* This is something of a grab-bag page. Most of these, though not all, are by McGinnis. The top row includes:
The second row includes:
The bottom row includes:
The cover for THE GIRL WITH THE LONG GREEN HEART was actually a 21st century production. A publisher named HARD CASE CRIME was started up with a charter to publish detective classics and new detective fiction. They contracted McGinnis to do some new covers for them. Hoo-ray!
Concerning the KILLER MINE cover, I keep thinking McGinnis was thinking Jane Fonda; he'd done her in the BARABARELLA movie poster and he liked to recycle his subjects on occasion.
I didn't know for a long time who did the cover of TURN ME ON! other than it wasn't McGinnis, but Jack W. Thomas sent me a very considerate email identifying the artist as James Bama, adding that Bama had painted the covers of most of his novels. (Bama's signature is actually at the bottom, but it's difficult to make out until told what it says.) It's an attention-getter ... a dangerous dame as a teenager, how much more hazardous can a girl get?
REDS is also by Bama, it's not really my style, but I picked up a good scan of it along with the cover for TURN ME ON!, it was easy to tweak, it looked good in the end, and I decided to include it. I'll have to be on the lookout for more James Bama, but on inspection he wasn't really into racy covers for the most part -- he did a lot of Westerns and the old DOC SAVAGE covers.
THE ERECTION SET was included even though it was a photo cover, partly because it was one of the more memorable ones -- OK, it's sleazy, but it does get your attention -- and partly because of the story behind it. Yes, this woman was at one time Mrs. Mickey Spillane. He had divorced his first wife in the early 1960s and ran into Selma AKA Sherri Malinou a few years later when she was posing for a cover picture for one of his novels -- not this one. He bribed the photographer to keep taking pictures of her even after the film ran out and chatted her up.
They got married in 1965. The marriage surprisingly lasted until 1983, crashing in what was said to have been a really ugly divorce, the details of which I remain blissfully ignorant. Apparently the settlement was not very much to her advantage, suggesting that Mickey had the goods on her, or at least superior legal clout. At last notice, she was playing agent for trash celebrities, the kind of folks who get their 15 minutes of fame on reality TV shows and the like.
According to the story, during their divorce Sherri said that Mickey was "an alcoholic, a sexual pervert, and a liar." Mickey nailed her with the heavy return fire on the exchange, however, saying: "She should live to be a hundred. But right away!"
