The Cover

When I enlisted graphic designer Caroline Johnson to create the cover for Nothing to Fear, I knew the task posed a fundamental challenge: how to capture the spirit of a book that cuts across genres and defies an easy “elevator pitch”?

But the book was in great hands. Caroline not only has a terrific portfolio of covers, but also is a self-described cinephile and Hitchcock fan.

Her cover design is a knockout, creating an elegant and eye-catching visual while referencing the book’s central ideas.

The immediate inspiration was a publicity still for The Wrong Man that featured fingers pointing at the film’s two stars, Henry Fonda (as Manny Balestrero) and Vera Miles (as Rose Balestrero). Working off of that concept, Caroline’s cover captures a fraught and often fateful moment for innocent suspects in mistaken identity cases: the initial eyewitness confrontation. Historically, New York authorities staged these confrontations in a highly suggestive way. For example, detectives often made suspects parade alone before the eyewitness (a procedure known as a “showup”) rather than placing them in a lineup with a group of people of similar appearance/age. In addition, police sometimes solicited identifications from multiple witnesses at once, creating the risk that they would influence each other.

The Wrong Man has several scenes depicting these practices. Caroline’s cover distills them into a single image. In her design, the accusing fingers of eyewitnesses create a menacing frame around a silhouetted figure clad in a trench coat. Ironically, the figure appears to be facing away from the accusers. This positioning signals the lack of reliability in their accusations. At the same time, the accused’s garb gives the image a double-meaning. On one level, it tracks the real case that inspired The Wrong Man, since police required Manny Balestrero to don his hat and coat when brought before eyewitnesses in 1953. But the figure also calls to mind the prototypical look of film noir protagonists.

Then there’s the striking color scheme. The dominant red points to the inflamed emotions of the accusers, who may have experienced trauma from having seen (or been victimized by) a crime and are now out for blood. The red also conjures the racing heart of the suspect and the terror of being misidentified as a criminal (perhaps I’ve seen The Shining and The Sixth Sense too many times, but I associate red with dread). Meanwhile, the black smudges of ink that mark the cover’s margins foretell the accused’s fate: arrest, fingerprinting and imprisonment. This touch is all the more fitting because The Wrong Man has one of the more vivid fingerprinting scenes ever put on film.

My deep thanks to Caroline for such a striking evocation of both the real and cinematic narratives explored in Nothing to Fear.