Needful Things: Hitchcock Posters in the Style of Penguin Crime Novels

The handmade-goods website Etsy is better known for crafty things—handmade jewelry, quirky knitted caps, etc.—but now and then, I’m stunned by some incredible design. A prime example comes from a seller known as Grimboid, who sells posters through Etsy in a shop called Headfuzz.

Check out this one, an original design for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window:

Original poster design for Hitchcock's Rear Window.

I’m particularly fond of the one above, as the film is based on a story by one of my favorite noir writers, Cornell Woolrich. The others in the poster series are equally great:

Poster for Rope. Note the modified Penguin Crime logo.

 

Dial M for Murder. I love the simple, but evocative design.

If you haven’t noticed, the posters are brilliant modern interpretations of the old Penguin Crime book covers, substituting classic crime films and directors for books and authors. Any true fan of crime fiction will remember them. The cover art was stark, and sometimes fairly weird. Here are some of my favorite covers to jog your memory:

 

Jean Potts' Death of a Stray Cat, Penguin Crime edition.

 

Sayers and Simenon.

 

Stark cover design for a Stanley Ellin novel.

These covers show some of the trippier Penguin Crime designs.

The prints come in several sizes, and can be made to order in any measurement. The seller offers a special deal on orders of three. Visit the shop for more information.

What film would you like to see in the style of a Penguin Crime cover?

Note on the new series:

As a book lover, most of my discretionary income goes towards books. Now and then, though, I get all a-swoon over things book related as well. I’ll be collecting some of them here, so if you’re on the lookout for bookish holiday gifts, keep an eye peeled for the Needful Things tag.

Book Review: Ironside by Jim Thompson

Remember that time the great Jim Thompson wrote a TV novelization? No? It’s okay, I didn’t know either. I came across Ironside while processing an order at the used book store, and I laughed. It’s by a guy named Jim Thompson, I thought. But certainly not the Jim Thompson? It’s a common enough name. Then I read the first line.

“It was the kind of a place where if you didn’t spit on the floor at home you could go down there and do it.”

That’s him, all right.

Not only is the whole first paragraph an obvious example of Thompson’s signature style, but the first line is recycled from a previous story, “The Tomcat That Was Treetop Tall.” You can hardly blame him for using it again: the story is not well known (it turns up in Fireworks: The Lost Writings), and it’s arguably one of his most evocative openers. 

Ironside, a TV tie-in paperback by Jim Thompson, 1967.

Thompson was only ten years away from the end of his life when he wrote Ironside, and he had already had at least one stroke. It was easy money, and it paid in advance. He would go on to do two more novelizations, adapted from the screenplays for The Undefeated and Nothing But a Man. He probably considered himself lucky to get the work with Popular Library. Editor-in-chief Jim Bryans had turned down White Mother, Black Son (later published by Lancer as Child of Rage), calling it “a little too raunchy.”

For whatever reason, Bryans contracted Thompson to create “a sort of novel” out of the new NBC crime drama Ironside, to coincide with its premiere season in 1967. Starring Raymond Burr as the gruff, wheelchair-bound Chief Robert T. Ironside, the show took place in San Francisco where the detective busts thugs with his team: straight and narrow Ed Brown; pretty, blonde, and privileged Eve Whitfield; and former boxer and ex-delinquent Mark Sanger. It was a huge hit, spanning eight seasons, and it seems like just about everyone who existed in the ‘70s guest-starred, including Jodie Foster, Harrison Ford, Ed Asner, David Cassidy, and Bruce Lee. Jessica Walter even starred in a spin-off show, as San Francisco’s first female police chief.

The theme music is what everyone remembers, even if they’ve forgotten the show. It was written by Quincy Jones, and was reportedly the first television theme song to be synthesizer based. Jones later expanded it and recorded it as a full-length song for an album in 1971. It’s still catchy by today’s standards, in a retro kind of way. Quentin Tarantino seems to agree: he used a segment of it in Kill Bill as a motif. (You can hear it every time Uma Thurman fixates on an enemy.)

In short, Ironside the show was everything that Thompson was not. It was popular. It was profitable. The only thing it had in common with the writer was crime. It’s no wonder, then, that the  entire Ironside tie-in is sort of a mishmash. While it is more accurately a tie-in than a novelization (it’s an original story not appearing on the show), Thompson is forced to use pre-existing characters and backstories. It’s known that he wrote without revising, but here it seems as if he’s writing even more quickly, patching in bits of old work, going on stream-of-consciousness tangents, then remembering the show and putting in some of that, too. The result is both great and terrible. You can see Thompson in it. It’s a big mess of a forest, but if you look around, it’s got a few lovely trees in it.

