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Two further Jordon mysteries went unpublished, which may explain the author's pivot to carnivorous plants.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.
![Alternative view of Wyndham (John) Re-Birth [The Chrysalids]](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/88377_2-300x300.jpg)
Sci-Fi & Fantasy
New York, Ballantine Books, 1955.
First US edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The Ballantine Re-Birth actually precedes the Michael Joseph Chrysalids, making this less-lovely-titled US version the true first edition of the book many critics, and Wyndham's own editor at New Worlds, who thought it far superior to Triffids, regard as his masterpiece. Post-nuclear Labrador; a fundamentalist farming society whose scripture commands "Watch Thou for the Mutant"; crops burned and deviant babies cast out; and young David Strorm, who recites the creeds while concealing that he and a handful of children can speak mind to mind. It is the least typical of the major novels and the most perfectly made. A set text in British and Canadian schools for generations, and with the odd distinction of a rock afterlife: Jefferson Airplane's 'Crown of Creation' draws its lyrics directly from the novel's dialogue.
The texts differ, the American edition trimmed of some of the philosophical passages, so the completist perhaps needs both...but the priority belongs here, and Ballantine's mid-fifties hardcovers were tiny printings inside a paperback operation, making them far scarcer than their renown.
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.
American Literature
London, The Readers Library, [1928].
UK Film tie-in edition. Small 8vo. Original red cloth decorated in gilt to upper cover. Dust-jacket.
Norris was among the highest-paid novelists in America, and this little tie-in exists because of the 1927 film: Mary Pickford's last silent picture, a shopgirl romance co-starring Charles "Buddy" Rogers, whom Pickford, in cinema's slowest-burning subplot, married a decade later after divorcing Douglas Fairbanks. The Readers Library specialised in these small cheap film editions with wrap-around pictorial jackets, printed on cheap paper that was already apologising as it left the binders; toned text-blocks are simply what the species looks like. Collected now almost entirely for the jackets, silent-film ephemera in book form, and increasingly appreciated as exactly that.
Non-Fiction
Edited by Walter Hooper
Cambridge, at the University Press, 1969.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Assembled posthumously by Walter Hooper, Lewis's tireless (his critics would say tirelessly proprietorial) literary executor, this gathers the professional criticism: essays ranging across Jane Austen, Shelley, Kipling, William Morris and the literary influence of the Authorised Version, written with the clarity of a man who believed criticism should be readable, a position that has perhaps never quite caught on...
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.
American Literature
London, Alvin Redman, 1961.
First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Miller (1884–1960) was an enormously industrious American writer, decades of magazine serials and novels, mostly Southern romances and a genteel line in historical Christmas novellas involving the Lincolns and Jeffersons. This UK edition appeared from Alvin Redman the year after her death. Redman was a small London house whose back-list is quietly sought after by the collecting cognoscenti.
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.
American Literature
London, Gollancz, 1957.
First UK edition, ninth impression (film tie-in issue). 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Ferber's 1952 doorstop about Texas: cattle empires, oil money, and the Benedict marriage strained across both. Texans received the work about as warmly as you'd expect a state to receive a book pointing out its vulgarity at length. Its afterlife belongs to George Stevens' 1956 film, which won him the Best Director Oscar and gave James Dean his third and final role: he died in September 1955, before release, making Jett Rink a posthumous performance and the film a permanent object of sometimes morbid fascination. A tie-in impression, so the collecting interest here is really the jacket, with Taylor, Hudson and Dean on the upper cover.
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.
Non-Fiction
White Slave Traffic in Asia
London, John Long, 1938.
Fireside Library edition, second impression. 8vo. Original blue boards. Dust-jacket, priced 5/-.
First published in 1934 and translated from the French by Warre B. Wells, this purports to be investigative journalism: Champly follows the trafficking route from Marseilles through Singapore, Indo-China and Hong Kong to Shanghai, "the Mecca of pimps," interviewing assorted procurers and racketeers along the way. What it actually is, is a lurid exercise in colonial anxiety about the "White Race," dressed up as social concern and sold (this copy being the eleventh thousand) extremely well, which perhaps tells you something illuminating about a proportion of the 1930s reading public... It survives now as a genuinely useful primary source on interwar Shanghai's demi-monde.
Fairy & Folktales
London [&c.], Longmans, Green, 1935.
First edition. 8vo. Original pictorial cloth.
