Forthcoming: Jill Emerson’s Getting Off (Hard Case Crime, 2011)

This September, Hard Case Crime will publish a new, original Jill Emerson novel, Getting Off.   The cover, for maximum marketing, reads Lawrence Block writing as Jill Emerson, who in the 1960s-70s wrote lesbian novels for Midwood, erotic and mainstream stuff for Putnam and Arbor House.

This will also be the imprint’s first hardcover.  Other titles have switched from mass market to trade paper.

We love Hard Case, but we wonder if this shift will work. The whole novelty and charm of the line was emulating vintage mass markets with the cover art, delivering books in the 40-60K word range like the old days, not these padded 80-120K word paperbacks that are now the market norm.

The market norm is also pushing the mass market trim size into memory.  We have been seeing paperbacks in a size somewhere between the mass and the trade.

We wonder if readers may be annoyed that they have to fork out more money rather than the under ten bucks price you can get a mass market for. Trade paper and hardcovers will make Hard Case like every other line out there, and not unique, kind of the way Random House took away the uniqueness of Black Lizard by re-issuing everything in trade paper with covers that look like everyone else’s covers, and not the uniqueness that the Creative Arts Black Lizard editions have.

Is this not typical of all conglomerates? They buy out a company that is small and cool and has its own style and slowly make it generic. And we’re not talking just publishing — films, music, art, it happens across the board when a big company’s board thinks people want the same thing rather than something original, and grumble when sales diminish because the fans get bored.

Anyway, we are looking forward to Getting Off.

Read an excerpt.

I’m Cannon — For Hire by Curt Cannon aka Evan Hunter/Ed McBain (Gold Medal, 1958)

Before Block’s Matthew Scudder, there was Curt Cannon, a private eye with a severe drinking problem.  His name later changed to … with the Ed McBain byline, published The Gutter and the Grave by Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter of Blackboard Jungle fame) by Hard Case Crime — Cannon’s  name changed to Matt Cordel. Seems Hunter was reluctant to have this old book reprinted, similar to Lawrence Block was with Grifter’s Game, but, like Block’s, critical and fan reception was positive. This is tough Manhunt-style, two-fisted hardboiled noir.

In fact, Cannon appeared in the first issue of Manhunt; there were four other stories, later collected in I Like ‘Em Tough.

In this nifty little hardboiled novel, Cordell lives on the streets in the Bowery, drinking his pain away until he passes out.  An old friend, Johnny Bridges, tracks him down, needing Cordell’s help in the detective realm. Cordell has no interest, and reminds his buddy that his license was yanked after an unfortunate incident that occurred when he found his wife cheating on him.

Johnny talks Cordell into it anyway — seems simple: Johnny operates a tailor shop and he believes his partner is reaching into the till. Cordell goes to the shop with Johnny and they find the partners dead body there.

The last thing Cordell wants or needs is to get involved in a homicide. But he is. Johnny is arrested for the murder and Cordell has to clear his buddy’s name and find the real killer. But first he must shave, shower, get a new suit, and look presentable. He doesn’t stop drinking, though.  And along the way there are women who throw their bodies at him, more dead bodies, and two-fisted moments in the noir fiction vein.

A fun read, whether you read the Gold Medal or Hard Case version.

Fade to Blonde by Max Phillips (Hard Case Crime, 2004)

Not a real vintage novel, we decided to review this one since we are fans of Hard Case Crime and its vintage reprints and originals in the vintage mode.  And we love the covers!

We wanted to like this one but it was hard.  It starts off great, a first-person narrative in the hard-boiled voice: Ray Corson came to Los Angeles to write for the movies but has only optioned a few treatments. He’s done some extra work as an actor, but he’s hard to cast, being a big, muscular guy suitable for manual labor, which is hoiw he has been surviving.

A blonde comes to him help: Rebecca LaFontaine; she claims a local thug is harassing her snd she wants him off her back. Despite some warnings that this dame might be a nutcase, he takes the job because it’s money and there’s nothing better to do.

