The copy editor inside me

I'm about halfway through The Killer Inside Me, and I can now state with some confidence that Pop. 1280 is Jim Thompson's best book.

There's nothing wrong with Killer's narrator/protagonist, the notorious Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford, or the depravity and calculating intelligence that lie beneath his boring exterior—nothing, that is, except that he's no Nick Corey, the less-celebrated but greater protagonist of Pop. 1280.

I haven't finished reading The Killer Inside Me yet. But I do have a few thoughts:

1) Is the horrifying beating scene in the 2010 movie version of Killer too much? The very existence of the controversy may answer the question. The corresponding scene in the book is, indeed, horrifying, but it is nowhere near as graphic or as central to the novel as the discussion and promotion surrounding the scene are to the movie.

In Thompson's world, deadpan humor, intense self-examination on the protagonist's part, and criticism of all manner of social hypocrisy are more central to the story than sex is. The Killer Inside Me is the study of a psychotic man. It's not a sex book, despite its sexual frankness and gleeful profanity. All it takes is comparison of the three editions of the novel shown at the top of this post with the cover of a movie tie-in edition (left) and, especially, with a poster from the movie itself (right) to illustrate that the filmmakers, producers, and promoters had a vision different from Thompson's.

2) Back in January 2012, I jocosely pointed out a grammatical error in a Cole Porter song. "One of those bells that now and then rings," I wrote, should be "One of those bells that now and then ring." (Porter, of course, writing to the dictates of rhyme and music, was exempt from rules of formal prose. Besides, he was Cole Porter.)

Well, some readers didn't get it, expressing benign condescension or amused  exasperation at what they imagined was my error.

Thompson, on the other hand, has Ford tell us at one point that

 "It’s one of those things that are so plain and simple you don’t see ’em."

This alcohol-sodden hack, banging out his novels on a manual typewriter in the bathroom, in other words, writing a book full of Southern dialect pronunciation, nonetheless recognized a plural subject ("those things") and knew that such a subject takes a plural verb ("are"). As I like to imagine the deceptively shambling but, in fact, highly intelligent, literate Lou Ford saying, "Just parsing through, ma'am."

I am pleased to enshrine Thompson alongside Dashiell Hammett as a copy editor's friend. Good grammar is nothing to be ashamed of. Even tough guys do it.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Olha, que coisas mais lindas!: Gorgeous Portuguese crime-fiction covers

(Courtesy of
Luís Miguel Queirós)

I head for Portugal on vacation this week and, as usual when I travel, I'll try to find out a bit about the local crime-fiction scene.

My first search turned up a colorful blog post from Cullen Gallagher, a fellow Noircon attendee who is not from Portugal but who did post some eye-catching covers of American, English, and other European crime novels translated into Portuguese. The covers are courtesy of an acquaintance of Cullen's who also supplies background about their creator and publication history.

One of the covers illustrates this post. See the rest over at Cullen's Pulp Serenade.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Cover stories

A post about the covers of James R. Benn's Billy Boyle novels in this space last year generated a lively discussion of art, war, publishing, history and aesthetics, among other interesting subjects.

Benn, kind enough to remember that discussion, sends a new article of his own about the cover of his latest book, A Mortal Terror, the sixth Billy Boyle World War II mystery.

It's good stuff, full of photos, drawings, and glimpses of how artist, author and designer thought at various stages. Like the earlier discussion, it offers a link to the wonderful Web site maintained by designer Daniel Cosgrove.

***

Benn was a member of my "Flags of Terror" panel at Bouchercon 2010, which makes this an appropriate time to mention that Bouchercon 2011 approaches rapidly. This year's conference happens a month earlier than usual — Sept. 15-18 — and if anyone wants to hold Bouchercons every eleven months instead of every year, I won't complain.  Visit the Bouchercon Web site for information, and I'll see you in St. Louis.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Form and content on book covers

I was a bit of a formalist when I studied art history.

With that in mind, see if you can figure out why I like these covers of three of James R. Benn 's Billy Boyle novels — especially if you've read the books.


