• Very late for my collection. I own it because a. it has a fully painted cover (in an era when these were giving way to the Tyranny of Text—branding/author's name inflation); and b. it's by Frank Gruber, writing here at the tail end of a loooooong career that began in the pulps (his "Pulp Jungle"—a memoir of his early writing career, is very much worth reading).
• That said, I don't love this painting, or, more specifically, this color scheme. It definitely conveys "oppressively hot and sandy," but I just end up wishing I had clearer views of all the interesting characters. Dude in the fez wants his time in the spotlight!
• World's tiniest minarets, stage left.
• Apparently this guy's gun holds hand lotion: "Damn dry Egyptian weather ... wreaks havoc on my soft skin."

• "Amazonian lesbian!" Top that. You can't. Game over.
• VENGEANCE! My penchant for tales of vengeance probably also had something to do with my buying this book.
• I call this painting "Someone Really Doesn't Like Brown Mustard."
• Violence should not come in "potpourri" form. Really hard to take seriously.
• "Fills the cauldron of suspense ... decants the wine of mystery ... warms the tea kettle of perversion ... etc.!"

It was in Ahmed Fosse's power to reveal that fame to Charles Holterman, to dangle the possibility of it before Holterman, and then ... to destroy it, just before he killed Holterman.

• "Hey, nice uraeus" (try saying that to the next pretty lady you see — see where it gets you)
• For a very early paperback, this one is unusually realistic (and sexy) in its depiction of the female form. You don't start seeing real GGA (Good/Great Girl Art) until the late '40s. In the early years of mass market paperbacks, the cover art tends to be more abstract, or more in the vein of magazine illustration. Paperbacks were still concerned with aligning themselves with good (i.e. edifying, or at least inoffensive) books. The selling power of the Lurid had not yet impressed itself on the paperback sellers of America. It didn't take long.
• Looks like that soft shoe guy is getting zapped by the laser goggles of some space monster.

• Shakespeare Head Say: Reading is GOOD for you.
• Wartime book. Wartime message. 

She felt then that he, Ward, was her husband, and that Philip, weak and puny on the bed in the next room, was their child, whom they had watched over and tended together.