The only children's book by the author of Cold Comfort Farm, written for her daughter Laura, born that year; a fairy tale in which little Gerda is taken prisoner by elves, kept in a cave with an old gnome, and rescued by the princess of the fairies. No nasty things in the woodshed, though one feels Gibbons of all people earned the right. With Townsend's two-colour illustrations throughout. Genuinely uncommon: Gibbons is collected on the strength of one immortal novel, and this, a low-survival children's book from her most fertile decade, is among the hardest of her titles to find in good order.
Horror & Gothic
London, New English Library, 1983.
First edition, first impression. Signed by the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
An attractive signed copy of Herbert's religious-horror novel: the deaf-mute Alice, the miraculous cures, the shrine beneath the oak, and the centuries-old corruption underneath it all, later loosely filmed as The Unholy (2021).
Horror & Gothic
London, New English Library, 1976.
First edition. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original dark grey boards lettered in gilt. Dust-jacket.
A signed first edition of Herbert's third novel, sitting between The Fog and Fluke and marking Herbert's turn from catastrophe to the supernatural: a 747 comes down in flames outside Eton, killing over three hundred people, all except the co-pilot, David Keller, who walks from the wreckage without a scratch and without memory, while around the crash site the town begins to fester with something the dead have not finished.
A key early Herbert: copies with seemingly contemporary inscriptions becoming particularly sought-after.
Horror & Gothic
London, New English Library, 1975.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The second novel, following The Rats (1974). Here an earthquake releases a sentient yellowish fog that drives everyone it touches homicidally or suicidally insane, culminating in scenes of mass carnage... the Bournemouth beach sequence remains genuinely notorious... Rendered with the working-class settings and recognisably ordinary England that were Herbert's whole point: horror in the bus queue, not the Carpathians.
Horror & Gothic
London, New English Library, 1977.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Herbert's fourth novel and his great curveball: after making his name drenching London in rats and fog, he wrote a book narrated by a dog, a stray mongrel who gradually realises he was once a man, with a wife and daughter, and sets out to find them. Reincarnation, a murder to unravel, and a surprising amount of canine philosophy...his publishers must have been thrilled... A doomed '90s film version relocated to the US however proved less commercially viable.
Near fine copies of '70s NEL Herberts are getting harder to find easily, the paper stock often lending itself to toning.
Horror & Gothic
London, New English Library, 1983.
First edition, first impression. Signed presentation copy from the author. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Inscribed intriguingly by the author, 'To David / See you on the day! / Jim Herbert', indicative perhaps of a close connection with the recipient. The inscription is also dated by the author, '27 Jan '83 [?]8:40', suggesting close to point of publication, marking it out from the more often found examples with later signatures or inscriptions.
In this work, Herbert takes on Catholicism: Alice Pagett, a deaf-mute child, is suddenly cured beneath an oak tree behind her village church, claims visions of the Virgin, and begins performing miracle cures — whereupon the village becomes an English Lourdes, complete with pilgrims, press circus, and the slowly dawning realisation that whatever is working through Alice is neither immaculate nor benign.
Horror & Gothic
London, New English Library, 1976.
First edition. 8vo. Original dark grey boards lettered in gilt. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
The third novel, sitting between The Fog and Fluke and marking Herbert's turn from catastrophe to the supernatural: a 747 comes down in flames outside Eton, killing over three hundred people, all except the co-pilot, David Keller, who walks from the wreckage without a scratch and without memory, while around the crash site the town begins to fester with something the dead have not finished.
A key early Herbert: near fine jackets are getting properly difficult.
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.
Horror & Gothic
London, Hutchinson, [1948].
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, correctly priced 12/6.
Arguably Wheatley's most genuinely frightening book, and the connoisseur's choice among his black magic titles: Toby Jugg, an RAF pilot paralysed by a spinal wound, lies helpless in a remote Welsh mansion where, night after night, something vast and spider-like presses at the moonlit window, and nobody believes him, which is of course the design. Paranoia, immobility, inheritance anxiety and creeping Satanic conspiracy, told through Toby's journal with real claustrophobic force; the BBC filmed it loosely in 2006 as The Haunted Airman, with Robert Pattinson suffering photogenically. The wraparound jacket by Frank C. Papé, a great fantasy illustrator famous for his illustrated Cabell editions, here doing nightmare duty, is among the most desirable of all Wheatley wrappers.
Modern Literature
London, Hurst & Blackett, 1956.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
The novel centres on Joseph Mbagawa, an East African student and chief's son with artistic leanings, living in a London hostel with other African students; chafing against its insularity, and against the aggressive race-consciousness of his influential friend Aiyedumni, he moves to a boarding house, setting himself at the intersection of two worlds.
Modern Literature
An autobiography
New York, Modern Age Books, 1940.
