"A surging novel of torment and desire"

Those of you who have read Paul Theroux's essay on The Widow by Georges Simenon—either as the introduction to the NYRB edition of the book, or when it appeared in the TLS—might have wished that it had come with a visual footnote to this sentence:

[The Widow] was even resurrected as a 1950s pulp fiction paperback with a come-on tag line (“A surging novel of torment and desire”) and a lurid cover: busty peasant girl pouting in a barn, her skirt hiked over her knees, while a hunky guy lurks at the door – price twenty-five cents.

Well, here you have it. And as a bonus, we bring you the back cover's illustrated dramatis personae: "THE PEASANT WOMAN, THE EX-CONVICT, THE TEEN-AGE GIRL" and the plot synopsis that, while not strictly misrepresenting the facts of the book, gets its tone all wrong: "...Tati knew that only the most devious devices could hold a man with fatally twisted emotions"!

The TLS article bore the title "The existential hack"—which doesn't seem to have been snapped up yet as the title of a freelance writer's blog, register it while you can.