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[TYSSOT DE PATOT, Simon.] Voyages et Avantures de Jaques Masse. A Bordeaux, Jaques l'Aveugle 1710 [ie The Hague c1715?]. 12mo modern calf. Title a touch rough around the edge, browning of the earlier sections, a pretty good copy. Au$1500

First edition it seems of this imaginary Australian voyage and troublemaking utopia. The bibliographical world has accepted Rosenberg's separation and stretch of the four '1710' editions over four decades, with the first appearing no earlier than 1714 and the last not before 1742. As I have the first, his 'A', I'm hardly going to argue with him. Early commentators dismissed Tyssot and his book with a snarl: atheistic and scandalous, socialist, meprisable (contemptible), inexpressibly confused; but modern scholars have gone industrial. A quick survey shows the wealth of academic ore mined from Tyssot: Judaism and Enlightenment; Language and the History of Thought; Astronomy, Prophecy and Imposture; Cartesianism and Female Equality; The Ideal Language; Masks, Blackness, Race; Early Deism in France; The Wandering Jew; and I'm sure there's plenty left. I do wonder how many of these scholars read the book: more than one describes a very different book from the one before me.

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RADCLIFFE, Ann. The Italian, or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents. A romance. Dublin, printed for P. Wogan &c 1797. Two volumes 12mo contemporary sheep (some insect chewing of leather around the spines). Some browning and signs of use but a pleasing enough original copy. Au$1250

First Irish edition, hard on the heels of the London edition. Having never recovered from The Mysteries of Udolpho and the awe and wonder it produced in me - I still wonder how it didn't kill the Romantic movement stone dead and I had an awful urge to slap Emily every time she trembled in ecstacy faced with a slice of nature - I'm unable to face The Italian. The conflicting opinions of it being her both her best and her worst book makes it bit more intriguing.

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KENNEDY, William [ed]. The Continental Annual, and Romantic Cabinet, for 1832. With illustrations by Samuel Prout. London, Smith, Elder [1832]. Octavo publisher's morocco; x,313pp, 13 engraved plates including the extra title. Plates a bit foxed but in all quite good. Au$75

Not a bad gathering of romantic, often gothic fiction with such tales as The Fanatic; The Wax Figure; The Black Gate of Treves; The Spy; and The Prima Donna, a Tale of Music.

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Drama. The Miller and His Men. A drama, in two acts. Written expressly for, and adapted only to Webb's Characters and Scenes. London, W. Webb [c1840?]. 12mo plain wrapper; frontispiece and 18pp. Spotted, used but decent enough. Au$60

Doubtless adapted from Pocock's very popular sensational drama (it was also novelised by Prest some years later) for Webb's Juvenile Theatre. The frontispiece is very fine, showing the miller and his robbers being, with great energy, blown sky high.

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FEVAL, Paul. The White Wolf; or, The Secret Brotherhood. A romance. London, J.S. Pratt 1849. [Yorkshire printed, by Pratt in Stokesley]. 16mo; wood engraved frontispiece, title leaf and pp11-444, complete and seemingly as issued. Inserted into a blindstamped cloth binding of a title in Milner & Sowerby's Cottage Library with a small printed paper title label added to the spine, front hinge splitting. Certainly a used copy, with marks and smudges and corners off the last two leaves but still quite decent. Au$185

First English edition? It seems likely, perhaps even the first edition in English. I find nothing earlier except for a dubious listing of an 1848 New York edition of which no copy is located. It doesn't seem natural for a small provincial publisher to be first in with a major piece of translation but Pratt - apparently a family concern that had specialised in sermons and improving tracts - went sensational in the forties publishing such titles as Arwed Gillenstern, or the Robber Captain's Bride; Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain; and The Gipsy of the Highlands: or, the Jew and the Heir. It took me a while to be convinced that this is a home made remboitage rather than a repackaging of Pratt sheets by Milner & Sowerby with later fiddling but I am sure. I'm not going to removed the title label to see what's underneath, it's too much a part of the book's history now. This was in Walter Stone's collection - he had a reasonably impressive collection of bloods, gothics and similar trash - and it's possible he did it but the endpapers and what look like bookseller's pencilling make me think it was done before he got it. Someone thought it worth saving and they were right. Searches of all the expected catalogues finds one copy, also in the colonies - in the University of Queensland.

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HOLCROFT, Thomas. A Tale of Mystery: a melodrama, in two acts. London, Cumberland [c1850?]. 12mo printed wrapper; 32pp, frontispiece by Robert Cruikshank. Au$50

A fine and terrible gothic melodrama adapted from Pixerecourt's "Coelina" and first staged and printed in 1802.

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FROST, T. [Thomas]. The Corsican Brothers; or, The Fatal Duel. London, Purkess [1852?]. Octavo contemporary half calf, original colour illustrated front wrapper mounted on a front endpaper. Bound from the parts with a wood engraving in each part. Some browning and signs of use but a handsome copy with the signature of the great collector of gruesome trash J.P. Quayne. Au$600

First edition? Rare, apparently missed by Summer's who caught other Frost productions in his Gothic Bibliography. This appeared at much the same time as an English translation of Dumas' novel so Frost offers a short preface in which he insists he didn't know Dumas' novel existed. He based this on the play adapted from Dumas and presumed Dumas' work was also a play.

