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
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.
Detective Fiction
London, John Murray, 1926.
Murray's 2/- series. 8vo. Original cloth blind-stamped to upper cover and stamped in gilt to spine. Dust-jacket.
Murray's cheap "2/-" reprint of the fourth and final Holmes novel.
Detective Fiction
...A Gaumont All-Talking Picture starring Henry B. Walthall
London, Readers Library Publishing Company, [1930].
Film tie-in edition. Small 8vo. Original cloth stamped in gilt to upper cover. Dust-jacket.
Soutar was a prolific popular novelist several of whose books were adapted for the screen in this period, including Butterflies in the Rain (1926) and Worldly Goods (1930). The plot follows a man who takes the blame for a killing actually committed by his wife, and its long consequences.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, n.d. [1930s?].
8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket, contemporary newsagent's sticker to upper cover and spine.
The last of Crofts's four standalone novels before he introduced Inspector French, its plot splits between a South African railway murder investigated by Inspector Vandam and, some years later, a linked Scottish case taken up by Inspector Ross.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, 1934.
First edition, seventh impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7d.
The sixth Inspector French novel, set largely in Crofts's native Belfast, centres on the disappearance of a retired linen magnate en route from London to Northern Ireland. Widely reported as Crofts's own favourite of his books and among his most admired "unbreakable alibi" plots.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, 1934.
First edition, seventh impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
The seventh Inspector French novel, first published by Collins in 1931, concerns the murder of two company directors aboard their yacht in the Channel, killed just ahead of their firm's collapse and their own planned escape abroad with the proceeds. Contemporary reviewers ranked it among Crofts's strongest French titles.
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1940.
First edition, seventh impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Inspector French investigates the disappearance of Dr James Earle from his Surrey cottage on the Hog's Back ridge, a case that deepens as further disappearances follow. Published in 1933, it was the tenth Inspector French novel and Crofts's first for Hodder & Stoughton, and is widely regarded by genre historians as Crofts near the peak of his craft.
![Freeman Wills Croft, The Starvel Tragedy, reissue, [1937]](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/88496-300x300.jpg)
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, n.d. [1937].
"The Bob Novels" edition. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
The third Inspector French novel (1927): three people die in a Yorkshire house fire, initially ruled accidental, until banknotes supposedly destroyed in the blaze resurface, exposing arson, murder and body-snatching. Regarded as one of Crofts's best-known and most admired titles. Issued here in "The Bob Novels," an interwar cheap-reprint format.
London, Longmans, Green, 1944.
Early UK impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 5/-.
UK title for Scotland Yard Can Wait (1933): a bank robber released early in hopes he'll lead police to £60,000 in hidden proceeds is himself murdered, followed by his suspected accomplices. A standalone rather than a Pinkerton title.
Detective Fiction
Frome (David, pseud. Zenith Jones Brown) Arsenic in Richmond
London, Longman, Green, 1937.
Longman Thrillers edition, second impression. 8vo. Original red cloth with black device to upper board. Dust-jacket, priced 4/-.
The UK title for Mr. Pinkerton Goes to Scotland Yard (1934): timid Welsh amateur Evan Pinkerton bets Inspector Bull ten pounds that he can find a murder overlooked as natural death, and does. Brown (1898–1983), an American who lived in England 1929-31, wrote the Pinkerton books as "David Frome" and, more famously, the Grace Latham/Colonel Primrose series as "Leslie Ford."
Detective Fiction
A story of crime
London, Collins Crime Club, 1937.
First edition, seventh impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
Poirot, ostensibly on holiday, investigates the murder of American heiress Ruth Kettering, strangled aboard the Blue Train en route to the Riviera and robbed of her famous ruby, "Heart of Fire." By Christie's own account this was her least favourite of her books, written during the personal ordeal following her mother's death, her husband's infidelity and her 1926 disappearance.
Detective Fiction
Frome (David, pseud. Zenith Jones Brown) The Body in Bedford Square
London, Longmans, 1945.
Reissue. 8vo. Original grey/green cloth. Dust-jacket, with 5/- price-sticker to inside front flap.
An attractive reissue of this classic London-based murder mystery. UK title for Mr. Pinkerton Grows a Beard (1934): Pinkerton stumbles over the body of Carlotta Rathbone in a fog-bound London street, generally reckoned among the strongest entries in the series.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1938.First edition, ninth impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.First published in the UK by the Collins Crime Club on 1 January 1934, the novel finds Poirot's journey home from the Middle East interrupted when a fellow passenger is murdered aboard a train stranded in a snowdrift, the confined setting allowing Christie one of her most celebrated closed-circle solutions. The true first edition is notoriously scarce and expensive even lacking a jacket: Collins's initial print run was small and quickly exhausted, necessitating two further impressions within the same month of publication. This copy, a ninth impression, offers the text in a far more accessible and affordable state than the elusive first printing, and is further enhanced by the presence of a later 'Agatha Christie Society' bookplate.
Detective Fiction
London, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1933.
First UK edition, second impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2s6d.
The third of Plum's small run of mystery novels (1930-33, plus one late title in 1945-46), featuring recurring detective John Smith of Chicago; a little-documented American genre writer.
Detective Fiction
London, Andrew Melrose, [1936].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Seemingly the first crime title by this Hubin-listed author, featuring his recurring character Inspector Hopton. Woodiwiss had also published a collection of ghost stories in 1931.