© Peter Rozovsky 2010

No cats allowed ...

... but I'm going to make one more post about a dog, and you can't do a thing about it.

1) Recent discussion here came down against the covers of J.F. Englert's three novels narrated by a literate, reflective Labrador named Randolph. I complained that the covers might mislead readers into thinking the books cuter and cozier than they are.

In the covers' defense, though, they reproduce skillfully executed artwork, apparently commissioned for the books, if one can judge by Englert's thanks to illustrator Dan Craig. I've taken part in discussions of copycat covers, the phenomenon that results when different publishers rely on the same stock of photographic images. Why can't the publishers spend a few extra dollars for an artist, illustrator or photographer, and avoid looking cheap and cheesy? I asked. Englert's publishers do this. More power to them.

2) I also like a couple of bits inside the book, A Dog About Town, including:

"He crammed what looked like a Maryland crab cake into our deeply troubled refrigerator, the interior of which had remained a shadowland of petrified broccoli and pizza since the bulb burned out months before."

and

"His reputation in the writing life had been launched and sustained by this pedigree of mid-twentieth-century entitlement and superiority, which by the time of his death in the twenty-first century, was anachronistic."

and, for what it says about Randolph as a palatable contemporary vehicle for sentiments that might seem precious, dated or eccentric in the mouth of a twenty-first-century human fictional detective, this:

" ... the detective is the last true humanist, standing at that intersection where observation and reason meet emotion and intuition revealing the secrets that measure our fragile, inconstant, but extraordinary beings."

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Good books, bad covers

Yesterday's post about J.F. Englert's A Dog at Sea mentioned in passing the book's cloying cover.

The covers to Englert's first two novels are borderline cutesy, I told a commenter, but the current cover goes over the top. More than that, it's misleading. Readers looking for a cute doggie book might be disappointed, and the cover might repel readers who would otherwise enjoy the intelligent story that lies within.

To ensure that you don't judge this book by its cover, here's an excerpt from A Dog at Sea. Here's a bit from Englert's A Dog About Town. Here's some graceful, amusing prose from A Dog Among Diplomats. Here's what I wrote about that last book.

And here's your question: What good books that you've read were ill-served by off-putting or misleading covers?

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Camilleri's Italian covers

My reading of and about Andrea Camilleri has led me to a Web site that offers a gallery of his Italian covers and links to tantalizing summaries of books not yet translated into English.

Camilleri's eleventh novel about Inspector Salvo Montalbano has just been published in English as The Wings of the Sphinx; the site offers covers and summaries of fourteen novels plus two collections of Montalbano stories, an omnibus edition and a non-Montalbano book.

One of the novels takes the investigation into Montalbano's beloved Mediterranean, "the most marine of Montalbano's investigations," according to Camilleri.

A collection of long stories, La prima indagine de Montalbano (Montalbano's First Investigation), takes the reader to a time when "Montalbano is 35 years old, an adult but still professionally naive and not so astute ..."

Now, there's something for Camilleri's readers to look forward to.

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Cover stories

I posted a comment last week about the phenomenon of different books with sometimes startlingly similar covers. This week Belinda Mountain of MIRA Books, whose cover for Paul Johnston's novel The Soul Collector sparked the discussion, weighs in. She offers a short comment on my post, then holds forth at greater length on her own blog.

Her comments will speak for themselves, but they did put me in mind of something obvious that I had nonetheless not thought of before: Books with similar themes may well lead to similar covers. Johnston's book, she writes, "features a character named The White Devil, and a killer who draws pentagrams near his unfortunate victims, so the pentagram/star icon was incredibly well suited to this book."

Pentagrams and the fear of Satanism figure prominently in Jo Nesbø's The Devil's Star, which helps explain the similarity between its cover and that of Johnston's novel. But then, Nesbø's book itself is just one of several Scandinavian novels translated in recent years in which Satanism plays a prominent part. Helene Tursten's The Glass Devil and Åsa Larsson's Sun Storm (The Savage Altar in the U.K.) also come to mind.