A synopsis is difficult, because the plot is rather convoluted. A killer is loose in San Francisco, and an ambulance driver is under suspicion, as he’s repeatedly the first on the scene. Simultaneously, Mark Sanger has been arrested after a white guy he punched for shouting racist slurs at him dies in the hospital. Mark’s fists are apparently considered deadly weapons by law (he was a boxer, after all), so he’s in pretty big trouble. Keep in mind, though, that Thompson once wrote: “There is only one plot -- things are not as they seem.” Neither the murders nor Mark’s troubles end up exactly as you might predict, though predicting anything is tricky with Thompson’s lack of control over the storyline. It veers so many times, you might feel carsick.

It’s fun, though maybe a little cringeworthy, to watch Thompson have to dance around expletives. Ironside’s most-used adjective is “flamin’”, and it’s a weak substitute for the type of profanity Thompson’s fans are used to. You can sense the restraint when he writes “pea soup from pineapple juice,” or anytime he uses the word “butt.” It’s almost effective in what’s probably an accidental way when he’s forced to call a woman “A wicked, wanton woman. A degenerate wastrel.” The one “w” word he’s not using is so notably absent, it’s the only one you’re really thinking of.

Though he shows restraint when it comes to language, Thompson adds something to the Ironside mix that’s not at all present on the show: sexuality. He uses it to deepen Ironside’s character, depicting him as sexually frustrated, a topic I don’t think the show ever delved into. After reacting angrily to a playful kiss from Eve, Ironside throws her out, undresses with great difficulty, and goes to bed, telling himself that his response to her had been the only fair one.

She didn’t know. No one knew. No one but Robert Ironside knew the actual dimensions of his handicap. And there was only one way another person could know. To let her -- them -- share the burden.

Eve’s character presents a problem for Thompson. He doesn’t seem to know how to portray a nice girl who’s not a victim or a sex object -- so he makes her into both.  “I like to keep you around for decoration,” the chief tells her, which is no surprise, considering the penchant her dress has for riding up when she checks the oven. It’s no surprise either that Eve gets into life-threatening trouble. In Jim Thompson’s world, it’s what she was made for. (This isn’t a judgement of any kind on Thompson’s choices, but an observation on how the show’s characters differ when guided by him.)

Mark Sanger’s layers are probed more deeply than they ever were on TV. His inner monologues contain some of the best characterization in the book:

A man may have been born with dung in his mouth, and his nose may have been rubbed in it until its stench becomes a part of him. But it don’t kill his sense of smell. And it don’t kill his taste buds, man; it really don’t. It just makes them sharper, you know? Hungrier for somethin’ nice. And when it finally comes along, when he at last tastes honey and inhales the aroma of roses, he knows what they are. He knows.

There’s no call in an Ironside book for a depraved killer as narrator, but Thompson delivers as best he can, focusing on the murderer for long stretches. It’s out of place in this particular story, but it’s brilliant -- almost a book within a book -- and it’s welcome to anyone who’s a fan. When the killer is getting his gloves on and reciting his insane lines, we know we’re in Thompsonland. He can’t help going there, just as he can’t help recycling old lines -- or even titles. “And this is also Hell,” he writes in a jail scene. “This, here and now, now and on earth; a place one does not have to dig for.”

I wouldn’t recommend Ironside to anyone except Jim Thompson fans, and even then, only to completists. It’s wildly uneven, but there are bursts of his genius that are definitely worth some attention.

Note: While checking some facts for this review, I discovered that Ironside is coming back to TV this Fall. It premiers October 2, and stars Blair Underwood. The trailer actually looks pretty good.

Check out other Friday’s Forgotten Books reviews over at Patricia Abbott’s place. 

Book Review: The Flesh Mask by Jack Vance

Most readers know Jack Vance, who died just this past May, as a science fiction writer. He’s certainly worth remembering as one, racking up a pile of Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo awards (including a Hugo for his autobiography This Is Me, Jack Vance!).

Lesser known are Vance’s mystery works, though he wrote several, three of them under the Ellery Queen name for the popular series. He nabbed an Edgar award for Best First Mystery Novel in 1961 for The Man in the Cage, a suspense novel about an American smuggler in the North African desert.

Splatterlight's Lindle edition of The Flesh Mask.

The Man in the Cage may have been considered Vance’s first mystery novel by the Edgar committee, but it wasn’t his first thriller. That distinction belongs to The Flesh Mask. Originally published as Take My Face in 1957, the classic revenge story is the only one of Vance’s novels to have been published under the name Peter Held. It was re-released in a limited edition in 1988 under Vance’s real name, though it’s easiest to find today in the Kindle version, bearing Vance's preferred title, released by Splatterlight Press. 

The Flesh Mask decidedly qualifies as a forgotten book -- neither of its two names have a single Amazon review. (Let’s fix that, shall we?) That could be because it was a good few years ahead of its time, a slasher novel that predates the slasher genre. If Vance had waited five or six more years, it’s easy to imagine a film version on a double bill with Dementia 13.

