In 1961, Tony Colwell, design director at the publisher Jonathan Cape, made a £25 bet with the artist Tom Adams. Colwell had received the manuscript for John Fowles’s first novel, The Collector, and his instinct was that it required a dust jacket in the trompe-l’oeil style of Richard Chopping, whose artwork for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels was widely celebrated. He challenged Adams to produce one.
Initially uncertain, Adams, who has died aged 93, accepted the bet and produced what Fowles later called “the best jacket of the year, if not the entire decade”. Adams’s symbolic cover featured a lock of lady’s hair, a large old-fashioned key and a butterfly. It was universally praised, and Adams’s agent, Virgil Pomfret, took a proof of the cover to show Patsy Cohen, art director at Collins, suggesting his client would be the perfect cover artist for Agatha Christie.
Cohen responded cautiously, asking that Adams produce a cover “on spec” for a new edition of A Murder Is Announced. Eschewing the usual staples of a dead body or a depiction of the detective, Adams settled on a representative tableau of an elegant clock under glass and wilted violets resting on a newspaper clipping on a mantelpiece, with bullet holes in the wall behind. Cohen liked it, and the book’s publication in 1962 marked the beginning of an 18-year relationship for Adams with Christie’s novels . He provided more than 100 Christie covers, chiefly for Fontana in Britain and Bantam in the US.
Although many featured skulls and skeletons, there were no overtly violent scenes on Adams’s covers, with the exception of Lord Edgware Dies, which depicted the victim with a Victorian paper knife driven into his head. In some, violence had clearly happened: there was a blood-and-hair-coated hammer in one of his illustrations for the novel N or M?, and a dagger thrust through the tweed of Roger Ackroyd’s jacket for The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Surreal juxtaposition was a favoured technique, Adams claiming that classical surrealism lent itself to the symbolist illustration of thrillers and crime stories. Certainly he drew on René Magritte – replacing a vicar’s head with a tennis racket for The Murder at the Vicarage – and Salvador Dalí – visible in Destination Unknown’s swirling sky and smoke writhing over a desert dotted with colossal pearls.
Giant insects provided a third theme, with a huge fly hovering over a body (Mrs McGinty’s Dead), a trapdoor spider emerging from the head of a woman (Appointment With Death) and, most famously, an enormous wasp attacking an aircraft (Death in the Clouds), which inspired a 2008 episode of Doctor Who (The Unicorn and the Wasp).
Apart from his successful collaborations with Christie and Fowles (which included the 1969 first edition of The French Lieutenant’s Woman), Adams also painted paperback covers for Raymond Chandler and Robert Silverberg (both for the New York publisher Ballantine), and dust jackets for Jonathan Cape. These included Kingsley Amis’s Colonel Sun (1968) and The Alteration (1976), Patrick White’s The Vivisector (1970), David Storey’s Saville (1976) and Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979). Adams also illustrated The Great Detectives (1981) by Julian Symons.
Two collections of his cover art have been published: Tom Adams’ Agatha Christie Cover Story (1981; published in the US as Agatha Christie: The Art of Her Crimes), which he co-edited with Symons, and Tom Adams Uncovered (2015), co-edited with John Curran. The latter contains Adams’s final three Christie covers, one of them for the previously unpublished Hercule Poirot and the Greenshore Folly (2014).
Adams was the son of James, a Scottish town planner, and his wife, Constance (nee Peters), and was born in the US, at Providence, Rhode Island, although not long after his birth the family moved to the UK, where his father became county planning officer for Kent. Tom had a precocious talent as a painter, but after he left Maidstone grammar school his progress was delayed by the second world war. Her served in the navy between 1944 and 1946 on minesweepers, during which time he also spent a year at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Then he completed his art training at Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmiths College, in London, graduating with a national diploma in painting in 1950.
His early career as an illustrator included designing pub signs and writing and drawing half-page features for Eagle comic on soldiers and medals. He teamed up with George Cansdale, the superintendent of London zoo and a well-known television personality, to illustrate Cansdale’s wildlife features for the Eagle on insects, birds, fish and dinosaurs. For Eagle’s junior companion comic, Swift, he produced large colour panels on birds and wild animals that are considered among the best of his early work.
In 1958 he co-founded Adams Design Associates with his architect brother, Peter, and two friends, Anna and Andy Garnet. The company produced large murals in the new medium of laminated plastic for various businesses, including Royal Bank of Scotland and Standard Chartered Bank. The operation expanded in 1960, adding the artist Barry Daniels and the architect Colin Huntley to its roster, designing furniture for Harrods, Liberty and Heal’s, and changing its name to Danad Design Associates.
In 1961 Adams had become a design consultant to Aspro Nicholas pharmaceutical group and the laminated plastic manufacturers Airscrew Jicwood. In 1967 he opened the Fulham Gallery in London, from where he published limited edition silkscreen poetry prints by Christopher Logue, Adrian Henri, Brian Patten, Ted Hughes, Edward Lucie-Smith, Henri Chopin, Anthony Thwaite and the poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis. He also designed posters for Mark Boyle’s The Sensual Laboratory, a light show that toured with Jimi Hendrix and Soft Machine. Lou Reed, a fan of his work, sought him out to paint the cover of his self-titled debut album (1972), and Adams later painted covers for the British soul band Kokomo’s debut album (1975) and Iron Maiden’s greatest hits compilation, Edward the Great (2002).
Commissioned to paint a portrait of Benjamin Britten in 1971, Adams produced a lifescape incorporating elements of Britten’s work. His other portrait subjects included the Prince of Wales, Federico Fellini, Bud Flanagan and Richard Dimbleby.
He was involved in films as a concept illustrator for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Mike Hodge’s Flash Gordon (1980) and Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (1985), also working with Nicolas Roeg and the production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti.
In 1980 he opened the Calvert Gallery in Pimlico, London, where he promoted the works of young printmakers, mounting postgraduate diploma shows for the Chelsea College of Art and other institutions. In the late 1980s he worked on a series of advertisements for Bell’s whisky. In later years, from his home in Launceston, Cornwall, Adams continued to paint commissions and to exhibit.
He is survived by his third wife, the children’s author Georgie Adams (nee Georgina Pritchard), whom he married in 2005, and their daughters, Abigail and Imogen; by Jonathan, Mark and Charlotte, the children of his first marriage, to Audrey (nee Bates), which ended in divorce; and by five grandchildren, Mia, Esme, Leon, Daniel and Makeda, two step-grandchildren, Ghiselle and Isadora, and two great-grandchildren, Sienna and Tristan.
• Thomas Charles Renwick Adams, artist and designer, born 29 March 1926; died 9 December 2019
