TRASHY TUESDAY: BOOK HAUL – OLD CRIME AND SPIES, AUSTRALIAN CHANDLER AND WEIRD SCI-FI SEX ROMP.

My recent trawling through old bookshops and bookfairs has uncovered an odd collection of old crime and spy novels, some adult titles and a striking western cover!

John Creasey was an incredibly prolific author with over 600 books to his credit and a raft of pseudonyms. One of his most popular series was about The Toff, the nickname of the Honourable Richard Rollison, an upper-class crime sleuth. Almost sixty books were published in the series, which ran from 1938 to 1977, four years after the author’s death. Rollison is a milder version of Leslie Charteris’ The Saint, even down to having a similar calling card, which in the Toff’s case featured a line drawing of an upper crust man with a top hat, monocle, bow tie and a cigarette in a holder (featured on the cover above).

The Toff At Butlins came out in 1954 and the above Hodder edition is from 1957. The cover has that glorious British 1950s innocence about it, which was to disappear in the 1960s as the cover illustrations on paperbacks became more provocative. It is hard to tell from the cover, which could belong to a Girl’s Own Adventure book, that it is actually a murder mystery. Even the back cover is vague as to what it is about, although there is a marvellous tagline description that has not aged well:

“In the gay atmosphere of a Holiday Camp, the Toff sets out to find three missing men.”

Also providing a nice fifties cover is The Saint Intervenes by Leslie Charteris (Hodder, 1956).

Berkley Mather is a largely forgotten British thriller writer who produced some very good spy and adventure novels in the 1950s and 60s. The Achilles Affair (1959) is one of his better ones and, like a lot of British thrillers of the time, the origins of the plot reach back to the dark days of World War II.

The cover is by the artist John L Baker, who did several cover illustrations for Fontana, including some notable Agatha Christie titles.

Also with a strong fifties feel is this striking Arrow cover for Charles O. Locke’s Road To Socorro (Arrow, 1958). Also titled as The Hell Bent Kid and filmed as From Hell To Texas with Don Murray, it is often listed as one of the best westerns ever written.

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, paperback covers were becoming increasingly more spicier and often dominated by drawings of scantily clad or naked female models. One of the most talented and recognisable “Good Girl Art” cover artist of the time was American Robert McGinnis.

McGinnis did one hundred cover illustrations for the American editions of the Carter Brown books. The Lady Is Available is probably not one of his most striking covers, but it does showcase the ‘McGinnis’ formula of a beautiful, underdressed woman alone, usually making eye contact with the potential reader.

In Australia Horwitz were the originators of the Carter Brown books, which underpinned the commercial success of the publisher for many years.

However, the Carter Brown novels were not the publisher’s only output and they released a wide range of books across the spectrum of popular reading from westerns to war stories to romance and books about modern sexual practices. In the early 1960s Horwitz entered into an unusual agreement with Penguin books wherein they released 37 Penguin titles with spiced up covers. One of these was Raymond Chandler’s The High Window (1961). The cover was by noted Australian artist Theo Batten, who also did the one for Playback below.

Here are a couple of links to more on the Penguin books released by Horwitz: https://murdermayhemandlongdogs.com/trashy-tuesday-perry-mason-covers-australia-vs-usa/ https://murdermayhemandlongdogs.com/trashy-tuesday-horwitz-covers-the-penguin-series/

Finally, by the late 1960s Horwitz were heavily involved in producing ‘Adult’ books, usually under their Scripts imprint. One of these was Squat (1970) by David Rome (pseudonym for David Boutland). Promising “sexual adventure on other planets”, it is almost unreadable and, apart from the cover, is pretty nondescript.

So a very mixed collection finds. I have another larger pile which I am currently working through!