At the beginning in the 1930s, McConnell was chiefly associated with crime novels, especially the works of Peter Cheyney, Berkeley Grey, Victor Gunn, Vernon Warren and Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu. His output in crime was only eclipsed by the 600 or so Western covers he produced for Amalgamated Press, Fiction House, Mills & Boon and T V Boardman. His 28 Western covers for Corgi Books, who had probably the best line of quality wild west novels in the 1950s and ‘60s, are a testament to McConnell’s incredible imagin
At the same time, he was producing romantic and historical covers – his covers for Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels and Raphael Sabatini’s romances of the Spanish Main for Pan may well be amongst his most memorable as they were so widely available in the 1960s.
Bizarrely, and for the first time in my life, I have been enjoying tidying up the garden. The last time I mentioned this, we were having a tree taken down ; since then I have been digging out weeds and trying to grow grass in their place. Back in April we had a huge problem with a green alkanet, a common wildflower that was starting to take over the garden. It had driven back the lawn by at least two feet and had swamped the area around the pond in the back garden. You'll see from these photos...