Brian Harwin's novel Home Is Upriver appeared in 1952, with this Signet paperback arriving in 1955, and concerns the coming of age along the Mississippi River of the orphaned Kip, who finds a home with married couple Buck and Martha, but promptly screws it up by deciding to screw their daughter Storm. The book may be better known these days by its 1959 title Touch Me Not. Brian Harwin was a pen name for author Le Grand Henderson. We know. Why would you change your name from Le Grand Henderson, when that's as writerly a name as can be, whereas Brian Harwin sounds like a guy from high school who ran a hardware store for a few years then you heard he maybe moved back east? Well, it turns out Henderson actually did make use of his amazing name. He published children's books as simply Le Grand, and many of those too take place along the Mississippi River. He was actually born in Connecticut, but his love of the Mississippi blossomed after he undertook a yearlong houseboat journey from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. This would have been during the Great Depression and we can only imagine that the adventure was le grand. Home Is Upriver was the only book he wrote as Harwin. If you want to see its Touch Me Not incarnation, which has excellent Robert Maguire art, we suggest looking at our collection of swamp, bayou, and river paperbacks here.

Ian Fleming was not an author to be trifled with. We talked about how he shifted the rights for Casino Royale from Popular Library to Signet. Well, here we go again. The above 1957 Perma paperback of Diamonds Are Forever with excellent William Rose cover art is rare because Fleming shifted the publishing to Signet after Perma changed the title of Moonraker to Too Hot to Handle. Since this happened after the Casino Royale fiasco you’d think the editors would have known better. 

The story is well known—Popular Library insisted upon changing the title of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale to what you see above. They even went so far as to call 007 “Jimmy Bond” on the rear cover blurb. Fleming retaliated by selling the U.S. publishing rights to Signet at first opportunity, leaving only a small run of very collectible copies of You Asked For It on the market. Fleming must have learned from the episode, though, that titles don’t really matter, because he later wrote Chitty-Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car. Anyway, You Asked for It appeared in 1955, with unsigned and uncredited cover art. The blog Killer Covers has a bit more info about the book here. 

Above are two covers for Carter Brown’s, aka Alan G. Yates’ thriller Who Killed Dr. Sex? Robert McGinnis painted the cover art at top in 1964 for the Signet paperback, and in 1965 another artist painted a dupe of the cover for Horwitz International’s release. You probably shouldn’t get any credit for copying work, but we have to confess we like the second version quite a bit. McGinnis is a master figure painter, of course, and his reclining woman beats the dupe, but the second version’s wall filigrees and iridescent green bed are nice additions. The other main difference is the direction of the woman’s gaze. McGinnis painted her looking slightly away, while the copycat painted her looking directly at the viewer. It’s a major shift in mood, and an interesting choice. We discussed this copying practice in relation to Carter Brown’s paperbacks before, and we assume it has to do with rights issues between the American and Australian publishers, and Robert McGinnis, but we’d love to know the details. Hopefully, more information will become available down the line. 

Novelist Carter Brown was from Australia and illustrator Robert McGinnis was from the U.S., so it’s unclear whether the two ever met, but that didn’t stop them from becoming a dream team. Together, they produced some of the most pleasing novels/covers of the late pulp era. Below are fifteen Brown-written/McGinnis-illustrated Signet mysteries, circa 1950s and 1960s. You can read more about McGinnis (who by the way is still working at age 85) at the website American Art Archives.

Just to show that virtually no author escaped the wave of sexulaized art that swept over publishing during the 1950s, here are two pimped out book covers for George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and 1984. Orwell was already a literary immortal by the time these editions hit the streets, but hey—it’s never too late for an extreme makeover. The covers aren’t dishonest, per-se, but trying to make these two extremely important books look like John D. MacDonald capers is a bit sly. But at least we know the publishers took the propagandist lessons of 1984 to heart. From the age of doublethink—greetings!

Above you see the cover of British author James Hadley Chase’s 1953 revenge thriller I’ll Bury My Dead. It has what we consider unusually downbeat art, but with the body count in the story being so high maybe that’s to be expected. Basically, a shady P.I. dies of an apparent gun suicide, but his brother is convinced it’s murder and decides to investigate. He ends up uncovering a blackmail racket, getting on the wrong side of the police, and being connected to more corpses, including that of his brother’s wife, depicted in George Erickson’s cover art. Were these murders or suicides? This book was savagely reviewed for the most part but was reprinted as recently as 2009, which goes to show that pulp is critic proof. 

He was born Alan G. Yates in Australia, but as Carter Brown he published 150 crime stories, starting in 1953 with The Mermaid Murmurs Murder and continuing until 1981 when he published The Wicked Widow. All his tales were set in the Unites States (including these four with Robert McGinnis cover art), but strangely, American readers never embraced him. Instead, it was in Europe that he made his mark, where his noir plots filled with classic twists and hard-boiled dialogue did as much for crime litertature as any figure who ever lived.