Pan’s People: The Case of the Velvet Claws by Erle Stanley Gardner (1960)

 

Finishing off our recent celebration of Pan’s late ‘50s / early ‘60s cover artwork, here’s another absolute banger from Sam ‘Peff’ Peffer.

I don’t have much else to say, as my interest in the work of Erle Stanley Gardner extends precisely as far as the cool cover design which sometimes graces his books [see previous examples: 1, 2, 3], so instead let’s just say: wow, look at that dissolving big city skyline and the faceless guy in the shadows… no doubt knocked out under a tight deadline in a matter of minutes, this is pulp craftsmanship at its finest.

Pan’s People: Moment of Danger by Donald MacKenzie (1959)

After all the excitement of October, I’m going to try to keep this blog afloat by turning to some scans of recent additions to my paperback collection - which is something I’ve not got around to for a while, so there’s plenty of stuff to work through; not least, plenty of newly acquired Pans.

As I’ve probably remarked before in these pages, Pan’s ‘50s-‘60s crime paperbacks remain such a ubiquitous and cheap presence on the second hand market here in the UK that it often feels as if I pick up a new one every time I leave the house. But, their artwork is so consistently beautiful that each one I pick up still feels like both a bargain and a treasured addition to my shelves… and this characteristically evocative number from our old friend Sam ‘Peff’ Peffer is a case in point.

As the back cover here makes abundantly clear, ‘Moment of Danger’ was adapted for the screen in 1959. Shot in Jess Franco’s future stomping ground of Malaga in Andalucía, the film was directed by Hungarian-born Hollywood exile Laslo Benedek, best known for ‘The Wild One’ (1953) and ‘Death of a Salesman’ (1951). 

Meanwhile, as Pan’s ever-busy copy editors also manage to inform us via the yellow-backed paragraph on the bottom right, author Donald MacKenzie also sounds like an interesting cat - but apparently not sufficiently so as to merit his own Wikipedia page, whilst google searches are complicated by the existence of multiple authors and academics of the same name.

From what I can gather beyond the fascinating tit-bits concerning MacKenzie’s history of incarceration provided here, he was born in 1908, and also penned the source novel for the Seth Holt-directed 1958 thriller ‘Nowhere to Go’, in addition to a series of sixteen ‘John Raven Mysteries’, published between 1976 and 1994 (the year of his death), amongst other things.

A capsule biography extracted from the website of publishing conglomerate Hachette UK (who currently offer MacKenzie’s entire catalogue for sale as e-books) repeats the quotes used by Pan on the back cover to ‘Moment of Danger’, but adds various other info, as follows:

Donald MacKenzie (1908-1994) was born in Ontario, Canada, and educated in England, Canada and Switzerland. For twenty-five years MacKenzie lived by crime in many countries. ‘I went to jail,’ he wrote, ‘if not with depressing regularity, too often for my liking.’ His last sentences were five years in the United States and three years in England, running consecutively. He began writing and selling stories when in American jail. ‘I try to do exactly as I like as often as possible and I don’t think I’m either psychopathic, a wayward boy, a problem of our time, a charming rogue. Or ever was.’ He had a wife, Estrela, and a daughter, and they divided their time between England, Portugal, Spain and Austria.

So there ya go.

Pan’s People: Gideon’s Month by J.J. Marric (1960)

I’m afraid I’ll be heading off on holiday for a while through May and June (no prizes for guessing where). As such, I’ll be leaving you with a few pre-scheduled posts, offering up some recent additions to the various bits of my paperback collection I’ve been featuring here over the past few years. And, it seems weirdly appropriate that we should kick things off with a book seemingly set in London during a May heat-wave.

Like many of the British crime books published by Pan (see: The Little White God), there’s a heavy ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ feel to this one, although the sight of a lady in her night-gown being threatened by a knife-wielding ne’erdowell at least hints at the more lurid content that crime stories and thrillers were routinely dishing out by the dawn of the 1960s. Lovely artwork as always from BITR hero Sam ‘Peff’ Peffer.