First US edition, first printing. Signed & dated by the author on half-title. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
Uncommon in the jacket, let alone signed. The author has signed 'Haru Matsui' in English and Japanese, written in hiragana (for the given name Haru) and kanji (for the surname Matsui, 松井).
Ayako Ishigaki (1903–1996) was an Issei journalist, activist, and feminist, born Tanaka Ayako in Tokyo, the daughter of a college professor; she first came to the United States in 1926, moved to New York, and married the painter Eitaro Ishigaki in 1931; she adopted the pseudonym Haru Matsui to protect her family in Japan from possible retaliation for her left-wing activism. Restless Wave is a semi-autobiographical memoir detailing Ishigaki's coming of age in a privileged Japanese family, her rebellion against strict codes of women's behaviour, her political awakening, and her immigration to the United States; her critiques of Japanese society and militarism brought negative attention from the Japanese government, while the book was widely praised in the US.
Children's Books
London, Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, n.d..
Later edition. 8vo. Original blue cloth with inset colour illustration. Dust-jacket.
Originally published in 1909, this work draws directly on the author's years at Peradeniya and was very popular in the Edwardian period, running to sequels.
Horror & Gothic
London, New English Library, 1975.
First edition, first impression. Signed by the author on front free endpaper. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
Herbert's second horror novel, which he described as making horror accessible by writing about working-class characters in recognisably ordinary England rather than remote castles or Gothic mansions.
Detective Fiction
London, Harrap, 1934.
Harrap's Shilling Library issue. 8vo. Original decorative cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 1/-.
The Harrap's Shilling Library ran from 1931 to 1935, focusing on mystery, crime and adventure novels, and represented in the words of one bibliographer "the last, cheapest cloth-bound printings of back catalog titles".
Detective Fiction
London, Sampson Low, Marston, [1930].
First edition, early issue. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
One of the earliest works by Knight, as often with distinctive and attractively designed dust-jacket.
Detective Fiction
London, Sampson Low, Marston, [1931].
First edition, early issue. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 2/6.
The second of five novels featuring Knight's series detective Jerry Scant, a gypsy and amateur sleuth in Wales. As often with Knight's works, in distinctive and attractively designed jacket.
![[Shanghai]. The Life of Shanghai](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/88339-300x300.jpg)
![Alternative view of [Shanghai]. The Life of Shanghai](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/88339_2-300x300.jpg)
Tokyo, Shobido Printing Office, 1934.
8vo. Original near black, bevelled pictorial cloth. Original brown pictorial slip-case.
The first edition in English of an "attempt to visualise the unique customs of the bewitched metropolis" (Parr & WassinkLundgren), presenting Shanghai as a haven away from the raging Chinese civil war: Chinese statesmen and wealthy persons wishing not to suffer from internal turmoils took their refuge in this great town. The photographs are wide-ranging in their content, showing pedlars selling food, books, sandals and curios, the municipal fire brigade in action, policemen, customs officials, parks, shopping streets, and the racecourse.
Weird & Supernatural
London, Robert Holden, 1927.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, priced 7/6.
Australian writer Knowles' best work appears in the three books of stories and sketches, The Street of Queer Houses and Other Tales (1925), Here and Otherwhere (1926) and Silver Nutmegs (1927), notable for their humour and satire. Knowles's work is in the tradition of Richard Garnett and has affinities with the work of Lord Dunsany and Donald Corley, but he affects a more naive and relaxed style than any of these. Uncommon in the jacket.
Non-Fiction
or The Feminine Principle in Evolution. Essays of Illumination
London, Ernest Bell, 1906.
First edition, first impression. Inscribed with the author's compliments to front free endpaper. 8vo. Original cloth.
Swiney (1847-1922) was a significant figure in both British feminism and theosophy, founding the Cheltenham Women's Suffrage Society in 1896 and lecturing widely on women's education and esoteric subjects. Her writing blended theosophy with feminist advocacy and eugenicist ideas typical of spiritual feminists of the period. In 1909 she established The League of Isis, which promoted sex education for women and veneration of the Divine Mother - a subject addressed in this volume. A scarce work from an important figure in British esoteric and suffrage movements.
Thriller Fiction
London, Hurst & Blackett, 1956.
First edition, first impression. Signed by the author on title-page. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket.
MacArthur settled in Rhodesia in 1947, engaging in tree-farming as well as writing, and in all wrote over 40 books between 1945 and 1981 - travel books, adventure stories for boys and murder stories, some under the pseudonym David Wilson. Simba Bwana draws on his intimate knowledge of East and Central Africa, gained through numerous safaris following his settlement in Rhodesia, and on his earlier wartime travel writing.
n.p., , Sunday 13th November 1921.
