Of course, the answer is nothing. There’s not a single thing you can do about it, unless you’re Stephen King or somebody. Don’t believe your friends when they tell you you can’t judge a book by its cover. That made for a good Bo Diddley song, but you might remind them that forcing a person to make snap judgments with very little else to go on is precisely the purpose of covers.

However, if you’re fortunate enough to have a hip editor, as Megan Abbott did for her debut 2005 novel, Die A Little, then a lot of the stress melts away and you get a cover like this.

This outstanding cover, designed and photographed by Richie Fahey, is, as I said in a review of this novel, almost worth the price of the book by itself. The use of hand-coloring over a black & white photo, with all the tones just right, make this a book which will grab the attention of even the most casual browser.

Fahey also painted, but did not design, the cover of Andrew Vachss’ The Getaway Man (2003), arguably Vachss’ best novel.

These two covers, along with the ones that follow, are among my favorites. Here’s Cruel Poetry, a great 2007 Florida noir novel by Vicki Hendricks. I just love all the elements of this one.

John Ridley’s terrific noir novel, Love Is A Racket (1998), sported an attention-getting cover. I love the little heart in the gun barrel, as well as the scary font.

No need to introduce Hard Case Crime. We all know the great work they do. Here are a couple of their stunning efforts.

Black Lizard/Vintage Crime put out some pretty damned good covers back during the late 80s and early 90s. Jim Thompson’s classic nightmare novel from 1952, The Killer Inside Me, leaps to the front of my mind whenever I think about them.

I don’t know who they got to pose for this photograph, but one look into his eyes and I can promise you I never want to meet up with him.

Another Jim Thompson book, 1953′s Recoil, has a particularly creepy cover. I think it’s the glasses the guy is wearing.  

The cover to Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up (1967) is a great example of how a photograph can start off looking romantic and then end up looking dangerous.

David Goodis’ Black Friday (1954) is minimalist cover design at its most effective.

Last, and certainly not least, is Dorothy B Hughes underrated 1946 novel, Ride The Pink Horse.

By the way, these are all great novels. If you haven’t read them, I urge you to do so. You won’t be sorry.

Anybody out there got any fave covers they’d like to share? These are just a few of mine, but my list is long.

DIE A LITTLE  by Megan Abbott (2005)

Review by Mike Dennis

Things are never as they seem.

That could easily be the subtitle of Die A Little, the 2005 debut novel by Megan Abbott.  The characters are shrouded in their own obsessions and desires, but the shroud is not easily lifted, so nothing is ever entirely clear in this stylish, neo-noir tale.

Set in Los Angeles of the mid-1950s, during the very zenith of the California-as-land-of-dreams era, Lora King lives out the dream in a little house in Pasadena with her brother, Bill.  They’ve always lived together, even as they passed into adulthood, in a kind of mutually protective, fairy-tale world:  childlike Lora the schoolteacher, parading through sunny kitchens, making ham-and-pineapple-ring dinners; square-jawed Bill, saving society as a crime-fighting investigator for the LA County district attorney.  There’s probably a twin bed in Lora’s room.

But Bill marries Alice, and everything is shaken up.

While Alice is all cleavage and plucked eyebrows, she seems to truly love Bill, but she carries the whiff of the tawdry world that Lora knows is out there, and doesn’t want to think about.

Alice tries hard to bond with Lora, referring to the two of them as “sisters”.  She invites Lora over for dinner parties, and otherwise insinuates herself into Lora’s life.  Lora wants to like Alice, but she has her suspicions.  Alice has no photos of her family, her life before Bill is cloudy, and darn it, she’s just so different.

Pretty soon, a couple of bodies turn up, as Lora finds herself dragged into the back-alley LA cesspool of the time, a world drenched in drugs, prostitution, and murder.  She learns terrible things she didn’t really want to know, as everyone’s true motivations eventually crawl out into the sunlight.

Abbott takes her time in the unfolding of the story, narrating it in Lora’s first-person, present tense voice.  I found the present tense to be somewhat off-putting, not bringing the dark urgency to the story that was needed.  If you can get around that (which I did), then you’re in for an unusual, noirish look at LA in the fifties.

Unusual because of Abbott’s distinctive feminine voice.  It’s not the hard-as-nails voice of say, Christa Faust, but it’s not trying to be.  It’s softer, but no less dark, and always hinting at something creepy behind the milk-and-honey facade.

One more thing:  if you don’t know anything about the story, then the cover, which is a hand-painted photograph, is almost worth the price of the book all by itself.