The DA Breaks An Egg by Erle Stanley Gardner (Total, 1973, originally published 1956)

More pop art awesomeness here, with a real stunning title/illustration/design combo, serving to make a creaky old Erle Stanley Gardner mystery look a damn sight groovier than I assume it to actually be.

For the sake of metaphoric continuity, poetic justice etc, I hope the book ends with the DA enjoying a nice omelette… in the prison canteen.

Interestingly, this volume contains almost no publication info whatsoever, aside from a simple copyright and year of printing, and correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that “Total Special Edition” thing on the front the logo of the oil company Total? A brief google search fails to shed any light on what the hell they were up to repackaging old crime books in the early ‘70s. There's no price on the back either, so I'm guessing it might have been a giveaway as part a promotion or something..? Who knows.


Beyond the fact that it’s a really cool and distinctive piece of artwork, this cover illustration particularly leapt out at me because I’ve seen it before: on the front of the British psychedelic pop compilation Voyage Through The Sugarcube, a record I’ve been vaguely looking for on vinyl for ages simply because I like the cover art so much.


As you can see, the people behind the LP have retouched it all slightly (or at least, drawn over the lines in Microsoft Paint or something), and have given the girl a bit more of a right hand.

It’s strange isn’t it, that seeing this image on the front of a crime book, we instantly assume GIRL = DEAD, whereas looking at the exact same picture on the front of an album, I’ve always seen her as dancing, or enjoying some kind of music-inspired freak-out. I thought at first that they'd redrawn the facial features on the record cover to aid that impression, but on closer inspection they're pretty much identical.

It’s a brilliant bit of pop-art imagery either way, and given the total lack of info on the book and the grey-market nature of the LP, I guess we can take it as being pretty much public domain, so please, spread it around!