EXTRACTS: The Art of Denis McLoughlin © 2013 The Book Palace (272 PAGES in Full edition)

65 murder can be fun the boardman crime/ mystery covers D enis McLoughlin is what the Americans call a maverick. He is a one-off. Unique. In the history of British illustration there is no one who can be reasonably compared to him. He does not fit anywhere into the British tradition. His style is tough, blunt, rough-hewn. Its strength is in its individuality: there is no mistaking McLoughlin’s work. He has an enormous affinity with American culture, particularly the cinema and to the pulp magazines of the nineteen forties, and thus the covers he painted for the tough, mostly American, mystery thrillers that Thomas Volney Board- man printed over here in the late forties and fifties are totally complementa- ry in style. They often appear more American than the original U.S. jackets. As the Americans themselves have recognised, no illustrator was better at illustrating the hardboiled school of literature than Denis McLoughlin. McLoughlin would not be a good illustrator for Agatha Christie, Mar- gery Allingham or even P.D.James or Ruth Rendell. They are all far too cosy, too middle-class and just too English. Murder, American hardboiled style, is a brutal act of sudden violence. As Raymond Chandler said; “this school writes about people who commit murder for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” And the dead bodies are not found draped across the library floor or at the vicarage desk but lie in pools of real blood in some back alley. Looking through a selection of Denis McLoughlin’s remarkable covers for Boardman’s crime and mystery series, both in hardcover and in paper- back, perhaps the first thing that strikes you is the vivid sense of pictorial composition on display. More than any other cover artist I know, McLough- lin has an extraordinarily developed imaginative flair for unusual and strik- ing viewpoints. Much of this can be traced back to his love of cinema. Viewing black and white American movies of the ‘40s and ‘50s, particu- larly those of the so-called film noir genre such as Fallen Angel, Road House and The Big Combo , I am struck with the affinity that exists between them and McLoughlin’s work. The innovative camerawork on such films, with its use of strong shadows, unusual camera angles and lighting effects skilfully creating a dark, forbidding world where the individual is isolated, alienated or pursued by dark forces, had a strong effect on McLoughlin’s art. Designs such as those for the book jackets of Henry Kane’s Edge of Panic and David C. Cooke’s selection of the Best American Detective Stories of 1951 , each showing a lone figure casting a long shadow as he is chased through an im- personal cityscape in the former and a concrete jungle of skyscrapers in the ABOVE: Dorothy poses as yet another girl about to meet a sticky end for the cover of a Boardman crime novel. FACING PAGE : A masterful handling of light injects a palpable feeling of unease into the cover of Fredric Brown’s Night of the Jabberwock, October 1951.