Buried for Pleasure paperback cover – Fred Pfeiffer

I have a happy memory from my childhood of being treated to a train journey to a cinema in the nearest city to see the Doc Savage movie. Although the film ends on something of a cliffhanger a follow-up was never made because it was such a financial flop. Apart from the first two weeks of its US release it had the misfortune of facing stiff competition at the box office in the form of a commercial behemoth, a film about a great white shark which swept all before it, and is generally considered to be the film that ushered in the era of the summer movie blockbuster.

I however quite liked the Doc Savage film and whilst I waited for the sequel I built up a small collection (ten books or fewer) of the Bantam paperbacks which had been imported into the UK to cash in on the hoped-for success of the movie. James Bama is widely regarded as the best Doc Savage paperback cover illustrator, but Fred Pfeiffer also illustrated 13 of the covers and it is possible that when I saw the above [unnamed] book cover illustration it triggered something deeply buried in my memory from over 50 years ago. It is possible, but to be honest unlikely as I do not even know if Fred Pfeiffer painted the covers of any of the now lost books I owned just as I would not at that young age have been able to discriminate between one artist from another. However, the human subconscious is a dark and mysterious realm, so who knows?

One aspect of the above book cover illustration that I consciously responded to is the pink and purple colour scheme, which I have liked ever since I saw colourist Tom Ziuko use it in the Green Arrow miniseries from the early 1980s, which is something I let him know when I had a short email correspondence with him following his announcement around about 15 years ago that he was selling the colour guides to some of the comics he had worked on. Nothing came of that exchange as the colour guides for the GA miniseries had long been sold off but I am glad to have passed on my appreciation of Tom’s work which he graciously accepted.

The listing for the above covers did not specify the title of the book it was used for as it was not known. Although I have a vague curiosity as to what it is it is far from essential for me to know. I have enough unread books and comics to see me through now to the end of my days, and because of the book’s vintage the chances are very slim that I would be able to source a pristine, unread copy of the book to read anyway.

In any case the book seems to write itself. It appears to be a pulp fiction precursor to or knock-off of (depending on whether it came out before or after) John Fowles’ The Collector (with one notable difference; no spoilers here) which is one of the Ur-texts for psychological studies of unsocialised deviants. The large head at the centre of the painting is obviously the baddie and the light hitting his nose from above casts a shadow giving him a Hitler-esque moustache. He is a shifty, creepy incel who can get members of the opposite sex to give him a second glance only by tranquillising them and holding them captive in his basement lair, but he did not bank on the damsel-in-distress’s intrepid boyfriend who is hot on her trail and saves the day.

There are also all these other features of the painting which are bubbling under the surface. Pink and purple work well together because they are analogous colours – colours that sit next to one another on the colour wheel, but also they are, with the blood red, apparently colours of “the sexual spectrum”. The villain is represented by his disembodied head but another part of his anatomy is symbolised by the priapic syringe and hypodermic needle. Ostensibly the female’s only form of undress is the shoe which was thrown clear in the struggle that has rendered her unconscious but she is attired in a pink, flesh-coloured minidress, spreadeagled on the ground so that the viewer is afforded such a viewpoint that they feel that any moment they are going to feel the hand of the law on their shoulder for the crime of upskirting. And the good-looking, clean-cut hero is clambering through a set of florid-coloured curtains. I mean it is not exactly subtle, is it? Unless of course Fred Pfeiffer’s choice of elements to make up his composition and the way that they are assembled is completely innocent and random, and the interpretation I am imposing on them is nothing more than the result of my fevered, sex-obsessed imagination. In that case I should invoke the famous quote by Robert Michels (although it is often attributed to Oscar Wilde) – “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power”.

Update: Fellow CAF member Brian Emrich has below kindly identified this artwork as the cover for the 1968 edition of Buried for Pleasure by Edmund Crispin. Thank you, Brian!