booksfromthevaults

BOOKS FROM THE VAULTS: CLASSIC COVERS FROM YOUR DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES!

High-Victorian Horror meets Fifties High Camp: Richard Marsh’s The Beetle

Pictured here is the cover of the 1959 WDL Books edition of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. The Beetle was a high-Victorian fin de siècle masterpiece of horror and suspense, published in 1897, the same year as the more famous Dracula, and every bit its equal, which gives you some idea of how highly I rate it. The plot revolves around the idea of a mysterious shapeshifting supernatural entity, the Beetle of the title, who has made his way to London in order to carry out some political shenanigans, arranging the theft of important letters from the desk of an MP (very much in the spirit of the fiction of the times!) and has the power to mesmerise his victims to make them do his bidding. It is inspired by the mass boom in archaeological investigation that was centred on the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs, and has a genuinely scary atmosphere, palpable with dread. The cover shows a gorgeous girl (likely Marjorie Lindon, the novel’s heroine) being menaced by the repulsive Beetle (in scarab form, of course!), in eye-popping ‘technicolor’ and fuses an awesome ‘50s pulp sensibility with the arch-Gothic Victorian horror of its story. I am a huge fan of these classic novels repackaged in ‘pulp’ format and am delighted to share this.

*The Beetle*: damsel in distress, 1890s/1950s style!

Madams by Moonlight: Willkie Collins’s The Woman in White, ’60s style!

Wilkie Collins’s groundbreaking multi-narrative Victorian thriller The Woman in White (not to be confused with the Susan Hill novel The Woman in Black!), originally published in the good old days of 1860, here reprinted in 1966 by Paperback Library, over one hundred years later! Proudly proclaiming its status as a ‘Paperback Library Gothic’ (along with a load of written-for-the-market chintz that would have accompanied it at the time), this stunning edition features one of the gorgeous full-colour paintings that graced this series. Amazingly, it still has the 1/6 d sticker from Boots (at a time when they sold actual books!) on the bottom right of the cover. Abridged as it is, I absolutely love this version, and think you will too.

*The Woman in White*: as Gothic as it gets!

Spooky happenings, 1960s style: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw

Henry James’s classic psych-supernatural novella, Turn of the Screw (as adapted brilliantly by Jack Clayton in his film The Innocents, with Deborah Kerr as the Governess) is here given the WDL treatment in full, proto-psychedelic glory in this 1960 paperback edition. This is one I find particularly outrageous and absolutely love, for its lurid colours, ‘Batman-gothic’-style lettering and borderline-cartoony treatment of the figures. You probably don’t have a pulse if you don’t enjoy this!

Pre-psychedelic, post-Victorian ghoulishness. What more can you want from a book?

Pulp, Girls and Guns: Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me, Deadly

I can’t get enough of this stuff, and the good news is that there’s still a lot of it out there. Mickey Spillane, creator of the legendary hardboiled ‘private dick’ Mike Hammer, was one of the originals, and this is his sixth, and probably most famous, novel, first published in 1953. While Sherlock Holmes can back up his intellect with fencing and Marquis of Queensberry-rules boxing if necessary, Mike Hammer tends to go straight in with fists or gun: I guess that’s the American way. And he needs it, with the foes ranged against him. The femme fatale on the cover here is posing with her gun, cigarette in a holder and a sleek, black cocktail dress, bristling with phallic symbols in other words and with an expression that is ambiguously seductive and dangerous. A classic noir girl, in other words. This cover is from a 1970 Corgi reissue, just at the turn of the decade, and screams ‘pulp’ in the best way possible!

Girls, guns and tabs in holders: the classic noir combo

Classic revenge thrills: The Bride Wore Black by William Irish

Though the original novel was published in 1940, the famous film version by Francois Truffaut didn’t come out until 1968, which is when this tie-in film version edition dates from. As the back cover quotes, “The bride and bridegroom came out of the church. A car roared past the steps. And Nick Kileen was dead with a bullet in his chest.” The story is downright dour, mean and miserable, and as if that weren’t enough, packs a twist like a spitting cobra. Irish (aka Cornell Woolrich, author of The Fifth Grave and many other crime blockbuster masterpieces, was a master of frenetic pacing and suspense. The cover, both stylish and sinister, with the eponymous Bride (Julie Kileen) looking more like a Victorian apparition than a mid-century moll with murder on her mind (okay, not actually a ‘moll’, but a broad at least), is unusual in this gallery because of its strikingly controlled and restrained black and white graphic, with just the title splashed in bloody red block type across the top. Can you say NOIR?

Sorry, boys, she’s not interested. The Bride brandishes a deadly weapon on the front cover of Irish’s mid-century revenge-themed masterpiece that launched a thousand revenge thrillers, female and otherwise.

