The Killer Inside Me - Robert Maguire Cover art CONFIRMED!

 

 

    When you start to root around the internet more and more looking for art and facts, you may tend to run into more and more interesting stuff!

    I encountered Lynn Maguire recently posting on a Facebook group where she was selling original posed photos taken and/or used by her father, legendary PB cover artist Robert Maguire, as studies for his original paintings sold to the paperback publishing houses for use as their cover art.  

    Ms. Maguire has confirmed something that I have long suspected - that the cover art to one of the hobby's most famous books, Jim Thompson' s "The Killer Inside Me", Lion Books No. 99, was indeed painted by Robert Maguire.

 

 

    She mentioned that to me that she confirmed this when she found pose photos of the woman lying dead in the foreground of the cover, and several poses of her father as the man in the painting. She indicated that her father very often used himself and his wife as models for the cover shoots, and then would paint different faces on the characters to create differences in the paintings.

     Ms. Maguire also confirmed that the delicious cover art for Thompson's "A Hell Of A Woman", Lion Books No. 218 was painted by Maguire (which I always suspected as a fairly obvious Maguire) ...

 

 

in addition to a couple of other famous Lions, "The Man I Killed" (which I never would have guessed was him - looks almost like a rough draft!)...


 

and "Sin People" which she had previously identified as his as noted here.

 

 1953, Lion Books #159

 

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Comments

  1. DouglasMarch 8, 2026 at 9:35 AM

    Excellent clarification on these, Lowell! Really appreciate Ms. Maguire and her help with this.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Lowell WilsonMarch 8, 2026 at 10:58 AM

      Thanks Douglas! She was very candid in a series of Messenger chats and is looking through her photos to see if she can ID a few others we chatted about. I thanked her for going through this treasure trove and doing her best to index them and figure out which covers they came from. It's rare to have access to all this ancillary process documentation.

      Delete

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