TRASHY TUESDAY: JAMES HADLEY CHASE FEMME FATALES

Over the course of his long career, James Hadley Chase (pseudonym of Rene Lodge Brabazon Raymond) wrote nearly ninety novels. They covered the spectrum of thriller writing from spy novels to private eyes to tough American gangster tales to a whole host of books about men falling for sexy women and getting in over their heads in some crime or another.

Chase’s books were published and republished in a number of styles but, not surprisingly, a lot of them featured delectable femme fatales. I have randomly picked out a dozen, or so, from my collection that range across the length of Chase’s career from the early painted covers to the 1960/70s photographic ones, including some nice John Pollack covers and a rare one from Australia.

A John Pollack cover (first paperback edition).

One of the later photographic style covers that graced this title – there were several!

Another Pollack cover.

Artist not credited.

Artist uncredited. Love the cigarette holder – quite a common trope on 1950s covers.

The Double Shuffle was released in 1963 by Horwitz, eleven years after its original release in the United Kingdom and features an eye-catching cover by an unidentified artist. Nice colours and a classic ‘strategically placed object’, add to the cover’s appeal.

Panther used some quirky interesting photographic covers in the late 1960s to sell Chase’s books (see The Things Men Do above), but they soon reverted to more commercial, generic covers involving scantily clad women (below).

For more on the Panther covers see: https://murdermayhemandlongdogs.com/trashy-tuesday-james-hadley-chase-the-panther-covers/

The Corgi covers were very similar:

In the 1970s Corgi adopted a stylistically similar range of covers for the Chase books, all of which involved Chase’s name in a bright, large font and the title of the book in a much smaller black font under it. Under the title there was usually a woman lying in repose or occasionally standing up.

These covers gave no sense of what the book was above and were replaced by Corgi in the early 1980s with even raunchier generic covers (below).

For more the James Hadley Chase covers see here: https://murdermayhemandlongdogs.com/trashy-tuesday-models-necklaces-and-australian-artwork-a-james-hadley-chase-book-haul/