The German’s are back at it.  Here we have their cover for THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH, retitled CLEAN TEAM.  And, you know, I understand the title change and don’t think I can really expect anyone to keep the American title.  As for the artwork, I love it.  Nice and splattery.  Mop and bucket, natch.  More like this, please.                                                                 

P from Brooklyn, in a clear bid to dominate all content on the site, sent me the gem below.    

Anyone who’s been paying attention to my commentary regarding Mystic Arts will know that Web Goodhue is essentially my version of Rockfish. Minus the Firebird.

Thanks again, gator!

Clearly someone in France is trying to make it up to me for the cuddly French cover for Caught Stealing.   My wife thinks this is a bit too Cirque du Joe Pitt, and I get that, but I’m less concerned with the image, which is just fine, than I am the title.  Dude, Le Vampyre De New York sounds like it should be on the title card for an obscure pre-war French horror film in which the Coalition serves as a metaphor for fascism and Joe Pitt is a reluctant resistence fighter played by Jean Gabin.

  Charlie accepts France’s apology for cruel joke of first cover. �

So ever since the rights to several of my books were sold to a French publisher a while back I’ve been eagerly anticipating a look at the cover art.  After all, these are the people who invented noir, the country where noir is taken most seriously.  There are entire schools of critique based on noir esthetics in France.  How cool will it be to finally be  published in France.  Well, not very cool at all from the look of things.  Why do the French hate Charlie so?

I love the artwork for the MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGN OF DEATH Blackstone audiobook. 

And we have a winner.

Just got this in the mail, and man am I pleased as fuck.  I previously broke down what I thought were weaknesses in SGRPC TAKE ONE and SGRPC TAKE TWO.  I find none of those weaknesses here.  If the cover for MYSTIC ARTS speaks a different language than the covers for my previous books, this cover speaks that same new language, but with its own accent.  First and foremost, I just plain like the way the damn thing looks.  Clearly there’s something dark and violent happening inside, but the artwork is off kilter enough to suggest that it may not be what you normally expect.  In a similar vein, it works with my publisher’s desire to remarket the books as something other than straightforward crime. I also like that, while the art clearly signals a change, incorporating the shadows from the hardback cover allows for a certain amount of continuity.  It’s glancing back, but definitely moving forward.  Love it.

Reader Tim Hewitt spotted this nugget at the Golden Age Comic Book Stories blog.

Dig the one fang motif in play in 1973.  I never pictured Joe with sideburns, but the look might work for him.

Thanks, Tim!

Reminder, the fifth Joe Pitt casebook, EVERY LAST DROP, is on shelves.

All pieces by Nico Walter.

Thanks, Nico!  I like ‘em all, but Terry is so dead-on it’s scary.

Reader B.H. spotted and shared a guest appearance of THE SHOTGUN RULE in Garth Ennis‘ CROSSED.

Here’s the panel drawn by Jacen Burrows.

(I’m posting this without having asked permission.  So if Garth, Jacen or the folks at Avatar want it removed, just shoot me a line.)

Know that whole “A picture is worth a thousand words” deal?

Sometimes that is just plain dead on.

I see no reason to comment further on the artwork for the Blackstone Audio versions of ALREADY DEAD and NO DOMINION.  They speak quite loudly themselves.

Thanks to the Ellen and Bruce Olson, my books are getting a better vacation this year than I am. 

Here’s the second take on a trade paperback cover for THE SHOTGUN RULE.

While the general consensus is that this is a huge upgrade over the FIRST TAKE, it is still missing the mark.  In an of itself, it’s a nice cover.  Truth be said, I prefer this to the hardback cover.  The problem is that Ballantine is trying to adjust the marketing for my books.  A concerted effort is being made to reach readers beyond the hardboiled/pulp/noir audience.  Not just mystery and crime readers, but readers who appreciate an offbeat story whatever the genre.  The leading edge of that effort is packaging.  The cover for THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH is the first cover that is meant to tilt toward those readers.  As the TPB of SHOTGUN will come out a month before the MYSTIC ARTS hardback, we want the two covers to be speaking the same lingo.

With all of that in mind, the problem I see in this very handsome cover is that it seems to look back toward the old marketing as embodied in the covers for the HENRY THOMPSON TRILOGY books, rather than looking forward to the new effort as embodied in the MYSTIC ARTS cover HERE.

 And so the process continues.

I just got this.  Very first pass on the cover for next winter’s THE MYSTIC ARTS OF ERASING ALL SIGNS OF DEATH.  And don’t expect to see much change when this hits the shelves.  Not if I have anything to say about it.  Quite simply, my favorite cover so far.  There are others I love, but this one has jumped into first.  Clearly we’re still in world where very bad things happen, but this one also has some visual cool and playfulness that hasn’t been present in any of the previous crime books.  The “erasing” of the dead body, while simultaneously highlighting it in toxic yellow, I love that.  I love that perspective is skewed and that you have to look at it once or twice before you realize that the original image is horizontal and that the body is on the floor, not on a couch.  I like that it seems to tell a different story about the kind of book this is, the suggestion that something more than mayhem and entertainment is happening inside.  Some effects may be added, the yellow may end up glossy, and there will undoubtedly be a blurb or two, but this is the winner. 

