[nice tight clean copy (NO remainder mark), appears unread; no significant wear to either book; jacket has tiny abrasion at top front hinge, otherwise flawless]. The author's first novel, set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, introduced the character of P.I. Jonathan Croft, who featured in five subsequent books. View More...
[nice book, very slightly bumped at spine ends, faint dust-soiling to top of text block; jacket lightly edgeworn, a bit of soiling to rear panel, publisher's name and address written in blue ink on the rear flap]. INSCRIBED ("To ________ / in friendship"), SIGNED and dated (in the year of publication) by the author on the ffep. A crime novel -- the author's first in that genre, according to the jacket blurb -- about a British surgeon who writes a woman a "harmless little prescription" for two morphine tablets, which ends up getting him involved in "the sordid Paris underwo... View More...
[mild shelfwear, spine slightly turned, small smudge on rear cover; jacket has small tears at all top corners, other quite decent]. Detective novel set in Los Angeles, by the producer/screenwriter best known for the 1973 film SAVE THE TIGER; apparently the source for the 1975 film HUSTLE with Burt Reynolds and Catherine Deneuve (screenplay by Shagan), although not credited as such in the reference source I checked. View More...
[well-worn ex-rental library book with the usual depredations (multiple stamps on endpapers, additional stamps on top and bottom edges, etc.), front hinge cracked with webbing fully exposed; jacket is similarly well-worn and (surprise!) firmly glued down at the flaps in that typical 1930s-era rental-library manner)]. "A fast-moving detective story in which Earl Standish, who has an international reputation in police circles for ferreting out secrets, devotes some six months in the search of 20-year-old Ruth Boynton who has disappeared while on a shopping tour." View More...
(no dust jacket) [solid copy, spine slightly turned, mild soiling/browning to page edges, light staining to covers]. Fictional account -- presented as a "compilation" of contemporary newspaper stories (all phoney, but very believable) -- of a sensation murder in New York's Bowery in April 1928. Quite clever, and darn near post-modern: the Foreword is dated 1938, and is described as a "new foreword," although it's an integral part of the work, which is book-ended by the revelation that the author (an intrepid reporter who had investigated the original crime) has been happily married for eight ... View More...
[book moderately shelfworn, bumped at top of spine, small bookseller's rubber stamp (Bertrand Smith "Acres of Books") on ffep; jacket heavily edgeworn, missing about half an inch at top of spine, old yellowing tape repair across top section of rear panel, miscellaneous small nicks and tears]. "A Hank Hyer mystery," the penultimate book in this highly-regarded series of nine novels featuring Hyer, a cynical (and high-priced) New York private investigator. The author (whose real name was Rudolph Hornaday Kagey) was an NYU philosophy professor who wrote hard-boiled mysteries on the side and was... View More...
(no dust jacket) [good sound copy, moderate wear to extremities, small puncture-tear in spine, one-time owner's signature and date on ffep]. Mystery novel featuring New York private investigator Henry (Hank) Hyer, the hard-boiled protagonist of nine novels by this author (an NYU professor and admirer of Dashiell Hammett) published between 1935 and 1943 -- a group of works referred to in Steel's entry in "Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers" as an "extremely fine series," with the present volume singled out as "perhaps the finest." The plot concerns the investigation into the murder of... View More...
[moderately shelfworn, dust-soiling to page edges, spine slightly turned, one-time owner's signature on ffep; jacket edgeworn, with various tiny tears and nicks, minor paper loss at top of spine, one-inch tear and associated creasing along rear hinge (but folded back into place with no paper loss)]. The second (and final) "Mr. Guelpa" mystery, published a few months after the author's death in June of 1925. In this one, the brilliant French detective comes to America, intending "to meet various authorities in the many different branches of criminology," but (you just knew thi... View More...
[tight clean book with just the teensiest trace of shelfwear, remnants of old price sticker on rear pastedown; jacket lightly soiled, with a handful of tiny edge-tears, no paper loss]. (B&W frontispiece, 3 B&W plates) Monsieur Guelpa, in solving "the most baffling murder mystery Paris had ever known ... goes deeply into the lives of the great French family involved, lays bare their romances, their relations with one another and with the public, the sources of their wealth, the reasons for financial embarrassment, the count's rich marriage in America, his wife's early love affair, the intr... View More...
(in Grosset & Dunlap dj) [covers are worn and faded (due to dampness) along bottom edge and at top of rear cover, but the inside of the book is not affected; jacket internally dampstained (bleed-off from covers) and with some internal tape repair, but externally attractive with just a bit of wear at edges and spine ends, one small closed tear and associated creasing at bottom of front panel]. "A triple murder story in which the small world of a ship, the S.S. El Dictador, sailing from Costaragua to New York City, becomes the tense scene of the attempt to catch the murderers. There is no... View More...
[book is solid, lightly worn, several pieces of tape on each pastedown, from where dust jacket was once taped down; jacket has matching tape-pieces on flaps, otherwise just moderately edgeworn, with some light scuffing to front panel]. The first of three mystery novels by this former journalist. (Her second, "Be Still, My Love," was the basis for the 1949 film "The Accused.") During World War II, while her husband, John Truesdell, was serving in the Army Air Corps, she wrote his daily and Sunday syndicated newspaper column under his by-line. View More...
(in Grosset & Dunlap reissue dust jacket) [moderate shelfwear to bottom edge, very slight fraying to cloth at top of spine, top front corner bumped; jacket shows a little wear at edges and corners, faint staining at bottom corner of rear panel]. Mystery novel with a resurrectionist angle, involving a racketeer who's died in prison -- well, actually, he's basically volunteered to be executed by carbon monoxide gas, as part of his agreement to be the subject of an experimental technique designed to bring victims of such poisoning back to life -- the condition for his cooperation being that if it... View More...
[spine slightly turned, small stain on top edge, some discoloration to pastedowns and endpapers; jacket is heavily edgeworn, little bits of paper loss at spine ends and several corners, shallow chip at upper left-hand corner of front panel]. A psychoanalytical murder mystery, in which the accused murderess doesn't actually know if she's guilty or not. Although she testifies to her innocence in court and is acquitted, every night "she dreamed an altogether different story of what had happened, until at last she did not know which version was true and whether the truth might not be still an... View More...
(no dust jacket) [lightly worn copy, minor spotting to covers, spine cloth a little bit faded, slight bumping at spine ends and several corners]. The third and last of the author's "Inspector Lamb" mysteries. View More...
[solid copy with minor shelfwear, light age-toning to page edges, very light stain on top edge, old price-sticker shadow on ffep; jacket shows minor paper loss at a few corners, slight wrinkling and minor wear along top and bottom edges, minor paper loss at spine ends (no text loss)]. Another variation on the "vanishing woman" theme by this author, whose best-known book, "The Wheel Spins," served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 film "The Lady Vanishes." In this instance, she doubles up: two girls vanish mysteriously in the course of the story, from the same ro... View More...
(no dust jacket) [ex-lending library book (label and various stamps on front pastedown), heavily worn (especially at bottom corners), hinges tender although not cracked; should be considered a READING COPY only]. Dark suspense yarn set in Havana. Filmed, somewhat, as a B-noir (THE CHASE) in 1946, with uninspired direction (by Arthur Ripley) and Bob Cummings (who was no Bob Mitchum) in the lead. Too bad this copy isn't prettier, but I can't help that. If you're so inclined, you could dress it up with a facsimile dust jacket, and as long as it stayed on the shelf nobody would be the wiser. View More...
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