Detective Fiction
London, Thornton Butterworth, 1940.
"First Edition Cheap Edition" (but really first edition, remainder issue with cancel title-page). 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
A detective novel by Francis D. Grierson (1888–1972), an Irish-born journalist and prolific author of over forty crime novels between 1924 and 1960, most featuring his series detectives Superintendent Andrew Ash, Inspector George Muir, or the pairing of Inspector Sims and Professor Wells.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1967.
First edition. 8vo. Original red boards. Dust-jacket, priced 18s.
Taking its title from William Blake's Auguries of Innocence, this later title ranked amongst the author's favourites of her own works.
A complete and detailed account of the amazing criminal activities of this sinister Chairman
London, Hurst & Blackett, [1929].
First edition. 8vo. Original black cloth blocked in orange. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
An omnibus reissue combining Sax Rohmer's first three Fu-Manchu novels - The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu (1913), The Devil Doctor (1916) and The Si-Fan Mysteries (1917) - under a single cover. An attractive copy.
Detective Fiction
London, Hutchinson, n.d. [c.1926].
'5th thousand'. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6 and also stating '5th thousand'.
Attractive jacket artwork elevates this later printing of an uncommon, Hubin-listed crime title.
Detective Fiction
London, Newnes, 1902.First edition. 8vo. Original red cloth blocked in elaborate gilt to upper cover and spine, with inset black silhouette of the Hound to upper cover.A great copy of without doubt one of the most thrilling and atmospheric adventures of everybody's favourite consulting detective, a glorious blend of goth pseudo supernatural and definitive Holmesian deductive scene stealing, The Hound of the Baskervilles exists very much in a realm of its own.The novel, the third of four featuring Holmes, was the first tale to be published after Doyle threw his most notable creation off a waterfall, and its considerable commercial success was really the catalyst for Holmes' triumphal return to life. With more plots than Varney the Vampire (actually five in all, including red herrings...so we're exaggerating, because everyone knows Varney has about 750), it seems very much a harking back to the Victorian style of creeper, very Le Fanu or Wilkie Collins, with its diary entries, and letters, unearthed manuscript and doom laden portents uttered by gloomy locals staring out of windows overlooking marsh land. It's glorious and deeply enjoyable, and pretty scarce in this bright condition.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, 1933.
First edition, sixth impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket. Priced 1/-.
The first Miss Marple novel, in which the body of the unpopular Colonel Protheroe is found shot in the vicar's study in the village of St Mary Mead.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, 1931.
First edition, fourth impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/-.
Village doctor James Sheppard narrates Poirot's investigation into the murder of the wealthy Roger Ackroyd in King's Abbot, the novel's celebrated twist revealing the narrator himself as the killer.
Detective Fiction
and other stories
London, Odhams Press, 1933.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
A collection of twelve stories, mostly tales of fate and the supernatural rather than orthodox detection. Features the first-book appearance of 'The Witness for the Prosecution,' later adapted into a hit stage play and Billy Wilder's 1957 film with Charles Laughton and Marlene Dietrich.
Detective Fiction
Tey (Josephine, pseud. Elizabeth Mackintosh) The Franchise Affair.
Introduction by Antonia Fraser
London, The Folio Society, 2001.
Folio Society edition. Large 8vo. Original blue pictorial cloth lettered in gilt to spine. Plain blue slipcase.
Tey's third Inspector Alan Grant novel, inspired by the real 18th-century case of Elizabeth Canning. The novel was adapted for film in 1951, directed by Lawrence Huntington and starring Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray, and was named one of the Crime Writers' Association's Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time.
Detective Fiction
London, Stanley Paul, [1939].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
Goyne was a career fiction-machine of heroic output: crime under his own name at a rate of several books a year, and, as "Paul Renin," a parallel production line of mildly scandalous romances that kept the circulating libraries in smelling salts; a double life the suburbs of his titles would have understood perfectly.
Detective Fiction
New York, Thomas Seltzer, 1926.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The fifth novel by Constance Antonina Boyle (1865–1943), head of the militant department of the Women's Freedom League, census resister, three times imprisoned, co-founder of the Women's Volunteer Police; Britain's first women in police uniform, created over official refusal - and, in 1918, the first woman ever to submit nomination papers for Parliament, at the Keighley by-election; the nomination was rejected on a technicality, but it forced the question and cleared the path for the women candidates that December.
Detective Fiction
London, The Bodley Head, 1958.
Reissue. 8vo. Original blue boards. Dust-jacket.
This novel (1924) grew directly out of Christie's 1922 round-the-Empire tour, undertaken with the irascible Major Belcher, who demanded to be put in the book, and got his wish as the 'reprehensible' Sir Eustace Pedler, thereby achieving the immortality his actual career never threatened.
Detective Fiction
London, The Bodley Head, 1958.
Reissue. 8vo. Original green boards. Dust-jacket.
The debut of Tommy and Tuppence, the "Young Adventurers, Ltd." The Bodley Head connection is the story here: Christie's first six books were published under the notoriously mean contract she signed as an unknown and resented ever after, decamping to Collins the moment she legally could - but The Bodley Head kept those early titles, and in the late fifties reissued them in this attractive uniform format with Shackel & Ryder's jackets.
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.