This is the movie tie-in edition, with a photo of Elizabeth Montgomery taken from the film. The film was in black-and-white, though, and this cover is in color:

McPartland- The Kingdom of Johnny Cool

   From the front cover:

A raw, renegade kid with enough guts to take on the whole damned underworld — A beautiful girl with enough innocence to believe in him.

   From the back cover:

They picked their man, and taught him well.

All the right names.

All the right tricks.

All the ways to kill a man and never leave a trace.

And when they had a fine, smooth precision tool for death, they gave him the name of a gangland titan and turned him loose in the underworld empire the mobster had once owned. And they said: Take it, Johnny. Get it back. It’s yours.

McPartland- The Kingdom of Johnny Cool


GOLD MEDAL k1343. Second printing, September 1963. [above] First printing: Gold Medal 881, 1959. I don’t happen to have at hand my copy of the first printing, but I found a cover elsewhere on the Internet. Both editions are scarce. On ABE when I checked just now, there were 9 copies of the first printing, and two of the second.

McPartland- The Kingdom of Johnny Cool


   The movie was simply titled Johnny Cool (United Artists, 1963). Henry Silva played the title role.

   To read Gold Medal aficionado Bill Crider’s take on both the book and the movie, go here.