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.
London, Amalgamated Press, March 1933 to December 1937.
Fifteen weekly issues, numbers 215, 253, 261, 264, 267, 268, 277, 278, 279, 281, 284, 285, 286, 296 and 461. 4to. Original pictorial wrappers.
A selection of fifteen issues of the Amalgamated Press's weekly crime and mystery story paper, which began in February 1929 and closed in May 1940 after paper rationing. Each issue carried a complete mystery as its lead story, supported by a running serial and shorter fiction. The paper became The Thriller Library in 1937, and the last issues were published as War Thriller.The run includes three Simon Templar stories by Leslie Charteris, 'On the Night of the 13th', 'After the Murder' and 'The Race Train Crime'. It also has two instalments of Barry Perowne's Raffles series, which began in the paper in January 1933. Other lead stories are by John G. Brandon, Hugh Clevely, Murdoch Duncan, Roland Daniel and Oscar Schisgall. The serials include William B. Seabrook's Jungle Ways (three instalments) and Richard Essex's Slade of the Yard (six instalments), as well as Roy Vickers's The Secret Sin. The 1937 issue, in the Thriller Library period, carries an instalment of Dashiell Hammett's The Great Knockover.
Detective Fiction
London, John Long, 1966.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 15s.
One of Rendell's non-series psychological suspense novels: the wealthy Alice Whittaker marries a younger teacher, who joins her family firm; when she falls ill she suspects she is being poisoned. US title In Sickness and in Health.
Detective Fiction
London, Penguin, 1948.First Penguin paperback edition. 8vo. Original green & white wrappers.Hercule Poirot, travelling home from the Middle East, boards the Orient Express at Istanbul; when snow strands the train in Yugoslavia, the American passenger Samuel Ratchett is found stabbed in his compartment, and with no police on board Poirot takes up the case. First published by Collins Crime Club in 1934 (in the US as Murder in the Calais Coach); Robert Barnard called it “the best of the railway stories”. Filmed in 1974 (Albert Finney), for television in 2010 (David Suchet) and in 2017 (Kenneth Branagh). This is the first Penguin edition.
Detective Fiction
London, MacDonald & Co., [1945].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 8/6.
Penelope Shadow, a timid woman who dreads being alone, becomes a successful writer of historical novels, hires Terry Munce as her housekeeper, and marries him, only to fear that he is trying to kill her. Domestic suspense that begins as comic domestic fiction. "Peter Curtis" was Norah Lofts (1904–1983), better known for historical fiction such as Jassy (filmed 1947), who used the name for her mysteries.
Detective Fiction
London, Robert Hale, 1968.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Melissa Aubrey, emotionally fragile and bound for Europe by sea, is given a small book to deliver to an export company in Palma by a mysterious stranger, and is drawn into foreign espionage. A non-series novel by Dorothy Gilman (1923–2012), creator of the Mrs Pollifax spy series (from 1966; filmed 1970) and an MWA Grand Master (2010). First published by Doubleday in 1967. Jacket by Colin Andrews.
Detective Fiction
London, Robert Hale, 1969.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
When a Cadillac crashes through the barrier of a new highway, a gunman on the run, a sullen teenager, a jaded working girl, a guilt-stricken widower and a mistress seeking a fresh start are caught in the pile-up that follows. First published in the mid-1950s. MacDonald (1916–1986), creator of Travis McGee, was an Edgar Grand Master. Jacket by Barbara Walton, a prolific 1950s–60s jacket designer.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1966.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
A campus mystery set at the fictional University of Hardgate: a lecturer accused of administrative irregularities threatens to reopen the old murder of a student by an unknown seducer; the faculty splits, fear spreads and a new murder follows.
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, Hodder & Stoughton, 1931.
First edition. 8vo. Original blue cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
The second of Sapper's two Jim Maitland books, after the 1923 collection of stories, and the only novel. Monocled adventurer Maitland is drawn into a hunt for treasure that takes him from England to South America, with piracy on the high seas and a terror-filled island; the Science Fiction Encyclopedia classes it as lost-race fiction, featuring ape-men. US title Guardians of the Treasure. "Sapper" was H. C. McNeile (1888–1937), creator of Bulldog Drummond. Jacket by Hastain.
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1934.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
A collection of twelve short stories by Sapper. In the title story a narrator befriends the aloof City businessman Henry St. John Carruthers, who seems never to have laughed, and who rescues a naive young man from a confidence trick. Others include "The Snake Farm" and "The Great Magor Diamond". "Sapper" was H. C. McNeile (1888–1937), creator of Bulldog Drummond.
Detective Fiction
Little (Conyth, i.e. Constance & Gwyneth) The Black Stocking
London, Collins Crime Club, 1947.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Detective Fiction
New York, Doubleday Crime Club, 1942.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced $2.00.
Detective Fiction
London, Eldon, 1951.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1967.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Detective Fiction
London, Gollancz, 1935.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins, 1953.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Detective Fiction
London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1967.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Detective Fiction
London, Collins Crime Club, 1949.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Detective Fiction
London, Robert Hale, 1976.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Dust-jacket.
![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
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.