Mike Hodges. In music, he did covers for Lou Reed's self-titled album and Iron Maiden's compilation Edward the Great. The Agatha Christie paperback covers Agatha Christie was no newcomer to the paperback format. Indeed, she was part of Allen Lane’s famous ten-book launch of Penguin Books. The success of Penguin Books in the UK and PocketBooks in the US—niche paperback publishers—in the years following WWII, inspired traditional publishers to produce paperbacks. By the early 60s, Collins decided it wanted to do something more artistically distinct with Christie’s paperback covers. Impressed with Adams’s cover for John Fowles’ The Collector, Collins engaged Adams. He was commissioned to do a trial cover of A Murder Is Announced, which was published with his cover in 1962. Everyone involved was pleased with the outcome. As a result, Adams ended up doing covers for many of Christie's paperbacks, often more than once. The covers he primarily did not create art for were the pre-1926 books which Fontana did not have the publishing rights to. PocketBooks in the US very much wanted more realistic covers. For this reason, most of Adams's covers for the US editions feature a single dramatic or portentous scene from the novel than spans the front and rear covers. The two exceptions are "Nemesis" and "The Mystery of the Blue Train". Fontana in the UK was much more open to Adams's creative input. Thus, the UK covers were often akin to a stylized tableau or surrealist collage. Adams ended up doing the covers for Agatha Christie paperbacks for twenty-eight years (1962-1980), thus becoming connected with her intimately in the minds of many readers. Technique and style Adams's book cover artwork, while usually instantly recognizable, runs to quite distinct modes. Some covers are still-life tableaux; some are depictions of a scene in the novel; some are surrealist collations of items and images. Organizing the vast majority of them, however, is Adams's unique exploration of a form that was vital for much of twentieth-century art: the collage. Adams's unique take on this was to bring the collage back into the realm of the painterly. Seen in this light, even Adams's covers that seem like still lifes are, in actuality, juxtapositions of elements and objects that normally are not in such proximity. It is this uncanny proximity—despite (or, rather, precisely because of) the near photo-realistic accuracy—that creates the unsettling effect. This element also goes to explain