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McLEVY [M'LEVY], James [and Alfred Crowquill]. Romances of Crime; or, The Disclosures of a Detective. Glasgow & London, Cameron and Ferguson [c1860?] Octavo; xvi,304pp. Bound after Alfred Crowquill's 'A Bundle of Crowquills' (London, Routledge 1854) in contemporary half morocco; illustrations in the Crowquill. The Crowquill is browned but the McLevy is quite good; both are bound without half titles. Au$500

Rare. The Edinburgh detective McLevy has been rediscovered in recent years - with reprints and new fictional cases - but the original editions remain obscure. Of the five titles of his adventures that appeared through the sixties, that I can trace, I suspect that at least one is a new edition of this book; and I'm pretty sure that this is the first of his books - judging by the editor's preface. Whether McLevy or a ghostwriter actually penned these, each adventure is short, pithy and carries a catchy title: The Conjuror; The Handcuffs; The Belfast Key; The Dead Child's Leg; The Blood-Stained Moleskin; ... In each the unfailing McLevy usually solves the case in less than a dozen pages.

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GOODRICH, Henry Newton. Raven Rockstrow: or, the Pedlar's Dream. A romance of Melbourne. Melbourne, Caxton Repository 1864. Octavo later (earlyish-mid c20th) morocco; [8],7-258pp, (wood?) engraved frontispiece by Calvert after a drawing by John Fallon. Name and a couple of extraneous squirls on the title, some browning; a pretty good copy with the bookplate of Harry Austin Brentnall, medico and bookmaker whose books used to be ubiquitous in the Sydney trade. Au$1150

Only edition of this quite rare sensation thriller, dubbed the first Melbourne novel proper. Certainly it's a grim metropolitan book set in the slums where life revolves around the pawn shop. From two brief paragraphs I picked out these descriptions of Goodrich's Melbourne: dreary, isolation, misery, oppressive, ghostly waste, and forlorn. Blackmail, murder, a story within a story; it's all here. This has one of the most captivating illustrations I've seen in a thriller. The frontispiece, on pink paper, is a dark, dark engraving that demands close inspection; maybe the best depiction of what mysterious deeds in the dark of night really look like. The binding is neat and workmanlike more than inspired. Most of the twentieth century was not a good period for Australian binding.

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DICKENS, Charles & Wilkie COLLINS. No Thoroughfare .. being the extra Christmas number of All the Year Round ..; London, Christmas 1867. Octavo publisher's printed blue wrapper (an inoffensive erasure from the front cover, small flaw to the edge of the back cover); 48pp. A few spots and signs of use but quite a good copy. Au$100

First edition.

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LAWSON, Captain J.A. Wanderings in New Guinea. London, Chapman & Hall 1875. Octavo very good in a commercial red cloth prize binding decorated in gilt and black; tinted litho frontispiece and a folding map. A bright copy, interesting as an example of the school prize industry. This has a large colourful prize plate - dated 1883 - inside the front cover printed by the London Scholastic Co. who may well have been one of the companies that made their business buying up unsold sheets of books and preparing them for prizes. In this case the binding is attractive enough, if anodyne, and the edges, untrimmed when originally issued by the publishers, have been trimmed and gilded all round. Au$300

Only edition. Like many of the best travel books, completely - from this distance ridiculously - imaginary, it sparked a fair few tight-lipped letters to the editor from both sides of the fact-fiction divide. Even Moresby, in the appendix to his book, printed a long and detailed letter to the Athenaeum refuting many claims made by Lawson. Given the furor it is surprising that not only did the book never reach a second edition but sheets were sold off as remainders. This may say something about embarrassment at Chapman and Hall. The authorship of this has occupied generations of bibliographers; it has been ascribed to Lieut. Robert Henry Armit - plausible until we consider the other books associated with Lawson - and Ingleton advanced the cause of Lieut. Dawson who accompanied Moresby to New Guinea and wrote this as an act of revenge, though how it's vengeful is not clear. Captain Lawson was the author of at least one more book - The Wandering Naturalists (1880) - where he also claimed authorship of Travel and Sport in Burmah which seems to be the book that appeared as written by John Bradley in 1876. The Library of Congress links the two authors, confidently gives Lawson the christian name John and suggests that Bradley is the pseudonym. Carrying on we find that Travel and Sport in Burmah has been attributed to James Anthony Lawson by Cushing and to Captain John A. Lawson by Kirk. Here is where I'm ready to give up.

