LITMIR.BIZ

       Cover designer’s note

      On a visit to Paris to produce a book on that charming city’s Art Deco architecture, my first stop was to locate the Folies Bergère, the legendary music hall where music would become just one of the many entertainments on offer to patrons. It was the author’s suggestion that I introduce an image that evoked ‘Gay Paree’. I believed that this image would fit the bill perfectly, and indeed it does. The dancing figure of the woman very much symbolizes one of the femmes fatales plying their trade so artfully for Monsieur Datt, and the multitude of swirling patterns behind her lead the eye on many a confusing journey – just like those endured by our intrepid hero.

      I was also inspired by the book’s inclusion of a quotation from the poem ‘May’:

       ‘… If she is not a rose, a rose all white,

       Then she must be redder than the red of blood.’

      A rose has come to symbolize many things in the arts, and here the contrast between the virginal and the sinful taint of blood is particularly apposite. The juxtaposition of the blood-stained rose over the Folies facade provided me with the key design element.

      On each front cover of this latest quartet, I have placed a photograph of the eyes of the bespectacled unnamed spy, in this instance overlaid with calibration marks from a hypodermic syringe. Why a syringe? Well, that will become all too apparent as you delve deeper into the seedy world of An Expensive Place to Die.

      A final touch to the front cover was the choice of a typeface that would present an elegant facade beneath which the elements of corruption would appear. The reason for my use of red for the final word is three-fold: it helps to draw attention to the blood on the rose; it creates the tricolour of the French flag; and it offers a cheeky sense of melodrama – humour is always important, especially in the works of this author.

      Readers who have been faithfully building their collection of these reissues will by now have become familiar with my use of a linking motif on the spines of the books. Being the final foursome in the entire series of reissues, and books in which violence is never too far away, I thought it a good idea to ‘go out with a bang’, as it were. This quartet’s spines accordingly display a different handgun, as mentioned in each of the books’ texts. The example here is a 6.35mm Mauser automatic, which was an antique even during the period of this story.

      Another recurring feature in this quartet, to be found within each back cover’s photographic montage, is a pair of ‘our hero’s’ glasses, which look suspiciously like those worn by ‘Harry Palmer’ in The Ipcress File and other outings...

      For this book’s montage, in order to evoke communist China’s involvement in the plot, I included a bust of Mao that I purchased some time ago in Shanghai. Like many of my objets from another time, it has found a new life helping to tell a story that the Chairman no doubt would have frowned upon.

      A souvenir ashtray featuring the Eiffel Tower becomes the receptacle for a lipstick-traced remnant of one of our hero’s Gauloise cigarettes, plus a Parisian Gendarme’s badge. Further pieces of ephemera are a vintage Folies Bergère programme plus a pair of Paris postcards. The top hat from a Monopoly set is a nod to the elite of Parisian society who are caught in Monsieur Datt’s web, and the dice and ace of spades card tell us that to enter his world is a gamble, which can lead to death. Lastly, the quarter-inch magnetic tape underneath the top hat is of a recording that I produced of Mick Jagger promoting one of The Rolling Stones albums for Radio Luxembourg!

      Arnold Schwartzman OBE RDI

      Hollywood 2012