This striking Penguin Crime series from the 1970s celebrates the Raymond Chandler detective novels of the 1940s. Featuring the L.A. private detective Philip Marlowe they set the standard for hard-boiled crime writing and are regarded as minor literary classics despite their genre origins. The four movies made from the novels are significant in themselves as examples of Film Noir, the dark cinematic genre that arrived near the end of World War II.
Four actors played the detective Philip Marlowe during the 1940s. Dick Powell played him in Murder, My Sweet, 1944 (Farewell, My Lovely retitled); Humphrey Bogart played him in The Big Sleep, 1946; Robert Montgomery in The Lady in the Lake, 1947; George Montgomery in The Brasher Doubloon, 1947 (The High Window retitled). Confusing yes, but it doesn’t matter to the book cover, does it?
/
The covers were designed in the 1970s by New Yorker James Tormey (1938-2017) who had studied at the Pratt Institute and worked in advertising and commercial photography. He used publicity photos from the movies and posterized them, a technique where tonal areas are reduced to flat tones then coloured by hand. It gave a dramatic edge to the cover designs.
Note how in each image the green – Penguin’s brand colour for its crime fiction – is linked to the Penguin logo, the author’s name and elements in the photographs. It gives some unity to the design.
Finally, an Art Deco typeface at the top sets the time as the 1940s, the period of the novels. The style was being revived enthusiastically in the 1970s which made these covers very fashionable in the decade of their publication.
//
/
PENGUIN SERIES DESIGN 