J.J. Marric was of course a pseudonym for the impossibly prolific John Creasey – we covered another entry in his long-running Gideon series here a few years back.

Pan’s People: Experience With Evil by John Ross Macdonald (1958)

Over the past year or so, I’ve really been getting into the work of Ross Macdonald (he soon dropped the ‘John’, for whatever reason).

Coming on as if Raymond Chandler had knocked the ‘frustrated-literary-novelist’ bit on the head and settled into a routine of knocking out two hard-boiled thrillers per year, the Macdonald books I’ve read thus far have all been absolutely first rate, mixing up the requisite laconic humour and restless plotting with consistently sublime prose and an acute sensitivity for the tragic quirks of human nature, all baked in an atmosphere of creeping malaise and cynicism that is pure mid-century California noir.

If you’re into crime fiction and yet to discover Macdonald, doing so is an experience I can highly recommend.

‘Experience With Evil’ originally appeared in 1953 under the delightful title ‘Meet Me At The Morgue’, and though it doesn’t feature Macdonald’s signature character Lew Archer, I’m nonetheless confident that Pan’s blurb-ists weren't lying when they deemed it “a kidnap mystery for the connoisseur”.

The cover – by our old pal Sam “Peff” Peffer – is of an equally fine calibre (no firearms pun intended), and in fact, finding this book a few months back represented a rare quadruple win for my paperback collection: a great writer, great art, great condition, and a great price (£2). Satisfying!

Pan People.

Amid all those artful Penguins, we haven’t had many examples of the more ‘old school’ approach to paperback crime covers on here for a while, so, here’s a cheery trio of UK Pan editions I just picked off the top of the book-heap, all featuring artwork from the ubiquitous Sam “Peff” Peffer - definitely one of the most consistent and classy British pulp cover artists I’m aware of.

‘Dames Don’t Care’ was actually a birthday present a few years back from some friends I’ve sadly lost touch with since (sorry about that guys, if you’re reading). I skim-read it at the time and found it a hell of a lot of fun as I recall – an example of Peter Cheyney pushing the ultra-hard boiled, cod-American thug vernacular style of his Lemmy Caution books to the point of absolute oblivion. Needless to say, none of the raging, desperate white trash characters featured in the book look anything like the more well-appointed couple seen on the front of this edition, leading me to suspect that the illustration was either just a generic, one-size-fits-all crime cover, or else a spare painting left over from some other assignment, slapped on here by a cost-conscious editor on a deadline.

Conversely, the Pan edition of ‘Lady in the Morgue’ must count as a bit of a minor brit-pulp classic, not only for the macabre and unusual cover painting, but for the frenzied back cover blurb (“..cuts grim mortuary capers over a volcano of violence..”), and even the press quotes are good too. Maybe not a paperback that’ll blow your mind on first glance, but in terms of the wonderful and peculiar stuff that keeps me coming back to these books, it’s got the complete package for sure.

Not much to say about about ‘The Endless Colonnade’, except 1. Hitchcocksploitation!, and 2. Ouch, quite a burn on John Buchan from the Evening News.

A nice interview with ‘Peff’ himself, alongside fellow cover artist Pat Owen, can be found here. Plenty of interesting recollections about life in the cover art business, but the thing that really knocked me out was the revelation that, for a lot of these covers, the publisher actually paid for reference photographs to be taken in advance, arranged on the artist’s instructions complete with models and costumes, and THEN paid the artist to paint the cover based on the photos! Truly, the mind boggles.

Oh, and by the way, apologies again for the continuing lapse in regular content on this blog. Just to keep you updated, I’m slowly getting back to some blog writing done after an unavoidable lay off, and, though I still have a pretty daunting workload to get through in other areas of life, I hope to be back in business with some fresh movie reviews by about this time next week, fingers crossed. Thanks again for your patience.

‘Lady in The Morgue’ dates from 1959 (originally published 1937), ‘Dames Don’t Care’ is 1960 (originally published 1937), and ‘The Endless Colonnade’ is 1959 (published for the first time).