No year is given, but there are clues that the story takes place in the 1950s or 60s: Roy writes on a manual typewriter with carbons; his labor job [pays $17 a day…

The novel won the Shamus Award 2004 for Best Paperback Original, albeit Roy is not a private eye per se, he does sleuth and he does speak like a cousin of Mike Hammer or Matthew Scudder.  However, the narrative is convoluted with banter and what reads like padding to make the book 70,000 words.  The real story in these pages is probably a tight 40,000 word short novel, but the publishers don’t like those 1960 lengths for paperbacks anymore.

Mona by Lawrence Block (Gold Medal, 1961)

An early Block with quite a history. It’s been reprinted twice since its Gold Medal debut in 1961 — as Sweet Slow Death in 1986 from Jove, Mona in 1994 from Carroll & Graf,  and as Grifter’s Game as the the first offering from Hard Case Crime in 2005.  A lot of mileage for an old title that has now become somewhat a classic in 60s noir.

I read somewhere that Block had started this one as a Nightstand title, and $20 Lust as something for Gold Medal or Beacon, but things got switched around, and when his agent Henry Morrison at Scott Meredith read the manuscript, he concluded it was good enough for Gold Medal and under Block’s own name.  Thus, Mona became the first paperback Block had his name on the cover, instead of Lesley Evans, Sheldon Lord, or Andrew Shaw.

There’s a Mona, a dead ex-wife, in $20 Lust (aka Cinderella Sims), talked about earlier, and a number of Monas show up in Block’s Andrew Shaw books.  She’s like Harry Whittington’s Cora, popping up often in different, same soul.

Block’s many Monas are just no good…tramps, cheats, and liars all…

The Vengeful Virgin by Gil Brewer (Crest Book #238, 1958)

Gil Brewer – another self-destructive writer of interesting crime and sleaze novels that, like William Knoles, Elaine Williams, and countless others, drank himself to death, and is nearly forgotten except by crime noir, vintage paperback, and paperback history buffs.

Brewer, like Harry Whittington, lived in Florida and set most of his novels there.  The Veneful Virgin is another one of those “let’s kill the ruch old man and take his money and I’ll fuck you forever, darling” novels with a wayward beauty and a dizzy heel.  This one has a twist, of sorts — the girl is the step-daughter of the rich old dying man, instead of the wife.

Jack is a TV repairman in his 20s.  He may be too good-looking for his own good, as women flock to him — an ex-girlfriend, Grace, he can’t get rid of, an 18-year-old girl desperate for a new life, Shirley, and her lonely married neighbor.

Jack pays a visit for TV and intercom installations to a house and is set by auburn-haired bombshell Shirley, who takes care of her nearly invalid step-father, who has nearly $400,000 in the bank.  Shirley seduces Jack and tells him how much she wants out, needs out, and there’s money…Jack has no idea she’s a virgin when he takes her.

The two immediately plot the murder. To make things complicated, the woman next door has the hots for him and won’t leave him alone; her husband has been away to Alaska and she’s lonely.  And Jack’s possessive ex-, Grace, keeps showing up at the wrong place, wrong times.

The neighbor gets wind of the plot and Shirley kills the woman, and then they kill the step-father.  Jack disposes of the woman’s body into a bass lake.

All along, it’s hard to think how stupid Jack is, easily whipped by teen pussy into doing this.  That’s all that’s on his mind: her hot young body, plus the money she’s worth, and the new life both will give him…but many of these stories end up in a double-cross, right?  Even Jack wonders if she’s playing him.  But she’s not…she really is in love with Jack, until she wonders if he loves the money more than her.

People suspect, the cops come around…Jack and Shirley skip town with a bag full of cash, followed by his crazy ex and — yep, things just go to shit for poor Jack.  Our noir guys just never get away with the cash, the girl, and murder — they always have to meet tragic ends…

This is a fast-paced read — Brewe wrote it in a matter of days, like he did many of his best, and the writing doesn’t suffer, and we feel that dizzy sense of craziness.

I look forward to readng more Brewer books.

Hard Case Crime has also reprinted this.

