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.
![Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, first Burt edition, [1928]](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/88648-300x300.jpg)
![Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes, first Burt edition, [1928] - second image](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/88648_2-300x300.jpg)
Detective Fiction
New York, A.L. Burt, n.d. [1928].
First Burt edition. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket.
The fifth and final collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. It brings together the twelve stories published in The Strand, Collier's and Liberty between October 1921 and April 1927. First published in June 1927, by John Murray in London and George H. Doran in New York. This is the A. L. Burt reprint, "Published by arrangement with Doubleday, Doran & Company", carrying the Doran copyright notice. A. L. Burt, founded in New York in 1883, specialised in inexpensive reprints of popular fiction. The pictorial jacket shows Holmes in silhouette with deerstalker and pipe, and the rear panel advertises Burt's "Newest Books in Popular Copyright Fiction", including Wodehouse's The Small Bachelor.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1942.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
A wartime Dr Priestley mystery. During an air raid on the village of Yardley Green in December 1940, a diamond merchant is found dead in a bomb crater, but he was alive after the raid, and the diamonds he carried are missing. Jimmy Waghorn investigates and Dr Priestley supplies the solution. Curtis Evans has praised its wartime atmosphere and ingenious plotting. "John Rhode" was Major Cecil Street (1884–1964), also "Miles Burton", whose first editions are now scarce and much sought by collectors.
Detective Fiction
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1957.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 12s6d.
A late Dr Priestley detective novel. The theft of £9,750 from a locked room at the Fendyke branch of the Capital and Provinces Bank, with no sign of forced entry, has completely baffled Superintendent Jimmy Waghorn. Eighteen months later the murder of Edgar Chelmsford, an unpopular local businessman found dead in a ditch beside his damaged motorcycle, takes Waghorn back to Fendyke.
Julian Symons placed Street among the "Humdrum" school, but Jacques Barzun admired several of the Rhode novels, and Curtis Evans's Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012) has prompted a reappraisal. His books are now scarce and much sought by collectors.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, n.d. [c.1930].
Collins' 6D Novels series. Large 8vo. Original upper wrapper (lacking lower wrapper).
Unusually for Christie, this title was assembled from twelve linked short stories first published in The Sketch in 1924. Her brother-in-law Campbell Christie helped her turn them into a novel during the difficult months after her mother's death and the breakdown of her marriage. The Times Literary Supplement found it "not so much the clearing up of a mystery as a recital of Poirot's encounters" with a gang of international crooks.
Detective Fiction
in The Playgoer and Society Illustrated vol.2 No.10
London, , 1910.
Folio. Original pictorial wrappers.
The July-August 1910 number of The Playgoer and Society Illustrated, which included a souvenir of Conan Doyle's play The Speckled Band. It features the play as "The Play of the Month" with a fully illustrated sequence of photographs by Ellis & Walery, including Lyn Harding as Dr Grimesby Rylott, scenes from Act III, and "The End of the Play". There is also an article on the play by Edward Morton ("Mordred" of The Referee). The front wrapper reproduces a red-tinted photograph of the climactic scene.Doyle adapted his own 1892 story for the stage, reportedly in a week, after leasing the Adelphi Theatre for a boxing drama that closed early following the death of Edward VII. The play opened at the Adelphi on 4 June 1910 with H. A. Saintsbury as Holmes, Claude King as Watson and Lyn Harding, who also directed, as the villain, renamed Rylott for the stage. It transferred to the Globe on 8 August and ran for 169 London performances before touring. It was later filmed (1931), with Harding repeating his role.
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1947.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original red cloth. 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
London, Collins, n.d. [c.1928].
Collins' 6D Novels series. Large 8vo. Original pictorial wrappers.
Generally regarded as the first full-length locked-room mystery. In a lodging house in Bow, in London's East End, the landlady Mrs Drabdump cannot wake her lodger, the young idealist Arthur Constant. When the door is broken open, he is found with his throat cut in a room locked and bolted from the inside, with no weapon to be found. Two detectives compete to solve the case: the retired policeman George Grodman, now a celebrity author, and his old rival Inspector Edward Wimp of Scotland Yard.
An inexpensive reprint, no. 104 in Collins' "6d Novels" series ("Better than a Magazine"). The pictorial front wrapper carries the tag line "The perfect crime: can you solve it?", and the rear wrapper an OXO advertisement.
Detective Fiction
London, Herbert Jenkins, 1956.
First edition. 8vo. Original red boards. Dust-jacket, priced 10/6.
The last of Rohmer's femme fatale novels featuring Sumuru, a beautiful and mysterious woman who is the leader of a secret society of assassins, pitching her against Inspector Milligan of Scotland Yard.
Detective Fiction
London, Gollancz, 1959.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, publisher's code 'X21' printed to foot of lower panel.
