I love book covers.
There are a number of places to take a look at the old pulps and a
number of blogs will put out a great gallery of cover art. Seems to me that once a year someone puts out
a poll on nominated mystery book covers.
And Rapsheet’s editor J. Kingston Pierce has another great
blog called Killer Covers you should
check out.
As a writer who has very little say about what my book covers
look like, I have a few I really dislike and a few that I really
appreciate. In my years with St.
Martin’s Press and Severn House, I’ve appreciated a number of covers, but two
really stand out. Unfortunately both are
out of print.
The first is from St. Martin’s Press and was a stand-alone. My editor there was the late Ruth Cavin, who responded to my request
to take a look at Janet Woolley as
an artist for the submitted mystery.
Ruth, after making me change the book title from The de Chirico Landscape to Eclipse
of the Heart, agreed to pursue my choice of artist for the cover. I had no additional input on the art, but I
was incredibly impressed with what the artist did. I think it holds up to this
day. She had to have read the book thoroughly to get the nuances she did. The book, which featured a gay protagonist,
didn’t get very far though through gay circles. The gay press ignored it
completely and my own hometown newspaper at the time, The Indianapolis Star, ran a positive review without ever mentioning
the main character was a gay. The
character’s sexual orientation figured significantly in the plot. Though I have made it a practice to never
talk to reviewers, not because I dislike them, but it might come across as
manipulative and my one-on-one communication skills need some sharpening. In
this case, I was curious enough to make an exception. I contacted the reviewer
and asked him why he hadn’t mentioned what I thought to be a key element of the
book. His response was that had he done
so, the story would never have seen print…and I suspect the reviewer might have
had to turn in his professional spectacles. He had been brave just choosing the
book to review. The Indianapolis Star
was notoriously conservative. 
The second cover that I am very fond of is from the
professionals at Severn House for a book in the Deets Shanahan series, Asphalt Moon. What I appreciated was the bold image of a
smoking shotgun, close up. It was not only a powerful image, the art director
manifested the very specific horror of the story. It was a simple but also
profound reflection of what was between the covers. Apparently another art director somewhere
found the image to be strong as well. Not too long ago, I came across another book, Blood Men, by Paul Cleave. And there was
my shotgun on his book cover. It was a
great cover as well, but the same damn shotgun, smoke and all. No harm
really. I liked that cover too.
Now, it would be great if I could do a blatant promotion of each
of these books. Both are, in retrospect,
among the ones I’m most proud of — and not just because of the covers. I feel
really good about the stories. Reviewers
were also very good to these two. But they are both out of print and were
published before the e-Book phenomenon. Then again, maybe something can be done about
that.
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