Beynon (John, pseud. John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, aka John Wyndham) The Secret People

London, Newnes, [1935].

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.

Wyndham’s first novel (or possibly second, the bibliographers not having entirely settled the matter, despite that surely being the point of bibliographers). Written in his twenties under the Beynon name, it is set in the impossibly distant future of 1964, by which point engineers have flooded a chunk of the Sahara to make an inland sea, and the well-off tour it by private rocket plane. As predictions go, wrong on every count, though one admires the aspiration.

British playboy Mark Sunnet and companion Margaret Lawn duly crash their pleasure rocket into the new Sahara Sea, survive that, and are promptly sucked down a whirlpool into a vast cavern world ruled by a mysterious race of pygmies. It is, in short, everything a 1935 scientific romance should be: brisk, preposterous, and quite unembarrassed about any of it.

Sixteen years later the same author produced The Day of the Triffids and became respectable. This is where he started, and early Beynon in collectable condition is far harder to find than the later fame would suggest.