The Cover Girl Killer by Richard A. Lupoff

Lindsey, an insurance investigator, is trying to find 'the woman on the cover of Death in the Ditch' (a '50s paperback crime title), beneficiary of a millionaire's will. It's one of his Lindsey-Plum detective series. Probably the closest thing to the book you posit was written by my friend Richard Lupoff (alas, recently deceased) is The Cover Girl Killer, St. Thanks to Telos, and these titles, I'm now strongly tempted to write one. I'm not sure I've ever read a story about an artist who specialised in book covers. I find the discussion of his life interesting - and rather sad. He was a highly professional artist, and did what he was tasked to do very efficiently. Unfortunately.īut just as you shouldn't judge a book by its cover (though sometimes you can.), so one shouldn't judge Heade by the authors whose covers he designed. Titles like Hotsy-You'll Be Chilled, Slay-Ride for Cutie, and Death Wore a Petticoat speak for themselves. He is, however, perhaps most closely associated with the work of Hank Janson, which I have to say doesn't appeal to me in the slightest. He produced artwork for comic strips and jigsaw puzzles.

His covers adorned magazines, children's books, romances, and westerns. During the course of his career, he produced covers for many notable writers, ranging from John Steinbeck, Pamela Hansford Johnson, and Anne Frank to thriller writers such as David Hume and Erle Stanley Gardner.

I didn't know anything about Heade or his work before reading these books, though by a coincidence I see that one of his earliest covers was for a paperback original story by Francis Beeding, The Errant Under-Secretary, which was recommended to me recently. The central challenge in publishing books of this kind is to ensure that the quality of the illustrations is of a high standard. The two books are: The Art of Reginald Heade by Stephen James Walker, and The Art of Reginald Heade, volume 2, by Walker and Steve Chibnall.

The Cover Girl Killer by Richard A. Lupoff