Yesterday my editor sent me the cover art for “The Nesting Dolls”, the new Joanne Kilbourn novel, publication date October 2010. I’ve had some adventures with covers over the years.
My second Joanne Kilbourn novel, “Murder at the Mendel” was published by Douglas&McIntyre (now D&M). I still remember the publisher, Rob Sanders, phoning to tell me they had a dynamite cover. It was of a naked dead woman. When I was silent, Rob was quick to reassure me. “It’s in good taste. Her nipples are on the back cover.”
The third novel in the series, “The Wandering Soul Murders” was also published by D&M. It’s a gritty novel about life in the Regina core, and I guess the illustrator had been asked to reflect the grit in the cover art. Rob hated it. He said it looked like “van art” – the kind of weird graffiti art once seen on the sides of vans, and together we tried to think of a Saskatchewan artist who did high realism. Rob found Iris Hauser. Time was short. So Iris took a painting of a sleeping woman she’d already completed, changed the colour of the sleeping woman’s hair from blonde to black, trailed a piece of seaweed across the hem of her white nightgown, and adjusted the woman’s features to suggest that she had entered the sleep from which none emerge. We had our cover – a portrait of the young woman who is drowned early in the book.
Avie Bennett, who was the owner of McClelland & Stewart, contributed to the cover of “Burying Ariel”, one of my favourite covers. The novel centres on a woman of beauty and talent who is trapped by those who love her. The cover shows a bird in a gorgeously ornate cage. The door of the cage is slightly open and the bird, obviously wounded, is poised in the cage opening. Avie thought the illustration lacked punch and told the illustrator to “put in more blood”. He did, and the cover was vastly improved.
The cover for the hardback of “The Glass Coffin” is both provocative and reflective of the theme of the book. The book’s focus is a young girl whose filmmaker father has filmed her life since the days she was born. Not surprisingly, she hates him. The cover is simple but powerful: a close-up of the face of a very young but seductive girl.
I loved the cover for the trade paperback of “The Brutal Heart”. It was very noir—quite literally – all black and white except for a splash of yellow forsythia.
The cover for “Love you to Death”, the first Charlie D mystery, is also very noir and very effective. A woman with red-red lips is holding a very phallic black microphone just a little too close to her mouth. Scary stuff, but boy I’d buy that book!