Celia Fremlin's second novel of suspense, following The Hours Before Dawn (1958), which won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1960. Three sisters, the put-upon Meg, the anxious Isabel and the well-off Mildred, gather for a holiday at the seaside resort of Southcliffe, where Mildred has taken a cottage at the place she honeymooned with her first husband, "Uncle Paul". Paul was imprisoned some fifteen years earlier for bigamy and for plotting Mildred's murder, and his release is now imminent. Isabel becomes convinced that he is coming back for revenge, footsteps are heard around the cottage at night, and Meg is drawn into her sisters' mounting fears. Reviewers have singled out the closely observed relationships between the sisters, comic as well as tense, set against the caravan park and seafront of a 1950s English resort.Fremlin (1914–2009) read Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, and during the war worked for Mass-Observation, co-writing War Factory (1943) with Tom Harrisson before turning to fiction. Her novels locate their menace within the home and the family; Lucy Lethbridge described them as centred on the home as "the harbour of a particularly horrible, intimate, terror", and she has since been called the godmother of "domestic noir". Her reputation has revived in recent years, and Uncle Paul was reissued by Dover (2017) and by Faber & Faber (2023).
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1970.First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.Durbridge's novel drawn from his six-part BBC television serial of 1965, a taut mystery of murder and mistaken identity.
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1958.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original brown boards. Dust-jacket.
A crime thriller by Francis Durbridge, whose ingeniously plotted serials made him a household name on BBC radio and television from the 1930s to the 1970s.
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1959.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A thriller by Francis Durbridge (1912–1998), creator of Paul Temple and the reigning master of the BBC television thriller serial.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1932.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
The thirteenth case for Dr Lancelot Priestley, the armchair scientist-detective of John Rhode, pseudonym of Major Cecil Street, among the most prolific of Golden Age detective novelists.
Detective Fiction
London & New York, W.H. Allen, 1972.
First UK edition. 8vo. Original black boards. Dust-jacket.
Doc McCoy pulls off what he thinks is the perfect bank robbery, but there are things he has forgotten, including a treacherous partner, his amateur criminal wife, and that there is no such thing as a clean getaway... Jim Thompson's noir classic, first published as a US paperback original in 1959; this W.H. Allen edition is the first UK and first hardcover edition, appearing as Sam Peckinpah's film with Steve McQueen reached cinemas.
Detective Fiction
Small (Austin J., aka ‘Seamark’) The Man They Couldn’t Arrest
London, Hodder & Stoughton, [1927].
First edition. 8vo. Original cloth. Early issue dust-jacket, priced 3/6.
A fast-paced thriller concerning Valman Dain, an inventor whose devices include a mechanism for eavesdropping on conversations through the telephone network. Austin James Small (1894–1929) went to sea as a boy, boxed as a Royal Navy heavyweight champion during the First World War, and was encouraged to write by Jack London, adopting the pen name "Seamark" to satisfy Admiralty regulations.
![Alternative view of Seamark [pseud. Austin J. Small] The Vantine Diamonds](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88557_2-300x300.jpg)
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1930.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
A travelling salesman's case of soap is exchanged for one containing a quarter of a million pounds' worth of diamonds. Austin James Small (1894–1929), who wrote as "Seamark" in Britain and under his own name in America, ran away to sea as a boy, travelled the world, and served in the Royal Navy during the First World War, where he was a champion heavyweight boxer; he met Jack London, was encouraged by him to write, and took the Seamark pseudonym to comply with Admiralty regulations.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1944.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
The 39th Priestley novel, and one of the group of wartime titles in which Street drew directly on Home Front machinery for his settings.
19th century literature
London, Blackie & Son, n.d..Reissue. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket,Wilkie Collins's first collection of six short stories, originally published in 1856. The book is a series of tales supposed to be told to poor travelling portrait-painter, William Kerby, who is forced to abandon his profession for six months in order to save his sight.
Detective Fiction
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1935.
'Popular Edition', second impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 5/-.
The fifth appearance of Lancelot Priestley, first published by Bles in 1928 following directly on The Murders in Praed Street, and belonging to the run of late-1920s titles in which the series took its settled shape - Priestley presiding, Harold Merefield in attendance, Inspector Hanslet of Scotland Yard supplying the official view for Priestley to dismantle.
Detective Fiction
Burton (Miles, pseud. Cecil John Charles Street) Heir to Lucifer
London, Collins Crime Club, 1947.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 8/6.
Desmond Merrion, an amateur sleuth formerly of Naval Intelligence, and his wife are on holiday in the seaside town of Croylehaven, where the eccentric Croyle family and their crumbling Castle Croyle hold dark secrets and, ultimately, murder.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1947.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 8s6d.
