Rare and collectable Detective Fiction titles, including first editions and other significant editions, often with striking dust-jackets. Authors ranging from the obscure, the pseudonymous and the classic, such as Agatha Christie, with titles from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction and beyond.
Detective Fiction
Beynon (John, pseud. John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, aka John Wyndham) Foul Play Suspected
London, Newnes, [1935].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green cloth. Facsimile dust-jacket.
Before John Wyndham was John Wyndham (and technically he was always John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris, his parents having supplied enough names for six pseudonyms) he was John Beynon, author of this, his only published detective novel. It offers Detective-Inspector Jordon, a stolen formula, and a heroine who briskly rescues herself while everyone else stands about suspecting the titular foul play.
Two further Jordon mysteries went unpublished, which may explain the author's pivot to carnivorous plants. The Day of the Triffids (1951) made Wyndham famous, and retroactively made this book, which almost nobody bought, that being the problem, extremely scarce. Only a handful of copies have surfaced at market in twenty years; the original jacket is so rare that owning one frankly borders on the gratuitous.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1964.
Later impression. 8vo. Original orange boards. Dust-jacket.
First published in 1934 (in America, less edifyingly as The Boomerang Clue), this is Christie in breezy standalone mode: Bobby Jones (the vicar's son, not the golfer, a distinction the opening chapter enjoys) finds a dying man on a cliffside whose last words supply the title, and investigates with the aristocratic Frankie Derwent in tow. The question proved durable enough to be re-asked twice on screen, including Hugh Laurie's well-received 2022 adaptation.
Incidentally, Christie's own account of the title is rather lovely: she said the idea came from visiting a friend for tea, whose brother tossed aside a book he was reading and said "Not bad, but why on earth didn't they ask Evans?", and she decided on the spot that a future book would bear that title, before knowing who Evans would even be.
Detective Fiction
Gunn (Victor, pseud. Edwy Searles Brooks) The Borgia Head Mystery
London, Collins, 1951.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Edwy Searles Brooks (1889-1965) was one of British fiction's great production lines: decades of Nelson Lee and Sexton Blake stories before reinventing himself as "Berkeley Gray" and, as here, "Victor Gunn," whose 43 novels featuring the growling Chief Inspector Bill "Ironsides" Cromwell and his skirt-chasing sergeant Johnny Lister ran from 1939 to 1966. This one, roughly the series' midpoint, concerns a golden Borgia head worth £50,000, a retired art dealer murdered for it, and a treasure hunt at a Cumberland country house, told inverted-fashion with the villain known to the reader throughout.
UK firsts in jacket are elusive; most surviving copies led hard library lives.
Detective Fiction
London & New York, T.V. Boardman, 1959.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 10s6d.
Kane was a New York lawyer who defected to crime fiction and produced, across four decades and several pseudonyms, some sixty novels, most featuring the martini-fluent Manhattan private eye Peter Chambers, for whom this is the sixteenth outing, published in America under the flatter title Death Is the Last Lover. The Boardman edition offers the better title and, frankly, the better object: number 28 in the American Bloodhound series, with jacket art by Denis McLoughlin, whose designs have made Boardman Bloodhounds a collecting field in their own right.
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1940.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 8/3.
Freeman invented the inverted detective story, showing you the crime first and making the interest forensic rather than whodunnit, and gave the Golden Age its great scientific detective in Dr Thorndyke. It's pleasing therefore that one of his last novels hands the magnifying glass to the staff. Nathaniel Polton, Thorndyke's crinkly-faced laboratory artificer, here explains himself: the first half is his autobiography, from destitute London boyhood to master craftsman, before his horological expertise proves decisive in a murder by apparent house fire.
The penultimate Thorndyke novel, published three years before Freeman's death, and a 1940 London imprint, meaning wartime paper, wartime print runs, and jackets that mostly went the way of everything else in 1940. First impressions in any jacket at all deserve more respect than they generally get.
Detective Fiction
with a preface on thrillers
London, Constable, 1929.
First edition, first impression, 'theatre issue'. 8vo. Original blue/grey wrappers printed in black.
Hamilton's breakthrough: two young men strangle a friend to demonstrate their intellectual superiority, stow him in a chest, then serve dinner off it to a party including the victim's father, all in real time, all in one room, a construction of horrible elegance. Universally linked to the Leopold–Loeb murder of 1924, and prefaced here by Hamilton's own essay on thrillers, the author defending the form while writing one of its cleverest examples.
Its screen afterlife is formidable: a pioneering long-take BBC television broadcast in 1939, which Hitchcock cited as inspiration for his 1948 film: James Stewart, ten-minute takes disguised as one continuous shot, and homosexual subtext the censors pretended not to notice. Hamilton did it again with Gaslight, incidentally donating a verb to the language, which is more than most playwrights manage. The fragile wrappered theatre issue survives poorly - playscripts get used, which is the point of them and the ruin of them - and a very good example is quietly desirable.
