Odd Cover Choices

Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely is a classic hardboiled noir book from 1940. There is one scene in it where a character gets hit upside the head with a bedspring . . . but is that really what you want to put on the book's cover?

As to romance books, they have their own cover formula of steamy girl/hunky guy.

So what went wrong here with Craig Douglas's 1966 romance The Hungry Ones? (Via.)

You Know How to Eat a Blog? Just Push It Into Your Mouth Until It's Gone.

I saw the 1947 noirish pot-boiler The Lady from Shanghai recently. It contains the following soft-boiled dialogue between Rita Hayworth (as Rosalie Bannister) and Orson Welles (as Irishman Michael O’Hara).

Rosalie: [What if] I don’t know how to shoot?
O’Hara: It’s easy. You just pull the trigger.

This brought to mind the genuinely hard-boiled dialogue from 1944’s To Have and to Have Not wherein Lauren Bacall elevates Humphrey Bogart’s heart rate:

You don’t have to say anything, and you don’t have to do anything. Not a thing. Oh, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and... blow.

To complete the trifecta, I just read here that during a 1939 visit to the U.S., Queen Elizabeth was presented with a hot dog. Unsure of how to proceed, she asked Franklin D. Roosevelt for directions.

Queen Elizabeth: How do you eat it?
FDR: Very simple. Push it into your mouth and keep pushing it until it is all gone.

The queen chose to go with a knife and fork.

Photo of Queen Elizabeth and Eleanor Roosevelt from UPI.