• She criticized his taste in statuary once too often!
• She criticized his Brylcrem obsession once too often!
• "Hold still, darling, while I smother you in THE HOLLOW of my neck"
• Man they are really doing battle for "worst hair."
• Huh. It doesn't look like he "inspires dangerous passion" so much as he "lavishes unwanted attention on women such that they are inspired to drive knitting needles into his neck."
• What are those things in her hand, anyway? I honestly have no guess. Part knitting needles part riding crop part busted umbrella. Whatever it is, I assume she's about to plant it right in his cherubic face.

• Most accusations "for all to hear" are not "whispered," in my admittedly limited experience of guys dying near swimming pools.
• This is a pretty weak teaser. Also, a truly unnecessary explanation of what Hercule Poirot is going to do. "Oh, is he going to ask questions and gain insight into the character of suspects!? How novel!"
• I'm no legal scholar, but I'm pretty sure that a detective cannot "convict the guilty one."

"Oh, Gudgeon," said Lady Angkatell, "about those eggs. I meant to write the date in pencil on them as usual. Will you ask Mrs. Medway to see to it?"

    "Oh, yes! Edward's a perfect angel." She hesitated. "Not, perhaps, very much go to him. Just a little—well, I'd call it strait-laced. Lot of Puritan ancestry and all that. But he's a dear," she added hastily.

• Her name is Gay? Bit on the nose, don't you think? I mean ... whither subtlety?
• It's like she's eating his face with her neck. Some kind of weird reverse vampire.
• "Your head feels so good, Steve!" "Mmmfrphywtuh"
• There's something oddly, bizarrely, unexpectedly charming about the pink stripes on the pillow.
• I approvingly acknowledge the hint (the barest hint) of garter hook.
• I love the cover copy's anguished "WHY?" "Why oh why won't she give up this endless orgy of the flesh and join the endless orgy of the mind!?"

• Ransom note font, wtf?
• OMG there really is a "Steve" in this thing. Nailed it!
• "Maybe it was Tom who turned Gay from men." So ... he turned Gay ... gay? Seriously, the protagonist's name is not helping you, Daoma.
• I'm not sure "tete-a-tetes" means what you think it does, Daoma. Unless ... "tete" ("head") is a euphemism for some other body parts that they're putting ... together ...
• Holy shit, plot twist! Peter covets Jonathan!? Who the fuck is Jonathan? You can't just drop Peter's queerness *and* a new character into the very last sentence. I don't even care about Gay anymore. I need to know about Peter and Jonathan! I hope they're happy (but since they're gay in a 1950s paperback, safe bet is that they are probably not, in fact, happy).

• Gee, your nose smells terrific!
• "Kissing's when I talk into your nose, right?"
• She's gonna have to open her eyes if she ever wants their faces to line up properly
• It looks like it's raining exclusively in her bed and on his shirt, with some kind of green aurora borealis in the background
• I keep quickly glancing at the cover copy and seeing the phrase "mouth-open season," which, given the picture, seems right

• Fair game! It's a pun! Because they are pretty ("fair") and you hunt them. Or else they are a game you play at a carnival booth, like the ring toss. He does seem to be trying to bend her body into some kind of shape, perhaps in order to win a giant stuffed animal. "I thought you liked me, Brad. What about that embrace at the carnival booth?" "I was just trying to bend you into a knot so I could win that panda!"
• I am shocked, shocked, I say, to find that this Orrie Hitt book doesn't seem to have much of a plot. He's going deer-hunting. But he wants sex and money. But he'll settle for sex. Hitt me!
• "A trio of torrid temptresses!" Somewhere, there's a dyad of dumpy dames going "Hey, what about us!?"

• Excellent title design motif. Really evokes an affair by evoking a hotel room of a bygone era (i.e. before key cards). But if I were Mary Orr, I'd be mad that they did not have a similarly eye-popping design for My Damned Name. I keep looking at this cover like [squinting] "who the hell wrote this?" They really bury her name in an avalanche of white text.
• Barye Phillips has not generally been among my favorite cover artists (there's something slightly sloppy / sketchy / incomplete / messy about his work, esp. for Gold Medal), but I kinda like this one. Their embrace—her ecstasy in particular—is really ... radiating. "When they came together ... it was nuclear!" (it's 1962, after all, so I thought a little Cuban Missile Crisis energy was in order)
• I did not know All About Eve was based on a book. Once again, the popularizers and adapters get the title right. Last time (Paperback 1120), it was the paperback changing the hardcover original title from The Long Chance to Long Shot (so much better), and here we see the movie-makers made the wise decision to ditch The Wisdom of Eve in favor of the much snappier title. Would that movie be the classic it is if it were titled The Wisdom of Eve?Honestly, I doubt it.