Belinda offers some sensible reasons for publishers' decisions, so thank her for weighing in. And the next time you think about "copycat" covers, think about "copycat" books, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Hey, publishers, what's behind the covers?

Euro Crime notes the near-identical cover designs of The Devil's Star by Jo Nesbø and Paul Johnston's upcoming novel The Soul Collector. In this case, the copycatting seems more blatant than usual, right down to a word in the subtitle of the Johnston novel.

Euro Crime has highlighted a number of such copycat covers, as have other blogs, and the issue has sparked discussion throughout the blogosphere. Some seem to think that publishers, looking for ways to save money, find it easier to use stock photos than to pay artists or photographers. But I haven't heard publishers weigh in.

If you're a publisher, how do you explain and justify this practice? How do you answer the accusation that copycat covers make publishers look cheap, cheesy and foolish ? And when did the phenomenon begin? When did publishers start relying on stock photos for their covers?

Once again, a bouquet for Hard Case Crime, which commissions paintings for all its covers.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Good things from across the border, Part I

I thank the reader who brought to my attention Penguin's covers for the new Canadian editions of Howard Engel's Benny Cooperman mysteries. The one to your right is worth a comment even before I begin reading it.

Note the wheelchair, the thought balloon and the title's backwards B. These are, presumably, references to an affliction shared by Cooperman and Engel. Like his protagonist, Engel suffered from alexia sine agraphia, a condition in which the sufferer can write but not read. (In Engel's case, the condition resulted from a stroke. I don't know the protagonist's circumstances.) This obviously must have been a terrible blow for an author to overcome, and I believe the cover design captures that beautifully.

Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author who has written with much understanding about any number of strange neurological conditions, wrote an afterword to this book, which leads me to suspect that the cover's hints at mental and physical struggles accurately reflect the book's contents.

Next: Toronto is widely known for the numerous movies filmed there but set in other cities. In the coming days, I'll be discussing a crime novel that makes Toronto so cool that producers may soon want to start shooting movies in other cities and pretending they're Toronto instead of the other way around.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Howard Engel
Canadian crime fiction

Covers through time

In an example of the creative synergy that starry-eyed Web boosters claim has transformed our consciousness (either that, or in a bit of copycatting born of laziness on my part), I refer you to Chocolate Cobweb's display of Ngaio Marsh book covers from 1944 through 1987. It's interesting to note how styles change over time and to speculate about how different aspects of an author's work capture designers' attention in different eras.

It appears that Ms. Cobweb has now posted a similar display of Agatha Christie cover, which ought to fuel your appetite for this question: What examples come to mind of covers from different eras that highlight different aspects of an author's work? Will a cover from an apprehensive era focus on darker aspects of a writer normally considered cozy, for example?

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Questions about surprising covers

A blog that bears the tasty name Chocolate Cobwebs posted a shot of this cover recently, and I was surprised when I noted the book's author and title. The illustration seemed a bit nervous for a collection of Golden Age mystery stories, even by someone like Sayers, who had a way of latching onto a viewpoint or subject well before others did.

Then I thought again. This cover, according to Ms. Cobwebs, is from a 1963 edition of the collection, which had first been published in 1928. By 1963, angst and nerviness had presumably become popular enough that such a cover might be more in keeping with the times than it would have been thirty-five years earlier.

This, in turn, sparked a string of further speculation, which I will happily save for some other time. For now, this question: What book covers or jacket illustrations, crime-fiction or otherwise, have you found surprising, and why?
=======================

Michael Walters posts a link to a site maintained by his book-cover designer, Richard Tuschman. The site has some gorgeous images, and Tuschman's blog offers interesting insights into the process of book-cover design.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Judging a cover by its book

Michael Walters’ blog links to this fascinating analysis of book-jacket design, in this case for the U.S. edition of Walters’ own novel The Shadow Walker. The designer/illustrator/blogger in question, Richard Tuschman, walks the reader through jacket design in a way I suspect you will find most enlightening. Needless to say, his blog looks good, too.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

Technorati tags:
Michael Walters
Richard Tuschman
Mongolia crime fiction
Asia crime fiction