Esther Kesgrave, long in service with the Botesdale family, returns from visiting her master - a certified lunatic confined in a mental home - to find the second Mrs Botesdale dead at the foot of the basement stairs. A post-war entry in the long Arnold and Merrion sequence, and one of the last to be issued in America before the series stopped crossing the Atlantic in 1950.
![Alternative view of Little (Conyth [i.e. Constance & Gwenyth]) The Black Thumb](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88548_2-300x300.jpg)
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1943.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Set in an isolation hospital, where the sharp-witted nurse Norma Gale contends with someone - or several someones - inclined to take an axe to the furniture and, in due course, the occupants. "Conyth Little" is the portmanteau pseudonym used on the British editions for the Australian-born sisters Jessie Constance Little (1899–1980) and Norma Gwenyth Little (1903–85).
Detective Fiction
London, Jarrold, 1936.
First edition. 8vo. Original black cloth lettered in green to spine. Supplied dust-jacket, correctly priced 3/6.
Superb jacket married to a somewhat pre-loved example of the first edition of this Hubin-listed crime thriller. Jessie Louisa Rickard (1876-1963), who published as Mrs Victor Rickard, was an Irish novelist born in Dublin as Jessica Louisa Moore. She began at 18 with a series of hunting sketches for the Cork Examiner, popular enough that the Irish Times took a hunting serial from her, though she did not publish a novel until 1912, aged 36. She went on to produce over forty books, adopting the "Mrs Victor Rickard" style expressly to avoid confusion with a young woman of her own name murdered in the case the press called the Cornish Tragedy.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1955.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, produced 10s6d.
The wealthy Phineas Barnsdale calls on his nephew at the latter's farm and is killed by a savage blow to the head while using the telephone; the interrupted call fixes the time of death precisely, and every suspect but one proves able to account for it. Fifties 'Burton' titles are sometimes harder to find than the pre-war ones, surprisingly, and mostly have no US counterpart edition.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1949.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, unpriced suggesting for export.
An elderly woman is discovered lying dead in a hammock by her great-niece - and is then found sitting up and calmly giving an interview to reporters minutes later. The puzzle reaches Desmond Merrion, whose snooping about the neighbourhood leads him to a boathouse containing two bodies, one recent and one a skeleton. The last Miles Burton to be published in the United States, and reviewed in the New York Times as "a fine, intricate puzzle".
![Alternative view of Little (Conyth [i.e. Constance & Gwenyth]) The Black Eye](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88542_2-300x300.jpg)
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1946.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 8/6.
Eugenia Gates arrives at her friend Mary Fredon's apartment for a fortnight's quiet holiday and finds every prospect of rest destroyed - and then the bodies begin to appear... "Conyth Little" is a portmanteau pseudonym used on the British editions for the Australian-born sisters Jessie Constance Little (1899-1980) and Norma Gwenyth Little (1903-85), who produced twenty-one mysteries between them in a screwball-comedy register, all but the first with "black" in the title and a corresponding black clue in the plot.
![Alternative view of Little (Conyth [i.e. Constance & Gwenyth]) The Black Lady](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/88541_2-300x300.jpg)
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1944.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Marina Hays accepts an invitation to a country house for the weekend and finds herself entangled in two murders, a disappearing swimming pool, and a courtship conducted largely by being handed boards to hold while her suitor saws and hammers, and by being addressed as Maggie and Malvina in preference to her own name. Published in the United States the previous year under the title The Black Rustle.
Detective Fiction
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1935.
'Popular Edition', second impression. 8vo. Original orange cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
First published by Bles in September 1926 as the second appearance of Lancelot Priestley, and described as the first major detective novel by its author - the book in which the machinery of the series is properly assembled. Uncommon in the jacket.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1933.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
The fourteenth Priestley novel, published in America as Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap, and set against the real RAC Motor Rally. Dilys Powell in The Spectator judged that Priestley as usual takes nothing on trust and that Rhode achieves a pretty piece of deduction; Isaac Anderson in The New York Times thought it one of the best of the series, and that no faint praise.
Detective Fiction
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1930.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
The Priestley books followed the tradition of Conan Doyle's Holmes and R. Austin Freeman's Dr Thorndyke in making scientific detection the centre of the method, and it is the technical ingenuity of the murder means - rather than character or atmosphere, in neither of which Street took much interest - for which the series is valued.
Detective Fiction
London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1935.
First UK edition, third impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2s6d.
The British title of The Maestro Murders, Frances Shelley Wees's first published novel, which appeared in New York in 1931 and introduced Michael and "Tuck" Forrester, the serial pair she used again in The Mystery of the Creeping Man.
Detective Fiction
London, John Long, [1934].