Postwar Perils: Jonathan Latimer’s The Fifth Grave

‘”You are in danger!”‘ screams the back cover of this Popular Library edition of Latimer’s hard-hitting, meat and gristle pulp novel. First published in Mystery Book Magazine in 1946, this paperback version was published in 1950 and reprinted in 1951. It’s a whole lot of story, and fits pretty much in your palm. It features a crazed religious cult (always a bonus in a thriller story) and Chapter 1 starts straight in with the line “From the way she looked under the black dress I knew she’d be a hot dame” (the original, before the censor’s talons wrapped around it, is even racier!). I’m a big fan of the cover on this one: a beautifully-painted piece of book art with a yellow motif (author’s name, Popular Library insignia and the ‘dame’s’ canary-yellow pyjamas, daring open at the bosom, interweaving with the red of the bold block title and the detective’s tie. Even organised crime was better int he old days, it would appear….

(I think ‘strange love’ might be even more disturbing than ‘violent death’ here….!)

Six Skeletal Tales of the Supernatural: The Curse of Dracula, ed. Charles Higham

I have a huge fondness for this 1960 reissue of classic vampire, mummy and other horror tales from the pick of the c19th: Stoker, Gautier, de Balzac and Edith Nesbit all feature, along with HTW Bousfield and the American journalist giant and master of the satirical supernatural short, Ambrose Bierce. Published by Horwitz Publications in Inc in 1962, this collection has an astounding piece of cover art, making liberal use of colour coding and way-out fonts in its text and features an extremely slimy, sweaty Dracula reaching out an exceedingly creepy an d emaciated hand over an elegant coffin containing a stunning blonde in a red evening dress. Coming at the beginning of the sixties, this cover is disturbing, psychedelic and fun all all at the same time, exhibiting all the qualities of a decadent fever dream.

The *Curse of Dracula*: Dracula looks as sweaty and nervous as an addict as he reaches for the object of his affections….

Dragonwyck: (North) American Gothic

You might be familiar with Dragonwyck through the classic 1946 movie starring Vincent Price as the heir to the shadowy and sinister mansion and Gene Tierney as the Cinderella-like farm girl who falls under the spell of his charm. It’s very much like Jane Eyre, but with an East Coast US setting and the fact that Nicholas, the heir and Mr Rochester-alternate, becomes addicted to opium, resulting in some truly erratic behaviour. The novel is a stirring and very period-accurate read, with a fantastic dynamic between Miranda and Nicholas, and was published in 1944 but set a hundred years earlier. There are elements of Poe, Faulkner and Hawthorne present as well as Charlotte Bronte, and this cover, from the Coronet edition (8th impression, 1972), does it ample justice, with a characteristically seventies-style yellow-green backdrop and an intensely eerie decaying mansion and grounds.

*Dragonwyck*: Miranda is all demure while Nicholas acts uptight in front of his crumbling pile.

John D MacDonald: The Travis McGee mysteries

Here are a brace of bangers from the legendary crime writer John D Macdonald here: The Deep Blue Good-By (1964) and Darker Than Amber (1966). The former is the first in the long-running series of novels starring freelance Florida-based investigator Travis McGee, who resides on a large boat and picks up cases of stolen property that interest him for a few dollars a pop (50 per cent of the total value). Both covers shown here are the original Fawcett paperback editions, and exhibit a cool mid-sixties charm that goes well with the sleek action narratives of the novels themselves. ‘Fun fact’: Travis McGee is the model for Sonny Crockett in Michael Mann’s legendary ’80s series Miami Vice. Check out the covers below and you’ll see what I mean.

The original and highly influential first Travis McGee novel, colour-coded for its theme and title, oozes mid-sixties *chic*.

The seventh novel in the same series, again colour-coded and featuring a typically toothsome Travis McGee heartbreaker!

“Against the Wall”: The erotic edginess of Sloane Britain’s Insatiable!

This is this novel’s first (and for all I know only)print, published in 1960. It contains multiple raunchy sex scenes and words we wouldn’t use these days, such as ‘faggots’. ‘This is the story of Sandy, a one-man woman who suddenly and tragically found herself without her man’, the blurb on the rear informs us (the ‘man’ in question is cruelly cut down by a car full of boy racers after alighting from his bus to return to his wife and Sandy’s journey of awakening starts from there. The book is a real treasure, containing lines like ‘Myrna Hopkins, head librarian and Sandy’s boss, was one hell of a good-looking woman for her age’ and ‘Ray’s body flew gracefully through the air in one last moment of bird-like freedom’. Awesome stuff! This is only the beginning, as Sandy embarks on her journey of turn-of-the-century Mad Men-like sexual discovery. A real corker of a book whose smouldering cover painting of Sandy grasping her brass bedstead rails and hot pink title lettering sets up expectations for the reader that the story amply fulfils, with its themes of lesbian sex (the author, real name Elaine Williams, was a lesbian herself) and sexual experimentation that were extremely edgy at the time of writing. You probably guessed already that ‘Sloane Britain’ had to be a pseudonym…!

Could any caption really do this justice?

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