Detective Fiction
London, Robert Hale, 1968.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
No relation to the mouse people, though one suspects she tired of saying so. Doris Miles Disney was a prolific American suspense writer, with some 47 novels under her belt, several filmed for television, who specialised in quiet domestic menace. This is the UK retitling of Night of Clear Choice (Doubleday, 1967).
Disney is a modestly collected author, and the Hale UK editions turn up less often than the American firsts, scarcity of the accidental rather than the celebrated sort, which is often where the sensible collecting is.
Detective Fiction
London, Harrap, 1934.
Harrap's Shilling Library issue. 8vo. Original decorative cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
The Harrap's Shilling Library ran from 1931 to 1935, focusing on mystery, crime and adventure novels, and represented in the words of one bibliographer "the last, cheapest cloth-bound printings of back catalog titles".
Detective Fiction
London, Sampson Low, Marston, [1930].
First edition, early issue. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
One of the earliest works by Knight, as often with distinctive and attractively designed dust-jacket.
Detective Fiction
London, Sampson Low, Marston, [1931].
First edition, early issue. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
The second of five novels featuring Knight's series detective Jerry Scant, a gypsy and amateur sleuth in Wales. As often with Knight's works, in distinctive and attractively designed jacket.
Detective Fiction
New York Evanston, London, Harper & Row, 1965.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth-backed boards. Dust-jacket, priced $3.50.
A detective novel which won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel for author John Ball, and the basis of the iconic 1967 Oscar-winning film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier.
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Proinnéias Ó Drógáin d'aistrigh go Gaeilge [translated into Irish Gaelic by Prendergast O'Drogan]
Dublin, Oifig Díolta Foillseacháin Rialtais [the Government Publications Sales Office], 1936.
First Irish Gaelic edition. 8vo. Original orange cloth. Dust-jacket.
The first and only edition of the first-ever Irish Gaelic translation of Sherlock Holmes - produced during the Irish language revival period, published by the government's own publications office, and now genuinely scarce.
Detective Fiction
London, Wright & Brown, [1936].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
Roland Daniel, full name William Roland Daniel, was an actor turned writer born in 1880 and died in 1969, who was incredibly prolific, producing a very large output of crime and thriller fiction for Wright & Brown.
Detective Fiction
Keverne (Richard, pseud. Clifford James Wheeler Hosken) Crook Stuff.
Some stories of crime and detection
London, Constable, 1935.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6 (reissue?).
The first of Hosken's short story collection under this pseudonym, and is relatively scarce with the original Youngman Carter dust-jacket.
Detective Fiction
London, George G. Harrap, 1932.
Third impression. 8vo. Original decorative cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
Harrap Shilling Library imprints with surviving dust-jackets are genuinely uncommon. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote of the author "unsurpassed for creepy skill in mysterious adventures."
Detective Fiction
London, Secker & Warburg, 1978.First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.Originally published in the US as a Dell paperback, this hardback edition is considered one of the scarcer Leonard editions, particularly in such good condition.
Detective Fiction
Latham, NY, British American Publishing, 1990.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced $19.95.
The American author's first novel, published when he was 26. The author has gone on to win multiple awards for his tightly wrought thriller fiction.
Detective Fiction
London, John Long, [1948].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 6s.
John Creasey (1908–1973) was one of the most prolific authors who ever lived: around 600 books under his own name and some two dozen pseudonyms, and the founder of the Crime Writers' Association and a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master. The Toff is the Hon. Richard Rollison, his debonair gentleman-sleuth, who began in the story-papers in 1933 and ran to nearly sixty novels.
Detective Fiction
A Peter Chambers Caper
London, Boardman, 1964.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
One of the 'American Bloodhound Mystery' series. Another hardboiled Chambers caper, in the Denis McLoughlin jacket.
Detective Fiction
A Peter Chambers Caper
London, Boardman, 1963.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
One of the 'American Bloodhound Mystery' series, in the jacket by collectable artist Denis McLoughlin.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, 1959.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 10s6d.
'Victor Gunn' was one of several pseudonyms of Edwy Searles Brooks (1889–1965), a phenomenally prolific writer (estimated at some 40 million words) who, under his own name and as Berkeley Gray, supplied the Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee story-papers, created the St Frank's school stories, and wrote the Berkeley Gray 'Norman Conquest' thrillers. As Victor Gunn he created Chief Inspector Bill "Ironsides" Cromwell of Scotland Yard, who this title features.
Detective Fiction
London, Ward, Lock, 1937.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, with code '736' to spine, price-clipped.
The Wonderful Scheme (issued in the US the same year as The Wonderful Scheme of Mr. Christopher Thorne) belongs to Keeler's Marceau Case sequence, offering "a third solution" to that case.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1941.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
A scarce wartime Crime Club first edition. Farjeon was known for his keen humour and flashing wit but he also used sinister and terrifying storylines quite freely.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1941.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Christie's wartime spy thriller and the third outing for Tommy & Tuppence Beresford (after The Secret Adversary, 1922, and Partners in Crime, 1929). A dying British agent's cryptic clue sends Tommy and Tuppence to the seaside guesthouse Sans Souci in pursuit of two German fifth-columnist masterminds, "N" and "M."
