Lew Archer: New, Newish and Old

The Lew Archer novels of Ross Macdonald are some of the best private-eye novels written, forming a sort of gumshoe Holy Trinity with Hammett and Chandler. Penguin UK have snaffled some of them for their Modern Classics range (to go with some other surprising but welcome crime-writing additions to that series), and have employed Edward Bettison to do the cover designs, with more than a hint of a stylish late-'50s, early-'60s vibe.

It's a pity the excellent Black Money isn't part of the set.

I'm also rather partial to the current US covers for the Archer books, put out by Vintage US/Black Lizard, which do a great job of playing up the noir aspects of their atmosphere.

All of these are quite a step away from the skin/boob-tastic covers inflicted on the books by Fontana at the tail end of the 1970s.

That last cover troubles me: is the target trapped under a breast? Between the cheeks of an incredibly lopsided arse? Clutched under a bingo wing?

Pearson, McCarthy & Fontana

A post of two halves: first of all, James Pardey, the man behind the amazing The Art of Penguin Science Fiction site, has just launched the equally appealing and well-researched The Art of Fontana Modern Masters. If you like funky cover design, go there! (You can also get this print of the set there, too.)

Secondly, the splendid John Self pointed me towards these beautiful new covers for the backlist of Cormac McCarthy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They are the work of David Pearson, for Picador UK, and seem to have taken one of his Kierkegaard covers for the Penguin Great Ideas series as the launching pad. (Click for a nice big version with lots of detail you can't see in the shrunken version.)

More Margot Neville

About six months ago, I wrote briefly about two of my father's great-aunts, the sisters Ann "Nev" Neville Goyder Joske and Margot Goyder, who wrote crime fiction together as ‘Margot Neville'. Over the weekend, while cleaning out a room full of boxes of books, I came across two more of their books, and so thought I'd put the covers up here, since they don't seem to exist anywhere else on the net. They're both Fontana paperbacks, from that publishers pulp painting era, before they decided the solution to every cover was to slap a nude on it.

From 1957...

..and from 1961...