The combination of clean lines and contrasting colours of James Weston Lewis‘s illustration here manages to feel both elegiac and new, somehow capturing an almost sepia-toned sense of age that promises an older mystery without veering into redundancy because of its age. I love, too, the clear focus on the house, because The Wintringham Mystery (1927) is very much a country house puzzler in the classic tradition — oftentimes, perhaps because of the preponderance of cost-saving stock illustrations, a reprint can promise something the book never intended to deliver, but this nails the era and the style of mystery perfectly. And, all that aside, it would simply look great framed on your wall.

Like the Rue Morgue Press before it, Locked Room International’s covers are a mixed bag. This has the feel of a stock illustration, and certainly there’s no credit to an artist as there are in many of their other titles, but if it is stock then it’s the most perfectly-chosen and -constructed stock illustration on record. I’m a big fan of negative space in art, and this simple, clean silhouette leans into this principle, not over-complicating that which needs no complication. It seems almost inevitable in retrospect: if you hired 600 artists to draw a cover for a classic mystery called The Howling Beast (1934) I’m willing to bet 583 of them would draw some slight variation on this. That alone makes it damn near perfect.

Before the British Library had the ingenious idea of using — sometimes, it must be said, rather bland — old posters for its Crime Classics covers, it commissioned several new pieces of art from Chris Andrews. This one for Death in the Tunnel (1936) is easily my favourite: a classic train mystery setup, the title promising something terrible once the locomotive passes from that lonely stretch of track and out of sight. I like the subdued colour palette here, too, giving things an ominous overtone without leaning too hard into it, the light on the front of the engine being swallowed by the burrow-like darkness. My mystery-loving fingers positively itched with anticipation to open the book when I first saw it, and I get the same shivers to this day.

Anna Morrison‘s striking designs for the Seishi Yokomizo reprints put out by Pushkin Vertigo all feature the simple iconography of a circular patch containing some object that is relevant to the plot. Before we realised this was going to be a feature of these books, however, the superb choices here — the inversion of the Japanese flag enabling the rendering of the patch of snow into which that bloody blade is thrust in the book, with nary a footprint to account for its presence — made The Honjin Murders (1946) compelling from the first. The pair of legs stretching upwards on the cover of The Inugami Curse (1951) almost made it on here instead, but the freshness of this still just about wins out for me — a strong opening salvo for a superbly adaptable series of covers.

You’ll find at one of the links above Jo Walker‘s thoughts on how this particular composition took shape, and — quite aside from her generosity in writing about this for the blog — I honestly think this might be my favourite of all the covers here. Takagi’s novel delves deep into the tattoo subculture of post-WW2 Japan, and this cover promises terrible, threatening things while also playing up to the ‘tattoo’ in the title. The letters being partially lost within the coils of the snake is a lovely touch, too, and provides such a magnificently eye-catching display that it’s difficult not to feel like it should be used on a far better novel. This really does illustrate the value of commissioning new covers, and everyone involved is to be heartily commended.