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5/17/2010 9:03:30 AM
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Janet Hutchings
Posts 34
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Cover artists and illustrators in our sister genre, science fiction, seem to enjoy considerable prestige within their fan community. The Hugo Awards include not one but two art categories: Best Professional Artist and Best Fan Artist. Mystery’s Anthony Awards, by contrast, include an art category only intermittently: Just seven times in the twenty-five years the awards have existed have Best Cover Art nominations been sought. Left Coast Crime, one of the smaller but growing mystery conventions, instituted the Arty, a Best Cover Art award, in 2003, but mystery still falls short of science fiction in its acknowledgement of the work of its visual artists. Science fiction also has the Chesley Awards and the Spectrum Awards (winners of the latter published in a yearly art anthology).
Notice too that those Hugo Awards are given to the artist, rather than for a particular piece of art. I wonder how many mystery fans could even name an artist currently working in our field. Authors may know the names of the artists who worked on their own book covers, but there don’t seem to be artist names that stand out in our field anymore.
That wasn’t always the case. A 2003 show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art gathered a number of the few hundred paintings that survive from the pulp cover art of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Though most of the artists of that period were paid little for their work, painting over their own canvases once a cover had been shot to save the price of a new canvas, many enjoyed a large reputation. Artists like Raphael DeSoto, who did many mystery covers, had their work booked a year or more in advance. EQMM’s George Salter, artist and art director in our magazine’s early years, had an international reputation and also did book covers for a number of famous authors. Of course, many of the well-known artists of the pulp era illustrated in multiple genres, and it’s possible that they’d be less well known if their reputations had rested only on their mystery covers.
Still, it seems to me that mystery art once commanded more attention and appreciation than it does today. And people continue to respond to those classic pulp covers; when EQMM began reprinting them about five years ago we immediately saw an increase in complimentary letters about our look. It all tempts one to think that mystery art reached a peak during those pulp years that it hasn’t been able to equal since.
My own reason for so often going with classic covers isn’t that we can’t find good contemporary work. There are plenty of talented artists still working in our field. The problem is that there isn’t a specific look that can be identified with the present day that also proclaims itself to be about mystery. Not in the way a “dame” in a bar, smoke rising from her cigarette, could do that on a pulp cover even without the support of the clichéd mystery props: the gun, the knife, the bottle of poison. . . .
Mystery’s clichés may explain, in part, why contemporary science fiction art generates more interest amongst fans than most current mystery art does. Whereas the mystery artist is limited to objects and scenarios that are not only familiar but convey a very specific theme (murder), the science fiction artist can deal with things never seen before, because they don’t exist in the real world.
It’s difficult to come up with ideas that haven’t already been overused in mystery art (a problem we come up against every time we commission a cover or interior piece), especially since if an ingenious method for murder exists in a story, that very thing cannot be illustrated without spoiling the tale.
We’d like to know what our readers think about current versus classic mystery art? Is a mystery book or magazine’s art important to you? Does anyone have a favorite contemporary mystery artist?
Janet Hutchings
Editor
EQMM
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5/18/2010 6:24:26 PM
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Yoshinori Todo
Posts 232
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Janet Hutchings wrote:
My own reason for so often going with classic covers isn’t that we can’t find good contemporary work. There are plenty of talented artists still working in our field. The problem is that there isn’t a specific look that can be identified with the present day that also proclaims itself to be about mystery. Not in the way a “dame” in a bar, smoke rising from her cigarette, could do that on a pulp cover even without the support of the clichéd mystery props: the gun, the knife, the bottle of poison. . . .
The name Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is so synonymous with the mystery genre, I don't think the covers have to be necessarily instantly recognizable as "mystery"--the title itself includes the word "mystery" anyway. It's like Stephen King or Agatha Christie. Just reading those names in big bright letters tells you: this work is all about quality horror or quality mystery, respectively, and the cover may depict anything from a beautiful sunset or a magnificent exotic landscape to ordinary people going about their (not so) ordinary lives.
And oh yeah, as much as I love the classic covers, I definitely prefer contemporary artwork.
edited by Yoshinori Todo on 5/19/2010
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Josh
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5/18/2010 7:52:47 PM
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Jeff Baker
Posts 132
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Glad to see someone's finally talking about EQ's interior artwork. Those artists deserve at least a small feature about them in an issue! MY favorite non-fiction to appear in EQ was a bit from a few years back about how you wanted to run a classic cover but didn't have the original painting (which you needed, technical stuff here!). The original artist re-painted it from his copy of the decades-old issue of the magazine! Hey! How about a featurette about the magazine's artists on the website? Yeah! Great idea!
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5/19/2010 1:24:57 AM
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Yoshinori Todo
Posts 232
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http://www.deliciousdeath.com/
Here you can admire hundreds (maybe thousands!) of Agatha Christie covers from all over the world. I especially like the British Fontana editions from the 80s and the HarperCollins editions from the 90s.
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Josh
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5/28/2010 1:08:29 AM
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Dixon
Posts 39
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I second Jeff Baker's idea!
An online section of The Mystery Place devoted to the artists and artwork would be very interesting, and I would welcome it with open arms. Maybe a mention could be made in the magazines, and perhaps readers could vote on the best artists/artwork every year, just as they do on the best stories. In fact, two award categories spring directly to mind: "Best Internal Artwork of the Year" and "Best Cover Art of the Year." Perhaps " Mystery Magazine Artist of the Year" could be awarded to the overall winner--that artist who had most pieces nominated, cross indexed with weighted points received for winning, or coming in second or third, in the first two award categories.
As to the question of Contemporary vs. Pulp – I love the pulp covers, but wonder if it might be possible to challenge artists to find new ways to indicate themes of Crime or Intrigue by having them create scenes from a story within the magazine. A good job of this has been done on several recent EQMM covers, including the January 2010 issue. However, I have to say, I think the best jobs were done on the Jan./Feb. 2008 issue, and Nov. 2009 issue of AHMM, with artistic depictions of scenes from “Chainsaw Nativity” and “Rumble Strip” respectively.
The Impressionist look of the “Chainsaw Nativity” cover was truly eye-catching, and promoted a sense of fine style in my opinion, even though the scene depicted was a rural one. The “Rumble Strip” cover REALLY “read” in pulp style, yet clothing and the tilted “gangsta” way that the bad guy is holding the pistol clearly connote a contemporary feel.
I see a lot of discussion on this site about younger readers wanting to see more contemporary covers, and other readers enjoying the pulp covers. To me, the “Rumble Strip” cover probably speaks to both groups, possibly meaning that the magazines can glean more readers—which is what cover art is all about. Right? I’m not sure this statement about this cover speaking to readers actually does what I claim, but maybe a future thread in this section could ask readers what they think about that. Certainly, looking at the sales numbers for that month could help determine the veracity of my statement. God knows, I don’t have any crystal ball.
So, my final answer? Try for a pulp-feeling cover depicting a scene from one of the more action-packed stories within, but make sure the details clearly speak to the contemporary reader. That’s my suggestion, for what it’s worth. 
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6/20/2010 11:01:24 AM
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lisad
Posts 2
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I agree with Josh, the covers and interior artwork could be improved by using contemporary art, even abstract art, it does not have to be cartoonish, trying to depict the storyline, sorry to say, but a lot of these illustrations look silly to me. As these stories are meant for adults...
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