Monday, March 30, 2015

Paperback Novelties: Death and Rudolph Belarski (1900-1983)

Rudolph Belarski (1900-1983), one of the great names in twentieth-century pulp and paperback fiction art, was born at the turn of the century in the coal mining town of Dupont, Pennsylvania, the son of immigrants from Galicia (then part of Austria-Hungarian Empire). Belarski quit school at the age of twelve to work in the local mines. After a decade had passed he began taking mail-order art courses from the International Correspondence School of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Soon after seriously taking up art Belarski moved to New York City to study at the Pratt Institute, from which he graduated in 1926.  He also taught at the school until 1933.  Two years later after leaving the school he began painting covers for pulp magazines published by Thrilling Publications.  After serving in the USO during World War Two he emerged as what David Saunders at pulpartists.com calls "the foremost paperback cover artist for Popular Library until 1951."

Like other Belarski pulps illustrations, this
one was adapted for a paperback cover, in
this case Patricia Wentworth's Pilgrim's Rest
(re-titled Dark Threat); see below
Rudolph Belarski unquestionably designed some of the most indelible banners of the post-WW2 paperback revolution.

One of my favorites by him is his cover for Fright, by George Hopley (Cornell Woolrich), a title which aptly designates Belarski's favored theme on his crime fiction paperback cover art. To be sure, this cover is somewhat exceptional, for the woman on the cover actually is dead, not in imminent danger of death; it is her murderer, a man, who is stricken with fright--quite pathologically--that his murder will out.

Usually on Belarski covers it's women who are the terrified ones, menaced by men. Occasionally a woman appears to strike back, and we see a male lying dead before her (see below the last cover, that for Rufus King's The Case of the Constant God, where the woman appears, mostly faceless, like some sort of dark, avenging angel).

On another cover (see the illustration above right) a blonde woman threatens a dark-haired woman. Whatever the variation, however, Rudolph Belarski provided memorable visions of sex and death in Cold War crime fiction.

Rufus King was one of the authors most favored with Belarski covers, and I will be reviewing a couple of these King crime novels this week. In the meantime, take a look at some of Belarski's work, mostly drawn here from non-hard-boiled crime fiction.

Also see previous posts on Arthur Hawkins, master of art deco mystery fiction jacket art, here and here.  And, since the cover of The Pink Umbrella Murder has been discussed so much below, see here for a review of the novel by Noah Stewart.

























9 comments:

  1. Love these covers! I have a few Popular library pulp editions, but not nearly enough....

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    1. But they are getting increasingly expensive for good copies! Fascinating pieces of Americana.

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  2. Beautifully done. My favourite has to be THE PINK UMBRELLA. "Oh my God, no! It can't be! It is! A PINK UMBRELLA!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

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    1. My theory: She just remembered she left the pink umbrella at home and she's discovered that....*It's raining!!!!*

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  3. Well, yes, spot the recurring motif! And that cover for the PINK UMBRELLA is really something!

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    1. Yes, there does seem to be a recurring motif, doesn't there? But, aside from that (a big aside), I notice variations, like the kneeling woman (legs), two in fear and one quite fierce, and the "reaching hands." I also have to commend the lettering of "The Applegreen Cat" actually being, well, applegreen. Aren't the Frances Crane books considered "cozies"? Interesting to see them sexed-up like this.

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    2. I must say, the grouping it really brings home to me how much the paperback revolution, on the crime fiction front, depended on images of beautiful menaced women. The theme is ubiquitous. This piece might have been called Belarski's Beauties. On hard-boiled covers you often have the tough male sleuth prominently figured, but on these covers, largely for non-hard-boiled books, the men often are literally on the margins, sometimes indicated by no more than pair of menacing hands.

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  4. What a gallery - love these covers! I recently read the Applegreen Cat, and I don't think I would have assigned that picture to the book if the title was missing....

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    1. Isn't there at least one giant flying dart? Yes, I'm afraid a lot of the covers seem to be a bit of a stretch in terms of what actually happens in the books, lol, but it shows how sex became the vehicle for selling even more traditional mysteries.

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