Natalie posted last week about the ‘new’ Dorothy Sayers novel she just read. (We are both serious Sayers fans.) I commented there and mentioned my enjoyment of tacky covers on older editions of crime novels. Why not share a few favourites with you?
Still, just to start with the non-tacky: a classic green-and-white Penguin (this by Gladys Mitchell, edition of 1961, originally published 1942). OK, they have tried to spice it up a bit. “Death and disappearance in a women’s college”!
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This is a bit of splendid 1970s-tacky (edn 1978; pub 1976). I don’t know what impression they were trying to give, but it’s just way off the mark. (Dunnett got quite a few howlers from her publishers in her time. Check out the German versions of the ‘Dolly’ series. Sooo bad. I want one. And I don’t read German.)
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But this edition of Gaudy Night (edn 1963; pub 1935) is just an all-time favourite. (I’ve just noticed that my copy of Strong Poison must be from the same set. It’s bad, but not that bad. Wonder what the rest are like?)
Oh, they don’t make ‘em like that any more.
(Unless, of course, parody is the name of the game.)
12 comments on “Criminal covers?”
Thanks for reminding me. I adored Sayers when I was in high school, so romantic, so sad. So exotic! I’ll try again though I fear nothing could live up to my foggy memories.
Sharon, I thought you might want to know that where your images should be, I just see a little graphic that says “HOTLINKING FORBIDDEN.” So, alas, no Sayers covers…
I’ve known someone to have this trouble before, and we had a discussion about it which I half understood (ignore the part where it degenerates into me and my sis insulting each other). Have you ever had this problem before, NK? I assume that you mean that all the images on the blog are blocked? Have you changed anything about your browser settings (or your ISP or anything else) lately?
Urrgh.
Great, and now I’m having trouble commenting on my own blog. Because there were 2 links in the comment? Let’s see if it lets me through this time. Spaminator, behave.
It has happened once or twice before and I was too lazy to say anything about it. I haven’t changed anything for a while – I’m running Mac OS X (2. something), using Firefox to access. I have to confess that I didn’t understand most of the conversation about why this was happening…
The gravatars show up fine, as do the images at the head of the page. Don’t know if that helps or not…
Total nonsequitur, but how are you enjoying The Witch in History? I love that book (although trying to teach it to undergrads didn’t work especially well).
Gravatars come from an external source, so they probably wouldn’t be affected. You’re getting the image at the top of the page OK though? That’s really strange… well I wonder. That gives me an idea.
I have fiddled. I don’t suppose things are any better now by any chance?
I have to confess that I haven’t *opened* The Witch in History yet… I’ve been meaning to read it for ages and finally picked up a copy. ‘Current’ reading in the sidebar involves a very loose definition of the word, including things I haven’t got round to taking off, things I hope to read soon, things I should be reading now but, hey, it’s the weekend and I picked up that crime novel instead…
Duran Duran’s version of White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)?
Anything by Oasis?
Any road up, there’s a cracking second-hand bookshop in Southport that has the staircase lined with old Mickey Spillaine pulp-fiction style covers. Full of foxy chicks, stilleto heels, switchblades and smoking guns.
Thay say young lads aren’t reading enough. Hmmm… I am the weaver.
Okay, I do see the book covers now! Although I don’t see the onion soup pics. FWIW…
(Well, when you do get to The Witch in History, it’s really good…
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Great.
I’ll explain what I did and then maybe someone will be able to tell me why it makes a difference. On this post, I changed the address for the image file from an absolute path to a relative path. I haven’t done it to the onion soup post yet (but will any minute now).
That is, previously the IMG SRC tag was followed by the full URL http://www.earlymodernweb.org.uk/wpimages/*filename* and now it’s followed by /./wpimages/*filename*. (This has quite a few advantages, but I’d been doing it the long way because I was having some trouble working out where to put the dots and slashes…)
You could see the top image because I’d already done it the proper way in the stylesheet (that one was easy because the image file is in the same folder). That was the key bit of information that helped me to do my Miss Marple impersonation.
Wow, what a wildly inappropriate Gaudy Night cover! Mine is from a similar era, but has a chessboard with broken chessmen, a broken wineglass spilling red wine, and a threatening note with a knife through it. But at least the chessmen suggest an intellectual setting.
Thought you’d be suitably shocked. If it weren’t so great/terrible, I’d have replaced it long ago. The quality of the book is just dreadful, and it’s falling apart. I wonder what the current editions look like…
I remember my high school English teacher had a pulp fiction novel on the bookshelf in her classroom with the title: “Puppet on a Chain.” You can probably put together the cover image in your head with a fair degree of accuracy.
Never read the book, but my friends and I always said it would make a great name for a band. If there are any aspiring musicians reading this, I hereby stake claim to this idea and demand royalties if you use it.
Alastair Maclean, surely? And not one of his early, good, ones, either.
Wasn’t there a Black Sabbath track called ‘Puppet on a chain’? One of their early, good, ones.