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
Charles Horace Snow (1877-1967) is among the most prolific novelists on record, with some 465 books published under his own name and up to a dozen pseudonyms including Charles Ballew, Gary Marshall, Ranger Lee and H. C. Averill. He spent his early years wandering the western United States and Mexico, supporting himself by mining and prospecting, until he was blinded when an engine he was repairing exploded in his face; after three years he was persuaded by his brother to turn his experience of the West into fiction, studied the rudiments of the craft with the help of his wife and daughter, and sold his first story in 1922.
Detective Fiction
London, Geoffrey Bles, 1957.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 12s6d.
A very late entry in the Priestley sequence, published seven years before Street's death and belonging to the final phase of the series, in which Superintendent Jimmy Waghorn of Scotland Yard carries the bulk of the investigation and Priestley presides from his study in the manner that gave the armchair detective his name.
Detective Fiction
An Asey Mayo Mystery
London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1935.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green cloth lettered in black to spine.
Eve Prence, the glamorous and relentlessly publicity-seeking proprietor of the Cape Cod Tavern, is found at the foot of the grand staircase claiming that someone has tried to kill her; the town assumes another of her stunts to fill the inn, until the following day she is discovered with a knife in her ribs. Asey Mayo - handyman, jack of all trades and the "Codfish Sherlock" - must make sense of a pair of antique pistols containing antique daggers, what precisely a blind boy heard at the scene, and two dirty indentations on a windowsill. The fourth of the Asey Mayo novels.
Detective Fiction
Another adventure of Sherlock Holmes
New York, Grosset & Dunlap, n.d. [c.1939].
Film tie-in edition. 8vo. Original red cloth lettered in black. Dust-jacket.
First serialised in the Strand in 1901-02, this remains the most celebrated tale in the Holmes canon - the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville and the curse said to stalk his heir across the Dartmoor fens. An attractively jacketed edition featuring Rathbone and Bruce as Holmes & Watson respectively, from the 1939 film directed by Sidney Lanfield.
![Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear, early US printing, n.d. [c.1920]](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/88518-300x300.jpg)
Detective Fiction
A Sherlock Holmes novel
New York, A.L. Burt, n.d. [c.1920].
Early US printing. 8vo. Original brown cloth lettered in off-white. Dust-jacket.
The fourth and final Holmes novel (1914-15), its flashback half loosely dramatising the real Pinkerton infiltration of the Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coalfields - the Birdy Edwards character standing in for the actual agent James McParland. A.L. Burt reprint of the 1915 first (George H. Doran/Smith, Elder). This edition was issued around 1920, so a scarce find in the original jacket in such good condition.
Detective Fiction
Another adventure of Sherlock Holmes
New York, Grosset & Dunlap, n.d. [early 1930s].
8vo. Original red cloth lettered in black. Dust-jacket.
First serialised in the Strand in 1901-02, this remains the most celebrated tale in the Holmes canon - the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville and the curse said to stalk his heir across the Dartmoor fens. An attractively jacketed edition depicting the scene on Dartmoor.
Detective Fiction
New York, A.L. Burt, n.d. [c.1923].
8vo. Original pictorial grey cloth. Dust-jacket.
A.L. Burt was a New York reprint house that issued Doyle's work under licence from the early 1890s into the 1930s, this being one of their later printings of the 1892 collection rather than a true first edition (Newnes/Harper, 1892). Unusually fresh for a common reprint format.
Detective Fiction
New York, A.L. Burt, n.d. [c.1922].
8vo. Original pictorial light grey cloth. Dust-jacket.
The second Holmes story collection (1893), closing with 'The Final Problem,' in which Holmes apparently dies fighting Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls - a twist that provoked public outcry and forced Doyle to revive the character a decade later.
Detective Fiction
New York, Grosset & Dunlap, n.d. [c.1940].
'Madison Square Books' edition. 8vo. Original green cloth. Dust-jacket.
A Grosset & Dunlap compilation combining 'A Study in Scarlet', 'The Sign of Four' and several short stories; this printing's jacket, carrying a photograph of Basil Rathbone as Holmes, dates it to around the 1939–40 Rathbone film tie-ins.
Detective Fiction
Chicago & New York, Rand, McNally & Company, 1895.
First US edition. 8vo. Title printed in red & black. Original red cloth, gilt.
Generally credited as the first full-length locked-room mystery novel, written by Zangwill in two weeks for serialisation in the radical London evening paper The Star in 1891 before UK book publication the following year. Zangwill (1864–1926), sometimes called "the Dickens of the Ghetto" for his novel Children of the Ghetto, was a major figure in Anglo-Jewish letters and an early, influential voice for Zionism and Jewish immigrant life in London's East End.
Detective Fiction
London, Skeffington, [c.1932].
First edition, early impression (Skeffington's Popular Novels series). 8vo. Original cloth. Presumed second issue dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
One of a series of nautical mystery titles by this author, uncommon in the jacket.