Author Archives: Dazzling Erin

Artist Profile: The Hard Case Crime Covers of Chuck Pyle

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

I’ve always liked the covers of the Hard Case Crime paperbacks.  Hard Case Crime is mix of reprints of classic pulp novels and new works written in the hardboiled style of old.  Each novel features a cover painted in the retro style of the pulps, by artists like Michael Koelsch, Robert McGinnis, Glen Orbik, and Greg Manchess.

All of the covers below were done for Hard Case Crime by Chuck Pyle, who along with being an illustrator is also a beloved instructor at San Francisco’s Academy of Art University.  Click here to read a good profile of him from 2015.  He sounds like the type of instructor that every artist should be lucky enough to study under.

To find out more about the Hard Case Crime imprint, click here.

Artist Profile: Peter Stevens (1920–2001)

Posted on by Dazzling Erin

Born in Cardiff, Peter Stevens was the son of two artists.  (His father, Lawrence Sterne Stevens, was a prominent pulp artist at the same time as his son.)  Peter Stevens studied at London’s Royal Academy of Art and, with his wife, moved to New York in 1940.  It was while serving in the Army during World War II that Peter sold his first pulp illustrations to Argosy.  From 1943 to 1963 (when his shifted his focus to doing commissioned portraits), Stevens did covers for almost every prominent pulp magazine.

A few of those covers can be found below: