Timeliner by Charles Eric Maine (Corgi, 1955)

TIMELINER!

The fascinating and provocative story of Hugh Macklin--an alien lost in endless futures--fighting desperately to return to his own era.

 Here we have a late fifties cover adorned with abstract art--the sort of art that doesn't really tell us much about the story inside the book.   There's a man--presumably the protagonist--fractured into six tiny squares.  There's a hazily-rendered back view of a naked woman.  And the background is a mix of random lines and swirls in a fetching shade of grey.  It's all rather bleh.  Give me a science fiction cover depicting rockets, doughty astronauts and scantily clad space amazons in metallic bras any day!

 For the record, the book is about a man whose consciousness travels through time, jumping from host to host like the hero of "Quantum Leap".   It's a well-written, if not particularly great book, with a nice twist at the end.

Skye Cameron by Phyllis Whitney (Coronet, 1974)

One of my "Green Shed" finds!

'No woman could ever be indifferent to such a man'

'A great brute of a man' they called him... 'uncouth, rude'.  They said he had been in prison, that he was a murderer ... and worse.  But the moment Skye Cameron caught her first glimpse of Justin Law, her heart beat uncontrollably.  She knew herself to be irrevocably drawn to the big, intense man with the mysterious past.

Skye Cameron was a redhead, strong-willed and impetuous.  But when she challenged respectable New Orleans society she was forced to defy the world she knew for a love she could not admit.

'A story ripe with the adventures of a flaming-haired heroine who is at leas kissing-kin to Scarlett O'Hara'

New York Times

Well the cover gets one thing right anyway--the heroine's hair is read.  Sort of.

But that is the only thing that appears to be right about the cover.  The novel takes place in genteel New Orleans in the late nineteenth century--the heroine is apparently wandering around a burning plantation looking disheveled and wearing nothing but her shift.  She looks a bit jaundiced, too, with that yellow complexion, and her expression says "Night of the Living Dead" to me more than "defying the world for love".

Also the hero, that "great brute of a man" is missing from the cover.  Make of that what you will...

"The Art of Romance"

This book is not my usual kind of blog-fodder, but I found it remaindered on the weekend and I couldn't resist:

 

An entire book full of book covers! 

Though Mills and Boon and Harlequin are best known for their romances, it would appear that they published other genres--at least in their earlier days.  From 1950:

Though of course the romances do predominate in every era--as shown by this couple in a steamy clinch in 1976:

There's a fair amount of social history to be gleaned from these covers--from changing standards of what what was acceptable (the covers get steadily raunchier from the 1960s on) to changing fashions in clothes, hair and makeup.  (Could the couple above belong to any decade other than the seventies?)

Solomon and Sheba by Jay Williams (Corgi, 1960)

Another one from the Green Shed, source of many things strange and wonderful.  Judging from the creases on the cover, it's been well read:

 

SOLOMON AND SHEBA

Great king, and beautiful, barbaric queen--the most passionate and sensuous love story of all time.

Does anyone else think Sheba there looks kind of masculine?  Or maybe the dancing girl is Solomon in drag.

Anyway, they don't write 'em like this anymore.  Solomon and Sheba is the sort of historical epic where the characters talk with a twisted Ye Olde Englishe syntax and vocabulary in order to show that they're... well, historical.  Strictly speaking, given the setting, they should be talking in Ancient Hebrew:

"Call me not 'king' this morning, I pray you," he said.  "I have set aside that heavy mantle for these few days.  I will not think of cares; there will be time enough for that when..."  He paused.  And when she looked at him he went on, "When my sister, Balkis, feels that she must return to her own place.  I would that day might be put off forever."

(Page 123)

But as a bonus, this book was turned into a movie, so it comes complete with... stills from the picture!    There are eight pages of plates in the centre of the book.  And look, Yul Brynner has hair!

The Golden Hades by Edgar Wallace (Hodder, 1962)

Another book acquired during my Lifeline Bookfair Crime Spree.  This one I definitely bought for its cover:

 

The banknotes marked with the sinister little yellow sign of the Golden Hades were not just state money. 

Wilbur Smith of the F.B.I. had seen the sign twice before--

The first time they involved a masked gang; the second time, they meant murder.

Edgar Wallace is one of those authors whose life is more interesting than his books.  Born into poverty as the illegitimate child of actors, he became a war correspondent during the Boer War, then took to writing thrillers to make money.  In the 1920s his publishers Hodder and Stoughton began promoting him aggressively, and he pretty much became a one-man fiction factory, eventually churning out around 170 novels:

Needless to say, the quality was NOT high.  This particular example of his work concerns a Satanic cult in New York.  To be fair, a book on a similar theme today would probably have more graphic violence and a lot more sex, but the characters might be equally cardboard.

Wallace eventually died in 1933 of untreated diabetes, and few of his books are in print today.

The Leaves of Time by Neal Barrett Jr (Lancer, 1971)

 

the gorgon 

came from some time line far across the multiple worlds.  It moved among men, looking always as though it was one of them ... but it was not a man.  For the Gorgon was the destroyer of the universe, and with it came death, and destruction.  The alien could not tolerate other forms of life, and would not permit them to exist.  The first a world knew of the beast in its midst was when its citizens began dying... horribly ... and then it was already too late.  For there was no defense for a beast that could assume the shape and identity of any other creature ... until a man whose world had been destroyed was thrown across the time lines, to an Earth whose only defense was the gentle philosophy of a man long dead ...

a lancer science fiction original never before published

This cover is taking a trip.  An acid trip.  And "The Gorgon" appears to have eaten random capital letters on the back cover.

Cover aside, I  usually enjoy stories about time travel and parallel worlds, and this one is a good example of its kind.   There is a hero, a monster, and an interesting world sideways to this one.  What more could a reader want?

The Secret Adversary by Agatha Christie (Pan, 1958 and 1963)

Here we have two versions of the same book, from the same publisher, but printed five years apart.  They provide proof that while things always change they don't necessarily improve.   First, the version from 1958:

 

THE SECRET ADVERSARY tells how two young people advertise for adventure and are caught in a whirlpool of international intrigue which almost costs them their lives.  A gay and exciting thriller!

 A woman, held at gunpoint, hands over documents to the mysterious figure in the foreground.  The cover doesn't tell you who the woman is, or what the documents are, but it certainly lets you know that what you're about to read is a crime thriller.

Next, the version published in 1963:

Two Innocents in search of adventure.

An Elusive Young Woman holder of a vital secret

A Faceless Man with a Blueprint for Anarchy

The woman being held at gunpoint has been replaced by a picture of a dark and gloomy mansion.  While the art isn't bad, the contents of the book could be anything: a Gothic romance, a collection of ghost stories, and traditional murder-in-a-country-house whodunnit.

At least Pan's copy writers had learned to write snappier blurbs for their back covers--albeit ones with really strange ways of using capital letters!