8vo. Original pictorial wrappers sewn at top edge with tricolour ribbon.
A Remembrance Day/Armistice Day souvenir - the date of Sunday 13th November 1921 falls precisely on the third anniversary of the Armistice, and the tricolour ribbon binding identifies the publication as a memorial in the Allied commemorative tradition; the "Honor Rolls" format records union members who served and/or fell in the Great War.
Eton, Printed by George New, 1892.
First edition, ?trade issue (i.e. unsigned and without the limitation details/'privately printed'). 8vo. Original yellow printed wrappers. Slip-case.
The first edition of A.C. Benson's first collection of poems. Arthur Christopher Benson (1862-1925) was an English poet and essayist who served as the 28th Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was one of six children of Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his siblings included the novelist E.F. Benson and the Egyptologist Margaret Benson. After graduating from Cambridge, Benson returned to Eton, publishing this collection in the year he was made housemaster; he went on to spend eighteen years there. It was his libretto for Elgar's "Coronation Ode" of 1902 that brought him national fame, the words "Land of Hope and Glory" being his.
Modern Literature
London, Macmillan, 1925.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green blind-tooled cloth after design by Charles Ricketts, lettered in gilt to spine. Dust-jacket repeating the Ricketts design, priced 10/6.
Gathering Yeats' early poetry and prose fiction, including the Celtic Twilight material, 'The Secret Rose', and the Stories of Red Hanrahan, as well as the lyrics of his first period.
Modern Literature
London, Macmillan, 1923.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original green blind-tooled cloth after design by Charles Ricketts, lettered in gilt to spine. Dust-jacket repeating the Ricketts design, priced 10/6.
Gathering Yeats' major prose writings on the Irish dramatic movement alongside six plays including 'The Countess Cathleen', 'The Land of Heart's Desire', and the Four Plays for Dancers ('At the Hawk's Well', 'The Only Jealousy of Emer', 'The Dreaming of the Bones', and 'Calvary').
Modern Literature
London, John Murray, 1934.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket.
The debut novel of the author of On the Night of the Fire (1939). He remains chiefly remembered for Odd Man Out (1945), which spawned a film adaptation in 1947 directed by Carol Reed and starring James Mason.
Horror & Gothic
London, Edward Arnold, 1925.
First edition, fourth impression. 8vo. Original decorative cloth with spider's web design. Dust-jacket, priced 4/6.
A gem from the golden age of supernatural fiction, this volume collects five spine-tingling tales by Montague Rhodes James that satisfy even the most demanding need for ghoulishly "excellent stories" (Bleiler). Highly collectable in the jacket, even when, as in this case, a subsequent impression.
Detective Fiction
New York Evanston, London, Harper & Row, 1965.
First edition, first printing. 8vo. Original cloth-backed boards. Dust-jacket, priced $3.50.
A detective novel which won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel for author John Ball, and the basis of the iconic 1967 Oscar-winning film of the same name starring Sidney Poitier.
![Doyle (Arthur Conan) Eachtraí Sherlock Holmes [Adventures of Sherlock Holmes]](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/88328-300x300.jpg)
![Alternative view of Doyle (Arthur Conan) Eachtraí Sherlock Holmes [Adventures of Sherlock Holmes]](https://lycanthiabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/88328_2-300x300.jpg)
Proinnéias Ó Drógáin d'aistrigh go Gaeilge [translated into Irish Gaelic by Prendergast O'Drogan]
Dublin, Oifig Díolta Foillseacháin Rialtais [the Government Publications Sales Office], 1936.
First Irish Gaelic edition. 8vo. Original orange cloth. Dust-jacket.
The first and only edition of the first-ever Irish Gaelic translation of Sherlock Holmes - produced during the Irish language revival period, published by the government's own publications office, and now genuinely scarce.
Children's Books
London, Max Parrish, 1952.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original boards. Dust-jacket, priced 8/6.
Greene's third children's book with former lover and fellow Victorian crime fiction collector Dorothy Glover (illustrating as Dorothy Craigie). Fully embracing his shared billing, Greene delivers a vigourous attack on corporate monopoly, championing a small neighbourhood grocer, his three cats, and a lone pony against a sterile, displacing conglomerate.
London, Cassell, 1956.
First edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket, price-clipped.
Slim was commander of the 14th Army, which, in concert with American and Chinese forces, defeated the Imperial Japanese Army during the Burma Campaign. This work is widely regarded as a classic memoir of high command.