• Wow, the key is much more menacing back here. Bigger, more skull-like, and with prominent jagged teeth. Perhaps this is a sign that the affair between ... what's her name and ... Miguel? Really? ... anyway, perhaps the key is a sign that the affair spells Danger!
• I like how she talks like a casting agent: "I've got this role that you might be perfect for..."
• Miguel: Filler of Voids
• It's kind of funny to describe your prospective affair as "The One." Like, wasn't your husband supposed to be "The One?"

• They shoulda called this "Gondola So Wide." Gondola so wide it fills the frame and reduces the lovely languishing lady to the size of a postage stamp. More bored expatriates in party dresses, fewer expanses of dull blue-gray, please!
• The composition is actually very nice, it's just that I don't buy these books for their lovely motel-room-quality pictures of exotic locales. I buy them for the sexy people acting strangely. For the hair, for the shoes. For the fashion. For the depravity. For the world-weary ennui of the mid-century sophisticate. This tepid gondola scene gives me (almost) none of this.
• To his credit, the artist (Tom Miller! Credited!) does a good job of making the couple pop. That damn pink dress against the somehow even pinker cushion? Magnificent. Also magnificent: her half-interest in Jake Trustfund there. Jake: "I love you, darling!" Her: "Mmm, yes. I know. Let's practice being quiet."

• This ... this just tints the least interesting part of the front cover pink!? Boo! Boo to this back cover designer, I say.
• Adjectives must come in pairs! "Blazing sunny!" "warm and human!" "hot, passionate!" "scathing, cynical!" Can't believe they left "amazing" in there unattended.
• Lewis had been accused of being "Red" after the publication of It Can't Happen Here, a novel from the mid-'30s that imagined what American fascism would look like. The book was ... prescient. It concerned "a demagogue [Windrip] who is elected President of the United States, after fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and "traditional" values. After his election, Windrip takes complete control of the government via self-coup and imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force" (wikipedia). Sound familiar? No? OK.

The five of them, plus the inescapable Marchesa Valdarno, sat prim about the refectory table of Irish oak, eating their molds of rice with duck livers served on English plates with views of Kent, while Belfont, with what he felt to be gentlemanly but learned humor, pumped Lundsgard, who answered with good-hearted simplicity.

This is very precise, poetic writing. And yet I can't help but wish there were more about "the inescapable Marchesa Valdarno." Flipping through the book, I find that the Marchesa "suavely jeered not only at America but at Parisian drunkards, English watering-places, old Roman society, and the Sadie Lurcher Riviera set [!!!?], of which Valdarno herself was a member." I'd sit next to her at the refectory table of Irish oak any day.

• Suburban kink is a sizable sleaze paperback niche. Kinsey got everyone interested in the actual sex practices of ordinary people, and nothing shouts "ordinary" quite so strongly as the suburbs. Writers had fun imagining that "upstanding citizens," cultural conformists, and scolding moralists were actually horny hypocrites. And their kids, too!
• Her hair is doing very weird and unnatural things. Either that or she fell on a squirrel.
• "Oh Steve, this dead squirrel makes a terrible pillow. I feel sick. Rub my tummy."
• Seems like a Scandal, Sin and Sex curriculum would involve a lot of redundancy. I'd prefer some outdoor activities and maybe even some philosophy: Sin, Sun and Sartre! (if that's not the tagline of some philosophy conference somewhere, then why even be a philosopher?)
• Aside from her bralessness and semi-brazen side-boob, this cover is pretty tame. At first I thought there was some kind of bacchanalia going on in the background, but they're just dancing and roasting marshmallows, I think.

• Does this even qualify as "advice?" And is that someone's idea of a "faculty" pun? 
• Hey, Frank Miller is in this? Exciting to get insight into his life pre-Dark Knight Returns.
• "A new teaching position"—is that also a pun!? 
• "Using women as weapons"—so, like battering rams?
• OK, I'm just gonna assume the whole last paragraph is meant to be SHOUTED.
• There is a catastrophic em dash failure in the last line here. This is the kind of "Scandal" that would bother me as a parent. "Yeah, yeah, the teens are having sex, whatever. Let's talk punctuation."

• It's not a great cover, and I paid too much (by my cheap standards), but I can't help it, I gotta have these early (pre-Vintage takeover) Black Lizards. They feel like an origin story—my hardboiled origin story, the origin of the Hardboiled Revival. And Jim Thompson was definitely my gateway hardboiled author. I don't think I've read this one, though.
• This looks like the poster for a bad late-'80s straight-to-VHS erotic thriller
• That bullet looks like lipstick. Is it lipstick? Roll-on deodorant? It's giving bullet, but out of context and with no other object for scale, it just looks weird.

