Just Around the Coroner (1949)

Here is the 1949 Dell Mapback edition of Stuart Brock’s Just Around the Coroner, with cover art by Gerald Gregg. To learn much more about mapbacks, click here.

Thomas Polsky’s Novels

U.S. publisher E.F. Dutton released its hardcover edition of Polsky’s Curtains for an Editor in April 1939. Six years later, Dell Books issued its “mapback edition” of that same novel (below) with cover art by Gerald Gregg and a backside painted by Ruth Belew.



Curtains for an Editor was also featured in Two Complete Detective Books in 1948.



In December 1939, Polsky’s second L.F. “Grid” Griddle novel, Curtains for the Judge, was brought to market, again by Dutton. The full hardcover art is shown above.



The third and final Griddle novel was titled Curtains for the Copper. It was released originally by Dutton in 1941. The first Dell mapback edition shown below (#29) comes from 1944, again with an illustration by Gerald Gregg. A subsequent Dell edition of that book (#700) was brought to market in 1953, with façade art by Walter Brooks.





Detective Book magazine published what looks to have been the entire text of Curtains for the Copper in its Winter 1941-1942 edition. That periodical’s introductory artwork is credited to the very popular Norman Saunders.



Mystery*File reports, “The Cudgel was a stand-alone mystery taking place in the hill country of North Carolina.” It was initially published in 1950 by Dutton. The cover shown below comes from the 1952 Boardman edition, with art by Dennis McLoughlin.

By the Balls, by Dashiell Loveless

This 1998 paperback release of By the Balls, from Uglytown Productions, is a straight-ahead homage to the vintage Dell “mapbacks” line, complete with lists of characters and significant events contained in the book, and a front-cover banner reading “with crime map on back cover.”

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope

Not all of Dell’s mapbacks were fronted by original paintings (a scattering of movie tie-ins, such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope [1948], substituted photographs of their stars), but the vast majority certainly were.

The American Gun Mystery, by Ellery Queen

When the Dell paperback version of Ellery Queen’s The American Gun Mystery was first released, in 1943, it featured the rear-cover art shown on the left. It was subsequently reissued with the “mapback” art on the right. The front-side illustration is by Gerald Gregg; the map is credited to Ruth Belew.

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Murder with Pictures, by George Harmon Coxe

Published by Dell, 1950. Cover illustration by Robert Stanley.

Dell Books’ “Keyhole” Colophons

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