the book release of Spy but before the movie was made, John le Carré appeared as a contestant on the TV panel game show To Tell the Truth. Watch that clip here.

“Too Beautiful to Live”

Today in The Rap Sheet, contributor Jim Napier writes fondly about the 1943 novel Laura, by Vera Caspary. To illustrate that essay, I used the cover from the most recent Vintage UK paperback edition. However, Laura has a long printing history, and at least two other, previous editions are worth celebrating on this page.

The front above comes from the 1961 Dell paperback version, illustrated by Gino Forté, while the one below was released by Popular Library in 1950, with cover art by Sam Cherry.

Jacket Required

Have you voted yet in the Best Crime Novel Cover of 2011 contest being hosted by our partner blog, The Rap Sheet? So far, the top four contenders appear to be Jo Nesbø’s The Snowman, John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Alan Glynn’s Winterland, and Scott Phillips’ The Assignment. But it’s still early days yet, and already there have been some surprising upsets in this rivalry.

You have until midnight this coming Friday to make your opinion known. Click here to look over the 12 covers in contention, and then cast a ballot for your favorite(s) at the bottom of that same post.

UPDATE: The contest winners have now been announced.

Dangerous Elegance

Earlier this month I made note in The Rap Sheet of the exceptional new cover for a Spanish-translated paperback edition of Megan Abbott’s 2007 novel, Queenpin (Reina del Crimen). Now comes a post from Óscar Palmer, the publisher of that edition, in which he recalls the cover’s creative conception.

Click here for Google’s imperfect English translation of that post.