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
London, Ivor Nicholson & Watson, 1950.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
One of this US author's most enduring works, and a genuine landmark: a noir told largely from inside the head of its killer, Dix Steele, an embittered ex-airman prowling post-war Los Angeles, widely regarded as one of the first modern serial-killer novels and a strikingly proto-feminist subversion of the form.
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, Ward, Lock, 1937.
First edition, first impression. Signed by the author on title-page. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped, with publisher's code '743' on spine.
An early work by the creator of the Poldark saga, opening in Raj India and Singapore, before finding its true centre in Cornwall and the Scilly Isles. Uncommon, especially signed. The jacket artist Nina Miller Davidson (1895–1957) was a Scottish watercolourist and stained-glass designer who also produced a number of book jackets.
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, Methuen, 1932.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
An uncommon Golden Age detective novel, and a more intriguing one than its obscurity suggests. Though The Author's & Writer's Who's Who records the author as one "Peter Redcliff Shore," born Hampton 1892 and Oxford-educated, that persona appears to be a fiction: research has established the author as Helen Madeline Leys (1892-1965), daughter of the barrister-novelist John Kirkwood Leys and far better known under her other pen-name, Eleanor Scott.
A Somerville College graduate and teacher, Leys wrote mainstream novels and the didactic Adventurous Women and Heroic Women (1939), but her enduring reputation rests on the ghost-story collection Randalls Round (1929), comprising tales, several reportedly drawn from her own dreams, which have been likened to M.R. James.
The bibliographer & anthologist Richard Dalby, who reconstructed the few known facts of her life, ranked her among "the best, but ultimately least known, writers" of supernatural fiction of the era, and contemporary reviewers praised her uncanny grasp of feminine psychology.
The Death Film itself is one of very few Golden Age mysteries to set a murder in a cinema - a victim killed during a film screening - though the book is so seldom seen that little more about it has been recorded:
"...it is, apparently, an extremely scarce title and the only thing we know about it is that someone is killed during the screening of a movie. So that makes a grand total of... two cinema mysteries? Two and a half, if you count the one by Christie?" (Beneath the Stains of Time)
The other one and "a half" being One Remained Seated (John Slate [pseud. John Russell Fearn], 1946) and The ABC Murders (Agatha Christie, 1936) respectively. Genuinely scarce.
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.
Detective Fiction
London, John Long, 1965.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A stand-alone crime thriller set in a Nottinghamshire housing development, in which a doctor investigates the suspicious death of a disliked man apparently killed by wasp stings at his wife's birthday party.
Detective Fiction
London, The Cresset Press, 1958.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original baords. Dust-jacket, priced 15/- (though scored out by hand and changed to 2/6).
Set aboard a small passenger ship sailing from Liverpool to Barbados, the novel presents a series of fatal "accidents" among a mixed group of passengers, investigated by an amateur sleuth, a middle-aged conductor named Edgar Cantrell.
Detective Fiction
London, Methuen, 1930.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
One of two Hubin-listed titles by this author, featuring Inspector Digby. Seemingly rare.
Detective Fiction
Macdonald (John Ross, pseud. Kenneth Millar) The Barbarous Coast
London, Cassell, 1957.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Lew Archer's attempt to locate a missing young woman associated with an upscale Malibu country club, an early foreshadowing of Macdonald's later treatment of cross-generational themes.
Detective Fiction
London, Chapman & Hall, 1904.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth.
A collection of adventure stories featuring Don Quebranta Huesos, a fearsome Spanish bandit who operates as a kind of antihero.
Detective Fiction
An account of the hitherto unknown circumstances connected with the extraordinary affair of Charles Michael Haworth
London, Cassell, 1928.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
First published in the US the year before, this is the only novel by the actor Gillette, famous for his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes. "The mystery addict who wants... horrors tempered by novelty and a good style will be entranced both by the originality of the plot and by Mr. Gillette's unfolding of it... a mystery that will puzzle the most seasoned reader of detective thrillers. It is a most amazing and baffling crime." (US jacket blurb)
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1947.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Contemporary library cloth with ex-libris stamp to upper cover. Dust-jacket, priced 8/6.
Bowers' fifth & final novel, concerns a series of apparent suicides in a quiet English village and the murder of a local business proprietress, investigated by Detective Inspector Raikes.
Detective Fiction
Hopley (George, pseud. Cornell Woolrich) Night Has a Thousand Eyes
New York & Toronto, Farrar & Rinehart, 1945.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket, priced $2.50. Housed in later drop-back cloth box (somewhat misleadingly stating 'signed', which the book is not).
The novel centres on a con man haunted by a genuine clairvoyant ability - an unusual blend of noir and the supernatural. Cornell Woolrich (1903-68), who also wrote as William Irish, is a foundational figure of noir fiction whose work inspired numerous films including Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). First edition copies in dust jacket are scarce.
Detective Fiction
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1939.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
An uncommon bibliomystery by this British detective fiction writer of the Golden Age, who authored some thirty mystery novels, many featuring Detective Inspector William Austen.
Detective Fiction
London, Hammond, Hammond, 1951.
First edition, first impression. Inscribed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Author's first book, uncommon, especially thus warmly inscribed.
Detective Fiction
Robinson (B. Fletcher) and J. Malcolm Fraser. The Trial of the Dead.
The strange experience of Dr. Robert Harland
London, Ward, Lock, 1904.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth with inset illustration to upper cover.
Seven thrilling tales by Fletcher & Fraser, the former who had inspired in large part Conan Doyle with the idea for The Hound of the Baskervilles: "This story owes its inception to my friend, Mr. Fletcher Robinson, who has helped me both in the general plot and in the local details." (ACD, in The Strand)
Detective Fiction
London, Robert Hale, 1960.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Father Joseph Bredder, a Franciscan priest in Los Angeles - formerly a professional boxer and decorated Marine - investigates.