Christie Covers

I recently bought a pantload of Agatha Christie books from a second-hand store that was selling them off at 50 cents a copy. Most of them were paperbacks from the seventies and eighties, with a few hardcovers and more recent paperbacks thrown in. A lot of the books were from the same publishing house, Fontana, which seemed to favour pretty bad covers.

This is one of their better covers:


This is from the school of "photograph three items relevant to the plot" mystery-novel cover design, but the image itself is better than most--I think it's actually a photorealistic illustration, and not a photograph, which was a good choice for an image that features a stuffed-weasel-thing so prominently. The illustrated version is more stylish and less creepy than a plastic-eyed photograph would have been. (Although, I know I have read this book, and I honestly can't remember where the weasel-stoat creature comes into the story.)

This book cover follows roughly the same design as the one above, although I prefer the previous cover's fonts, and the white band across the bottom of the cover, to this mild tweaking of the format. While this drawing is done in the same skilled photorealistic way as the previous cover, the items illustrated are way more off-putting. I think, as a general principal, I would omit shrunken heads from the cover of a book titled anything other than Shrunken Heads.

This cover would be about ten times better if it had omitted the hand with the chocolate and bullet in the foreground. The illustrator seems to work better with nice straight lines and architectural detail and even reflections than with the always-difficult details of the human hand. At the very least, that nail polish colour was a bad decision.

This cover has a little too much going on, and none of it is drawn particularly well. The way the doorway and the figure in the doorway shade into the void is the first bad touch. The decision to put the flower vase somewhere off the cover but have the flowers themselves drip all over the foreground also seems bizarre, until you realize that the ornate clock had to be crammed in there, too. And I cannot make sense of the flamey-fire-cloudy business shooting out of the clock--that's about what it looks like when you're holding the actual physical copy of this book in your hands.

This cover is less willy-nilly than the one for A Murder Is Announced, but it's still not very well-drawn. The angle of the book when I took this picture actually minimized the problems with proportions--the girl's mouth and jaw seem out of whack both in relation to the giant flower and to the way the head behind that flower ought to be shaped. The effect is unsettling, but I'm not convinced that was the intention.

This is the lone bad cover not from Fontana that I am including here, and it is an excellent example of the "photograph three items" style of cover. I find it notable mostly because the lighting has turned the cat dim and cloudy, as though it were badly edited into this background from an entirely different photograph. The book is old enough that I can't tell if the cat was always dim, or if that is the peculiar and unforeseen result of the colour gradually fading.

And this is my favourite of the covers I picked up: so pulpy. The event that is illustrated actually kind of does happen in the book, but the character is not the kind of lady who dies her hair platinum blonde and runs to the cliffside in a negligee and leopard-print coat. I would be interested to know if this was an existing illustration that the designer noticed could be used here, or if this was a deliberate attempt to sex up the story.

My other pulp cover is less impressive:It's still a pretty stylish/stylized cover, and I like the simplicity; I guess I just wish the background was any colour other than mustard-yellow.