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1941.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Room Number Six (Crime Club no. 211 in the series) is a chase-and-romance mystery in prolific author Farjeon's characteristically Hitchcockian vein.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1937.First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original orange cloth.A solid Collins Crime Club first UK edition. Campbell (1887–1955) was a suffragist & socialist in New York, relocating to Paris then England; she published nineteen detective novels between 1928 and 1950, several with French settings, and has been revived in recent years by Dean Street Press.
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917.
1/- edition. 8vo. Original decorative boards. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
This is the third collection of Sapper's First World War stories and sketches (after The Lieutenant and Others and Sergeant Michael Cassidy, both 1915), first published 1916, offering trench tales that are realistic and at times shocking yet deliberately leavened with humour. McNeile would of course go on to create Bulldog Drummond, one of the great interwar thriller heroes. Rare in the jacket.
Detective Fiction
London, Hurst & Blackett, [1922].
First UK edition. 8vo. Ink-stamped 'With the publisher's compliments' to title-page. Original cloth.
An uncommon cinema-related title by the author of When It Was Dark (1903), under the pseudonym 'Guy Thorne'.
Detective Fiction
Fredericks (Arnold, pseud. Frederic Arnold Kummer) The Film of Fear
London, Robert Hayes, [c.1921].
First UK edition. Small 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
Number 10 in the publisher's 'Hayes' Copyright Novels' series. The plot follows film star Ruth Morton, the target of escalating anonymous threats to ruin her beauty, with series characters the Duvalls called in to investigate. The work is widely cited as the first novel centred on the motion-picture industry, though set around the early film-making world of New York and New Jersey rather than Hollywood
Detective Fiction
The Chronicles of Delancey, King of Thieves
London, Ward, Lock, 1931.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Later issue dust-jacket.
In this companion to Sing Sing Nights, Ward Sharlow agrees to impersonate the late son of a wealthy man, a device framing a sequence of nested tales about Bayard DeLancey, a Raffles-like gentleman-thief styled the "King of Thieves."
Detective Fiction
London, Faber & Faber, 1971.
First edition, first impression. Signed by the author on the title-page and again on promotional bookplate. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
The fourth novel in P.D. James's Adam Dalgliesh series, in which Chief Superintendent Dalgliesh is called in to investigate the deaths of two student nurses at the hospital nursing school of Nightingale House. The novel earned an Edgar Award and a Silver Dagger, and is widely regarded as James's breakthrough into the international market.
Detective Fiction
London, Jarrolds, December 1932.
First UK edition, second impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
J.H. Wallis (1885–1958) was an American writer who produced a number of mysteries during the 1930s, several of which appeared in UK editions through Jarrolds.
Detective Fiction
London, T.V. Boardman, 1957.
First edition, UK issue. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 10s6d.
A hardboiled/noir mystery novel issued as part of Boardman's American Bloodhound series (No. 140), which reprinted or published British first editions of American crime fiction throughout the 1950s.
Detective Fiction
London, Hutchinson, [1927].
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
A detective novel by the American collaborative writing team of Alice MacGowan and her sister Grace MacGowan Cooke.
Early Stories from Black Mask. Edited and with an introduction by Joseph T. Shaw
New York, Simon & Schuster, 1946.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
A collection of fifteen stories selected from Black Mask magazine by its editor Joseph T. 'Cap' Shaw, widely regarded as the first anthology to attempt to cover the hard-boiled genre, and a landmark in the history of American crime fiction.
Detective Fiction
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1932.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Golden Age detective novel set in the world of theatre. Andreas (1898–1975) was a prolific German novelist, journalist and screenwriter.
Detective Fiction
London, Melrose, 1937.
First UK edition. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
Uncommon edition of this murder-mystery about a string of rubies - the famous 'Blood of Buddha'.
Detective Fiction
London, Arthur Barker, 1953.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Spillane's sixth Mike Hammer novel, widely considered one of his most important, not least for its adaptation as Robert Aldrich's 1955 film noir classic of the same name, starring Ralph Meeker.
Detective Fiction
London, Stanley Paul, [1939].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The gradual conquest of China by Japan as the foundation of a Pan-Asiatic Empire provides the backdrop for this tale about an eventual Japanese-led invasion of India and extension of dominion through Southern Asia, classified as a future war title by Bleiler (p.80).
Detective Fiction
A thrilling romance of the East and the Antipodes
London, Arthur H. Stockwell, 1935.
First edition, first impression. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
An uncommon romantic thriller, by an obscure imprint often associated with vanity publications (i.e. self-funded by the author and similar).
Detective Fiction
London, Wright & Brown, 1961.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 10/6.
Hubin-listed spy thriller.
Detective Fiction
London, John Hamilton, [1938].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, rather clumsily price-clipped to front inside flap.
Serial character Inspector Jackson of Scotland Yard ranges from London to Liverpool in this complicated crime caper.