Robert Struve is introduced in the book as a typical kid of thirteen, a comic book-reading, denim-clad paper delivery boy, differing from his friends “only in detail.” After he’s hit by a car and disfigured in a gasoline fire, he remains a star athlete through high school, but overhears the words of a gang of pretty sorority girls one night as they express their disgust with his looks. A hazing ritual gone awry sends Robert to a detention facility, and after his release, the girls start turning up dead, their faces slashed, in a gruesome series of sex murders. Robert is the obvious suspect, but he’s now had plastic surgery -- and there’s no record of his new face.

Classic slasher, right?

Original hardback with the title Take My Face.

Not entirely. The Flesh Mask may not be the brilliant stuff most discerning pulp readers know is out there (see Horace McCoy, Jim Thompson, David Goodis), but it’s a solid piece of writing. The plot propels itself forward, the writing is crisp and lively, and Vance has bothered to flesh out even the most minor of characters. While the stereotypical characters are all in place for a B movie-style thriller (among the girls there’s a slutty one and a prude), he gives us more than he even has to. 

A perfect example is Robert’s father. Though he’s dead and gone from the family picture as soon as page two, we get a clear picture of the thwarted salesman who knew “a hundred smutty stories.” In just a few well-chosen lines, we know that guy. One of my favorite descriptions is of Julie Hovard (the main object of Robert’s teen desires) when she’s still a spoiled little girl at the book’s beginning:

Her skin shone from expensive foods, pure milk, the finest soaps; her clothes were as crisp and fresh as new popcorn.

All but one of the hacking scenes take place offstage, but Vance makes sure we know how brutal they are. They’re almost no match for the simple descriptions of Robert’s face in repugnance, though. Having to stifle gasps, his own mother assesses his burnt-off eyebrows, the holes where his nose once was, and his left cheek that’s now “like a dish of brains.” The plastic surgeon, recalling his work to a cop, calls Robert’s face “as nasty a wad of tissue as I’ve ever seen.”

It’s no wonder this guy has some issues.

A last observation about The Flesh Mask is that, though clean enough for 1950s audiences, there’s an undercurrent of eroticism that Vance manages to maintain even while keeping sex out of the book. It establishes itself firmly during an evening of sorority initiation, to which Robert and a few other semi-drunken athletes are invited: 

The idea fascinated Robert. He had visions of girl-rites -- fair young bodies -- madness -- abandon … Julie Hovard … Something clenched in his stomach.

Paperback edition of Take My Face

While the event is tame by today’s standards, the girls’ shyness when made to do “whatever the boys want” seems to come off as more erotic than the debauchery that we know would ensue in a present-day version.

Vance was interviewed by Locus about a year before his death, and managed to be both self-deprecating and revelatory about his writing skill:

I wrote to make money, not for any other purpose. I just wrote the stuff because I was pretty good at it, and I wrote as fast as I could. I don’t glorify my writing at all. For some reason I have the knack. I can’t take any credit for it, any more than you can take credit for being a beautiful girl.

I think that sums it all up pretty nicely.

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This is my first time joining in on the Friday’s Forgotten Books posts begun by Patti Abbott. See her blog for a full list of reviews, and marvel at the names when you see who’s participating -- a bunch of mystery writers are in on the shenanigans.

Forget the Edgars: Which mystery author will win a morgue?

There’s a veritable slew of awards for crime writers of excellence, from the Edgars and the Agathas to the Neros and the Hammetts.

But the latest prize to be offered to a notable mystery writer will require a little more space than a bookshelf or trophy case will allow: It’s a new morgue. (Note: You have to imagine this in Bob Barkers’s voice, i.e. “It’s a newwwwww morgue!”)

Dundee University has come up with a revolutionary way to raise funds for the new addition to its Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification. Ten crime writers are competing in the Million for a Morgue competition for the chance to have the morgue named for them, with fans contributing a pound (or more) to vote.

The mystery mavens competing for the eponym are: Tess Gerritsen, Kathy Reichs, Lee Child, Harlan Coben, Mark Billingham, Jeffrey Deaver, Jeff Lindsay, Stuart MacBride, Peter James and Val McDermid.

Tess Gerritsen is in the lead as of this writing, so fans of Val McDermid’s likeable weirdo Tony Hill or Jeffrey Deaver’s quadriplegic Lincoln Rhyme should think about coughing up some coin.

The method of fundraising isn’t the only revolutionary thing about the project. The BBC reports that the newly built morgue “will adopt a "revolutionary" way of embalming - called the Thiel method - which keeps bodies flexible for longer.”

Which mystery writer are you pulling for? Or what would you like to see named for your favorite writer? (My answers are a. McDermid, and b. Martin Amis BBQ sauce, for no reason other than a larf.)