I think pulp/crime/noir art is important and fascinating, and
tying good
examples of this to hardboiled genre books could only help
the endeavor.>>
Cover art has almost always been important to pulp and crime
writing. Just
look at the way Gold Medal unified its line in the
early-to-mid-1960s with
artists such as Robert McGinnis: Once you saw one of his
lovelies on a PB
cover, you had a pretty good idea of the type of book you'd
be buying --
Travis McGee, Matt Helm, Sam Durrell, et al.
Nowadays, you rarely see such across-the-board similarities
for all the
titles from a single publisher or imprint. Instead,
publishers will link
works from a single author with a similar graphics style.
(The move from
illustration to graphics is worthy of another discussion, I'd
say.) For
instance, the new Travis McGee reprints have a colorful
graphics style
running across the entire series. The bright color schemes
reflect
MacDonald's COLOR motif for the series' titles and the
frequent
tropical/Florida settings, but I don't necessarily think the
graphics
emphasize the fact that the novels are usually
crime/adventure stories.
However, if you take into account the covers for other novels
in the
"Southern Crime" sub-genre -- Shames, Hiaason, Willeford,
Leonard, etc. --
you'll see the bright Travis McGee graphics fit right in; in
this respect,
a reader who enjoyed one "Southern Crime" novel and is
looking for another
one will probably "recognize" the graphics style and pick up
a MacDonald
novel.
(A brief aside: Does anyone know if the publishers plan on
reprinting John
D.'s non-McGee hard-boiled stuff after they complete the
McGee run?)
(And why, for goodness sakes, are they running the SAME
introduction in
EVERY one of the McGee novels they're reprinting? Don't they
figure someone
will read more than ONE McGee story? We all know they're
addictive.)
One other point: I don't think C.J. Henderson's P.I. novels
were well
served by the cover graphics that Avon (?)/Berkley (?) used
when those came
out a few years ago. Apparently sales bear this out, since I
haven't seen a
new novel from this writer lately. Of course, I'm betting the
writer gets
blamed, not the art director. --Duane
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