Somebody Owes Me Money by Donald E. Westlake (Lancer Books, 1969; Hard Case Crime, 2006)

Written a few years after Westlake stopped wearing the Alan Marshall mask for Cornith and Midwood, and was establing his career as a crime writer…

This is one of his funny goofy books.  It starts off somewhat serious, with sardonic moments, and eventally takes a turn for the absurd, the way the Lethal Weapon movies got more and more ridiculous.  If you like the humor in Joe Lansdale’s Hap novels, you’ll dig this.

A NY cabbie, 29-year-old Chet, gambler and invisible in the big city,  makes a good bet on a tip from a fare, and is owed $950 from his bookie; but when he goes to see his bookie, his bookie is dead and bloody, murdered.

Two mafia gangs think he did it; the bookie’s sister thinks he did it; the cops suspect he did it; he gets shot at and beaten up and is on the run, having developed a romance with the sister, Abby, a blackjack dealer from Vegas.

Through it all, all he wants is the $950 owed him, dammit.

Flaws and predictable, it’s still a fun read from vintage Westlake, a Lancer orginal recent re-printed by Hard Case.

Thoughts on Eye-Catching Book Covers

The great art found on 1940s-60s bools — not just sleaze, sex, and sin, but all paperback genres — were meant to catch the eye: when a customer saw the cover on the newsstand or bookstore, they would pick it up out of great curisoity: is the cover as good as the story inside?  Sometimes people bought the books on covers alone, just as collectors do today (collecting Bonfils or Rader, they don’t care about the text).

I never heard of these two books below, for instance, or the writers, and have no idea what they are about, I just now got them on eBay because I liked the covers:

Look at those bosoms on that Bonfils art!  Push-up 50s bras!

And Twisted — the cover seems to hint at incest.  From a Beacon?  I don’t know yet, but I have a feeling the cover is misleading, that the girl’s father is strict and mean and she takes off and rebels, and not that her father is the man on the cover wanting to prove that incest is best in some sort of gutter laden lust of shame!

I am often annoyed when the cover is indeed misleading, if the girl on the cover does’t match the main character.  Bonfils always illustrated a scene in a Nightsand book, unlike Midwoods where Harry Shorten would buy art and have writers compose something around it, or just attach art to a book that doesn’t quite fit the story, like Mel Johnson’s Instant Sex.

In the 1970s and 80s, sex books started to use photos of real people models, believing that is what customers wanted.  Perhaps they did, and perhaps paying a model a few dollars was cheaper than commissioning original art.  I don’t care much for photo covers, and they tend to not fit the stories either.  This is true for today’s erotic books — at Blue Moon Books, sometimes the Avalon art dept. just randomly slapped some photo they had in stock (sometimes even putting the same one on two books); and they would put modern age women on Victorian novels.  Some of my Blue Moon covers I hated, like The Dress —

The dress in the novel is short and black, and the female character is blonde  — the other female is a red-head.  So who the hell is this on the cover supposed to be?

(Note: The Dress is being made into a sexy art film in New York soon, after three years of development, and is available in ebook format at Olympia Press, or you can get it used online.  I wrote it as a novella in 1996, published in The Mammoth Book of New Erotica (edited by Maxim Jakubowski) in 1997; I then expanded it as a full novel in 2001 for Blue Moon.  Of all my erotic books, this one has made the most money, mainly from the film option.)

Some covers I really liked, such as The Rooms —

I actually saw the cover before completing the book so I wrote a scene that describes the cover.

For Amateurs, I took my own cover photo —

This was a girl who lived nextdoor, she was from Argentina.  She had a website where she sold pix, and sometimes videos if her having sex with her boyfriend.  I was happy when she agreed to grace the cover of one of my books, just as another female friend appears on the cover of one of my Dr. Mundinger-Klow books:

But…they just don’t make paperback or hardcover covers like they used to in the 1940s-60s.  Some imprints imitate the look, like the Hard Case Crime books, and they are cool, but they are just retro — they have the look but not the spirit and the feel.

Here are some other covers that are great, worth the price of admission  alone, but tend to not reflect the actual novel — posted here for your eyeball’s fancy, because I know you’re reading this blog because you dig these nifty covers a much as any other vintage book fan does…