Brown (Alec) The Honest Bounder

London, Wishart & Co., 1927.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7s6d.

The author’s first book, a novel of intrigue set, according to the jacket, “against the brightly coloured background of one of the small Central European capitals”. The jacket describes it as a story in which “intrigue of a kind not usually the subject of romance” drives the action, and in which the hero must decide whether “the most valuable loyalty [is] formal, or of the heart”. Alec John Charles Brown (1900–62) is perhaps best known as a translator from Russian and Serbian, his translations including Pasternak’s Safe Conduct. The SF Encyclopedia notes that The Honest Bounder “grappled with interbellum Europe from a left perspective”; his later fiction included the science-fiction novel Angelo’s Moon (1955).