• Bah, buncha quotes. Treating this book like it's legitimate literature, there's your first mistake. I don't need high-minded blurbs, I need lurid, turgid cover copy, and possibly more bad art.
• No idea what Cassill means here. Maybe he's talking about subject matter. I know he's not talking about quality. Or better not be.
• Too many ellipses in that Village Voice review. Suspicious, especially since it's merely descriptive and not particularly evaluative. Makes you wonder what they left out.

• My wife got me this as a present from the local library book sale. Did not expect to reboot this blog with Ancient Chest-Shaving Rituals but you get what you get.
• "Now sweetheart, you know that's not a safe way to eat frosting, we've talked about this..." "DON'T FENCE ME IN, HAL!"
• Perry Mason Solves ... The Case of the Shirtless Dermatologist! "I don't like the look of this mole on your cheek, Sally. And your upper thigh feels suspicious, too. I'm gonna have to operate. Be a good girl and give me back my scalpel."
• Perry Mason Solves ... The Case of the Man with the Blurry Feet! (spoiler alert: his feet were hideous so the publishers blurred them)

• My brain reading this back cover: "blah blah blah SUBURBAN SPANKING!? Awesome!"
• "Morley Eden said," is literature. It is art. It is a poem, the damnedest poem you ever heard.
• "Snaky gowns that cling like the skin on a sausage" is the kind of thing they send you back to Simile School for. "You're trying to convey 'sexy,' right? "Sexy, yeah, sexy." "And 'snaky,' that's OK, that kinda gets you there." "Yeah, gets me there, gets me there..." "But 'skin on a sausage'..." "Yeah?" "Well it's..." "Hot!?" "No, I don't think—" "Wait, wait. Let me explain. See, the chicks are the sausage, which is delicious, right, and..."

• "My left pinkie? Yeah, I broke that in a horrible bowling accident when I was a kid. Don't worry about it. Here, look at my right hand instead? Nice, right?"
• "Her? Nah, don't mind her, she's just the, uh, cleaning lady. Yeah, she likes to sleep on her smoke break. Does both at once. Sleep and smokes. Saves time."
• The blonde is the very definition of GGA (Great Girl Art), but it's like the painter was really more interested in directing your attention elsewhere—to the corny, chipper dude, yes, but most assuredly to the enigmatically sleep-smoking lady. Frankly, she is the only one whose story I care to know.

• This book hit me ... and it felt like a kiss.
• Love the visual [rrrrriiiiiipppp] 
• "Simmy knew she'd had a tough break. First of all, she was named Simmy. Strike one ..."
• "Downright swell" and "heel"—the two masculinities

• I know it's a weird place to start, but her top is *amazing*. Zebra stampede!
• The perfect horizontal line from the top her head to the tip ofer her elbow, also amazing.
• I know "Making love to women is his job" sounds saucy, but it's 1948 so ... not so much (it just means he's a heartthrob movie star, sorry to disappoint).
• Dude is a dead ringer for Rock Hudson. I mean, if you ignore the rubberized hair piece, what the hell...
• I wonder how long they had to hold this pose. So much close breathing. Plus, his (giant!) hand looks like it's really working.
• The couch / wall color combo is particularly unappetizing.

• Dang, his lips are really going to town, maybe this will be hotter than I thought
• Rex Brandon, I buy. Starr Thayle, I buy less.
• Cover copy writers still using clunky phrases like "had been accorded," that's how you know you're still in the '40s. Although "crashing climax" and "flaming tale" (!!) show promise.
• Halleck? That's a fish, not a name.

All afternoon they had been taking and retaking a couple of scenes on the yacht. Rex couldn't get them to Stephen's satisfaction. Almost as though Stephen derived a grim satisfaction in making the great Rex Brandon go over and over a certain take.

• Look, Doris Day's hair stylists did her no favors for a good chunk of the '60s but she is never not adorable and frankly that outfit is straight-up hot. I mean, your tastes may not run to the prim and purple, but that's your problem.
• James Garner, also the dreamiest, but this cover isn't really designed to showcase that.
• I hate how '60s paperback covers tend to emphasize text and often drive the art right off the page, but this cover has a nice, whimsical font, and frankly the artist gets a lot out of small details (DD's smile, her contemplative hand gesture, her dangly right shoe...)
• I love this idea that in the '60s, it was every guy's dream to have not one but two wives. "What a setup!" This runs contrary to most wife-related comedy I've heard over the years. Something about taking wives... please.

• See, text. It's awful.
• This is basically the plot of My Favorite Wife (Grant/Dunne, 1940). Since that is one of my favorite movies of all time, and since I have a crush on both of the actors on the cover of this book, I'm willing to give this movie a shot.
• See, TERPNING, I wasn't kidding. That's the cover artist's name. Not sure how that's a real name, but ... there it is! As I understand it, TERP is short for "terrapin," a kind of turtle. I would see a turtle-horror film called "The Terpning"!

"I was very excited by the island vegetation. I'm afraid I spent so much time on research that I was not very good company for your wife."