Collins Crime Club

London, Collins Crime Club, 1959.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 10s6d.

A distinctive smell of smoke presages a series of murders in a quiet village, and proves a puzzling case for Inspector Arnold and Desmond Merrion. One of the last Merrion cases (Street died in 1965, having written some seventy novels under the Burton name alone).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

London, Collins Crime Club, 1936.

First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.

On a dark November evening Sir Wilfred Saxonby travels alone in a locked first-class compartment on the five o'clock train out of Cannon Street; the train slows inside a tunnel, and when it emerges he has been shot through the heart. Suicide is the obvious answer until Inspector Arnold learns that a mysterious red light in the tunnel caused the train to slow, at which point he calls in his friend Desmond Merrion, a wealthy amateur criminologist. The thirteenth Merrion novel, it appeared in the United States from Doubleday the same year as Dark is the Tunnel, and belongs to a distinct subgenre of murders committed on the railway.

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".

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.

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.

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.