Of course you can't have a Swedish Westlake retrospective without the Manhattan series getting in there somehow. They got almost everything right - a fine selection of books, eye-catching bright red spine, totally genius name, the coolest logo ever and initially great artwork (though it had begun to decline around here). Too bad the
titles of the translations were mostly crap - usually generic and totally unrelated to the novel itself or the original title.
"The Mercenaries" was translated into "The Dead Don't Talk" in 1968. Yeah. The dead don't talk. Anonymous artwork. "3 6 1" came out as #199 later the same year, but that one looks exactly like the Finnish edition.
But that logo! That lower right corner! If I only knew how to print t-shirts...
[This one was never used in Finland, even though the Manhattan series was brought in here as such. Too risqué, that bottom... The book itself had been published in Finnish earlier by another publisher. This cover isn't by Bertil Hegland, is it?]
The cover is certainly not by Hegland. I suspect it some generic stock illustration.
ReplyDeleteI think it's by a Swedish illustrator. It's certainly not US and it's too bad even for a Spanish artist. (I don't really know why I brought Hegland's name even up, he was always too good to do this kind of lousiness.)
ReplyDelete