TRASHY TUESDAY: RARITIES, ODDITIES and an AUSTRALIAN CARTER BROWN COVER
I have collected over recent weeks a number of interesting older covers from small and obscure publishers. I have also added to my collection two different Horwitz versions of a Carter Brown novel that had its title changed for the American market.
Domino Mysteries were a short-lived series of digest sized mysteries produced by Duchess Printing and Publishing in Canada during the mid-1940s. Duchess primarily produced comics, but also briefly branched out into digest novels, mainly reprinting stories from American and British publishers.
Arthur Gask, an Adelaide dentist, was one of the first authors of Australia-based mysteries. Gentlemen Of Crime, (Domino Mysteries, 1945), was originally published in 1932 and was one of the books in his long running series about Sydney detective Gilbert Larose. Although he was quite well known at the time, H. G. Wells was a fan of his books, Gask has virtually faded from view nowadays.
Gentlemen Of Crime features a collection of the world’s best detectives, including Larose who is on a sojourn from the “Antipodes”, who have been hired to a solve an elaborate plot against a millionaire. The story is fancible, but the cover with its spiderweb motif is eye catching, although a bit too busy, and it nicely reflects the intricacy of the plot.
Also from the mid-1940s is The Frightened Man, (Handi-Book Mysteries, 1944), by Dana Chambers (pseudonym of Albert Leffingwell). It is a medium boiled American crime tale about a plot to a steal a significant inheritance. The cover is simple, but quite effective with the yellow on red colour scheme.
Also from Handi-Book is The Gloved Hand, (1947). Apparently, an original novel written for the Handi-Book Mystery series, it seems to be a standard American mystery about balckmail and murder. Leigh Bryson is a pseudonym used by Nancy Rutledge.
The cover is on the bland side, but the blackening of the fingertips is a nice touch.
Originally published in 1945 by Dutton, this Novel Selections edition of Death Visits The Apple Hole (odd title) is an “abridgement of the original to speed the action”.
The book is part of a series that A. B. Cunningham, an English professor, wrote about Sheriff Jess Roden of rural Deer Lick, Kentucky.
Point Of Return (1954) by Merlin L. Neff is an American inspirational religious novel published by Pacific Press Publishing Association, as part of their Stories That Win series.
The stagey cover is by portrait artist Joseph Maniscalco, who seems to have done a number of covers for religious books.
The Terror Catches Up, (The Kaner Publishing Co., 1946), by Hyman (H) Kaner features the most striking cover of this batch of books, which is not surprising as it was done by renowned British illustrator H. W. Perl (Hyman Woolf Perlzweig). Perl was a prolific cover illustrator and artist, and his artwork adorned some of the classic British pulp paperbacks of the period. Usually known for his pictures of glamourous women and femme fatales, the cover for The Terror Catches Up is more dramatic and conveys a real sense of terror and anger.
The Terror Catches Up is a small, stapled digest, 64 pages, featuring five short stories. It is self published by Kaner, who began to write and publish his own stories in the mid 1940s. He wrote widely, but his books mainly seem to have been in the crime, mystery and science fiction areas. The number of books that he wrote and published is unclear, but he appears to have used Perl to illustrate a few of them.
Carter Brown’s Murder In The Harem Club (Horwitz) was first published in Australia in 1962. It was one of the books in Brown’s popular Rick Holman series. Featuring a murder in a Hugh Hefner-styled club, it was a standard, fast-paced Carter Brown story.
The cover artist is not identified, but the illustration is fairly typical of the early 1960s Carter Brown covers that Horwitz did, with a semi naked girl looking back over her shoulder at the reader.
Interestingly, when Murder In The Harem Club was released in America it was re-titled Murder In The Key Club. I am not sure why the title change occurred.
The below cover is from the second release of the book in 1963 as part of Horwitz’s International Edition (IE) series. The cover reinforces the harem theme of the title, although at first glance it looks as though the woman has a beard.
An interesting collection of more obscure covers, I hope that you like them.