TURN ME ON! is a particularly interesting cover -- a dangerous dame as a teenager, how much more hazardous do they come? That one was by James Bama.
The cover of DON'T EVER LOVE ME was by Rudolph Belarski. The other three covers are by McGinnis, though they are "semi-fakes", all novels that existed but not with that precise cover. CRUISE and OPERATION OCTOPUS actually have the correct cover art, but for various reasons I preferred to use my own layout. McGinnis did paint the cover for THE STEWARDESS, but the cover painting used here was rejected by the publishers as too risque; I cooked up my own layout with it, using the original cover as a guide.
The semi-fakes are labeled "Mach [Mock] Press" as a tipoff that they're not quite the real thing. The original publisher of CRUISE was Pan; OPERATION OCTOPUS, Signet; and THE STEWARDESS, Avon.
Concerning the first cover for STACKED DECK, with the mirror-image redhead, I wasn't that hot on refurbishing it, but I kept seeing it around and wavered until I finally decided that I might as well do it and be done with it. It looked like a simple job anyway; it was. One interesting thing about this cover is that I tried to use the image of the top redhead to fix dings on the image of the bottom redhead, but it didn't work well -- because the two images are not perfect copies of each other. In a modern era of digital replication a perfect mirror image would be expected, but in the days when such things were hand-painted it would not.
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!"