Just received artwork for the maps that will be included in EVERY LAST DROP.

For the record, these are no more SPOILERISH than the maps at the front of all the Joe Pitt books, but if you ponder them long enough you might get tiny advance hints about some of what is to come. 

So use your own best judgement when viewing.

I like it.  The visuals are a little filmic, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  And it’s nicely emphasized by the vampire face on the side of the phone booth that looks like a movie poster.   I like the gray and rainy mood of if.  But mostly what I like is that the title looks so fucking good in Spanish.  “Ya Estamos Muertos”.  Which, I think, literally translates as “Already We Are Dead.”  Which, if I’m right, is just a flat out awsome title in English as well.  Also a great song title. 

OK, first off, image quality.  This is a home scan of the original artwork that was sent to me, compressed so it will load here.  So it’s a little small and fuzzy.  Which should not interfere with your ability to see that it rocks.  Best Joe Pitt cover since the first.  The designers nailed this one on the first go, and I am fucking delighted.   Frankly, I’d just as soon get rid of the fang, but it’s not going anywhere at this point.  But that miasma hanging over Manhattan, and the graveyard in the foreground?  Just great stuff.  And, when one knows what’s happening behind the cover, one also knows that this captures the mood of the book, as well.  Winner.

Looking at this, I think I can hear the designers at Heyne saying to one another, “Enough fucking about with bloody bandages and bloody fingers and bags of blood.  Let’s just do a puddle of fucking blood and be done with it.”

My reaction to this plan, had I been asked, would have been, “Yes, brilliant!”

Thus, here it is, NO DOMINION reduced to its essence, a puddle of fucking blood.

Actually, it does rather look like a Rorschach design made out of blood, doesn’t it?

“Tell me, young man, what do you see when you look at this design?”

 “A puddle of fucking blood!”

As well you should.

We went through quite a few versions to get to this one.  By the time we got started it was a given that the basic layout was going to be a cityscape top with a bisected face below.  And the one fang.  I was hoping to move away from that trope and find some new territory, but it’s hard to break a series from a design concept once it has been established.  The first version, which I don’t have at hand, was what I called, “The Cory Feldman Cover.”  The lower image showed a man in shadowed profile tipping a fedora from his head.  Not a bad basic image, but this one looked oddly Feldmanesque, circa 1984.  Veto.  The second variation, the top one here, does the smart thing and uses the Brooklyn Bridge up top.  I mean, with this title, you don’t need to over think that park.  The lower image scored a big blah with me.  Problems?  I don’t exactly know.  Maybe it’s the way the shadow around the guy’s head suggests a big, blowed-out shag cut.  Or the lack of any noir references.  In any case, another veto.  At which point, I’m feeling kind of crappy.  I don’t like telling people I don’t like their work.  I want their work to rock.  So when we got to the third version, I was pretty relieved to see something that I thought worked.  I’m not so much a fan of the gun-in-your-fucking-face school of design, but the book is what it is.  Are the fangs a little, I don’t know, wimpy?  Kinda.  Is that shirt a little too “Wall Street”?  Kinda.  But the package works.  I particularly like the color layout on this one.  Sign it into law.

Well, let’s be fair here, every single other cover that has come from my German publisher, Heyne, has been an asskicker.  Sooner or later there was bound to be one that missed the mark.  Is there anything actually wrong with this cover in and of itself, or is it just wrong for the book?  If I’m honest, and I’m going to be honest, I’d have to say, yes, yes, this is just not a good cover.  That’s OK.  I don’t always write good stuff.  Nobody always does their goodest best.  Sometimes you miss the mark.  After all the covers I’ve loved on the German editions, it’s only fair that one comes along that looks like the poster for a hip-hop dance interpretation of a novel by S.E. Hinton.

The first books I ever bought for myself came off spinning wire racks at a drugstore. No shit, in 1976 you could still walk into a drugstore, spin a rack of paperbacks and take one home for about ninety-five cents. Now that’s cool. The covers on these mothers were cool, too.

There were lots of books on those racks. Pastel romances, slick thrillers, dull self-help and nutrition manuals; lots of stuff to paw through. But the ones I was looking for were easy to pick out of the crowd. The stuff I was into had lurid paintings with one eyed, gray-scaled monsters; gun toting, trench-coated toughguys; and ray gun wielding, fishbowl-helmeted spacemen. Those were the shit.

They don’t make covers like that any more. Nor do they make spinning wire bookracks. Man, I’d give my left nut to sit on a sticky linoleum floor and stare up at one of those racks, my arm getting sore as I spin it around and around looking for the perfect cover to drop my greasy dollar bill on.

Honestly, that’s still the way I do it. When I need a new fix; some writer I’ve never hit on before; something that doesn’t come recommended from a reliable source; something found? I walk around the book tables at Shakespeare & Company, finger dog-eared remainders off the shelf at the East Village Books, cruise the new releases shelf at St Mark’s Books; just looking for an image. I don’t pop my money down for just any funky picture anymore (at twelve bucks and up, who can afford it?), but that’s still how they get their hooks into me. And if I read a couple pages, and I’m just not sure… a kickass cover will tip me over the side.

These are some of my covers and what I think of them.