Here's the second helping of book covers from the paperback collection up at Bear Island:

In The Last Analysis

My sense is that the phrase "In the final analysis" is more common, but whatever. This is some really high-concept stuff with the Dali-like levitation above a fainting couch that is itself levitating in some dreamscape with oddly colored clouds and no spacial cues beyond a strangely inaccurate shadow. Adding to the weirdness is the giant knife that not only cuts through floating woman and the floating couch, but also the shadown itself. Solid 70s stuff.

Murder as a Fine Art

Little Red Riding Hood finds someone hanging in grandmother's house? I don't know, but it's hard to argue with a cape as an accessory and there's the composition with the dame framed by the window behind her as if she were herself a piece of fine art. This was just one in the series, "Death in the Studio."

Maigret at the Crossroads

I love this cover because it so evokes an era, with the gendarme, clearly concerned that he perform competently, motioning someone to stop and the white strip through the green tint.

Perry Mason Solves the Case of the Haunted Husband

Zeitgeist, circa 1965. Vixen wife in a revealing-for-the-time dress plays the temptress for the, I'm guessing, ghost of her husband who is holding the ghost of a martini and seems to be either pulling away from her or about to douse her. This is picky, I realize, but from the cover it seems like it is the wife who is haunted by her husband's ghost, although that is not alitterative.

Originally posted on July 29, 2010