12 Cover Artists Every Vintage Crime Lover Should Know
Celebrating the Artists Who Illuminated Classic Crime
"Scanning the face-out selection of crime and thriller novels in a modern American bookshop, one can’t help but recognize homogeneity in cover designs. There are certainly exceptions. However, parsimonious publishing budgets, the rise of stock photography enterprises, marketing-driven fears of offending readers, and what now seems to be an annually escalating number of new books requiring wrapper embellishment have conspired to leave us with too many novel façades that lack much novelty at all.
This wasn’t always the case. During the mid-20th century, when the spread of low-cost paperbacks revolutionized the book-publishing industry, newsstands and drugstore spinner racks were packed with tales of criminality boasting commissioned cover paintings intended to titillate, shock, and thereby separate customers (primarily men at the time) from portions of their paychecks. That sensationalistic artwork routinely traded in lust and violence, sadism and imminent disaster; and though sententious critics howled, readers couldn’t grab up such pocket editions fast enough.
Myriad people deserve credit for those frequently gorgeous cover paintings, which were standard elements of paperbacks until at least the late 1960s, when they began to be replaced by more easily acquired and ostensibly more “modern” photographs. But the dozen artists cited below were responsible for some of the most captivating and memorable examples of the breed."
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