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EVANS, Samuel. The Yarra Bend and Other Poems and Verses. Melbourne, printed for the author 1877. Small 8vo publisher's cloth (rubbed); xii,116pp. Au$225

Only edition. As with almost all colonial verse we have to look beyond the poetic qualities for interest and here, for a change, we find some. The Yarra Bend is the site of the lunatic asylum (is this the origin of the phrase 'around the bend'?) a focal point in this crazed melodrama of eloped lovers, a test of constancy gone wrong, captivity by bandits, the care of the mad, a happy denouement and a final puzzling suicide. Mr Evans seems to have exhausted his muse with this; I find no evidence that he published anything else.

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THOMAS, Edward A. At Swords' Point. A novel. Philadelphia, Claxton &c, 1877. Octavo publisher's green cloth. A bit of browning at the ends, minor signs of use; a rather good copy. Au$250

First edition of this scarce thriller that begins with a desperate chase and gets complicated soon. A villain is accused of murder and our hero, a young lawyer, is happy to prosecute him, until he looks at the evidence.

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ALDRICH, T.B. The Stillwater Tragedy. Boston, Houghton Mifflin 1880. Octavo, excellent in publisher's brown cloth blocked in gilt, red and black. Au$175

First edition; classic detective fiction and an anti-labour novel, with a murdered corpse at the end of the first chapter and an unjustly suspected hero standing up to thuggish strike leaders. While barely inflammatory (the author and printer did not, after all, have to go into hiding), this novel did stir up more conversation than usual amongst his readers (his readers can't have been expected to take much exception to it; Twain wrote to Aldrich that he had enjoyed reading it in the notorious periodical of Howells and that Mrs Clemens was looking forward to it between baby feeds) and the connections between Aldrich and the extreme anti-labor literature of the late 19th century are not hard to trace.

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Kate Temple? The Fair Mystery. By the author of "Strangely Parted," &c., &c. London, Edwin J. Brett [188-?]. Largish octavo publisher's colour illustrated boards (spine quite chipped and apparently sometime repaired); two colour wood engraved plates, full page wood engraved illustrations. A very decent copy. Au$475

The book edition of a work first issued in parts. Hubin attributes this to Charlotte M. Braeme or Brame while the British Library attributes 'Strangely Parted' to Kate Temple and dates it 1885. I think we can discount the Brame (aka Bertha M. Clay) attribution which is based on perhaps a confusion with her novel 'A Fair Mystery' - a different book altogether. Kate Temple also becomes suspect when we find no other title under that name. A fabulously ripe sensation thriller, it's hard to choose a representative passage. There are so many on almost every page. Copac and OCLC find two copies of The Fair Mystery: in the BL, apparently in parts, and in Canberra at the ANU, apparently this book issue.

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WILKINS, W.A. The Cleverdale Mystery; or, the machine and its wheels. NY, Fords, Howard & Hulbert 1882. Octavo publisher's illustrated brown cloth blocked in black and gilt; part of the back fly torn away but still a remarkably good copy. Au$150

First (only?) edition of this melodramatic thriller of politics, murder and dastardly deeds set in the sub-Adirondack playground of Lake George. Wilkins, editor of the local Whitehall Times, also published a play of this in the same year.

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McGLOIN, Frank. Norodom, King of Cambodia. A romance of the east. NY, Appleton 1882. Octavo publisher's decorated ochre cloth blocked in black and gilt. A rather nice bright copy. Au$175

Only edition of this Asian fantasia, surely an early entrant into modern Cambodian fiction. Lots of warfare, sorcery, demons, and a final great explosion that blasts Norodom and his wicked consort Almeta to the moon means that this should be in the bibliographies of fantastic literature but most seem to have missed it. It's an odd excursion for McGloin whose habitual topics were law and religion in Louisiana.

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Kyokutei Bakin. [sometimes called Takizawa Bakin]. 夢想兵衛胡蝶物語 [Muso byoe kocho monogatari - A Dreamer's Butterfly Tale]. Tokyo, Haishi Shuppansha 1882 [Meiji 15]. Two volumes 225x155mm, publisher's embossed yellow wrappers; a half-page, ten double page and five full page woodcut illustrations by Yoshitoshi. A tiny bit of nibbling to a couple of pages edges, a good fresh copy. Au$750

Bakin's imaginary voyage fantasia was first published in 1809-10 and this is, I deduce, the second edition, revised or corrected from Bakin's own copy of the first edition; the first with Yoshitoshi's illustrations. Further editions followed thick and fast but apart from a partial translation in The Chrysanthemum (Yokohama 1882) I can't find an English version exists - particularly frustrating as Yoshitoshi's illustrations are magnetic. The surreal and grotesque are always hard to resist - and Yoshitoshi was a master among masters - and I don't think I've ever seen a better illustration, a better description, of the world of an opium smoker. The best account of the book I've found is in a 1909 letter from Minakata Kumagusu to the publisher Gowans & Gray who had approached him for a translation of a Bakin work of his choice. He chose this, "the only book that ever took me out of bed 30 minutes sooner than I wished to get up", and described it as something like Gulliver's Travels in which a man, decided there is nothing more to learn in his own land, determines to travel the world. He is told the means - a kite - in a vision and sets off to explore the lands of Infancy, Lust (high, medium and low grades), Drunkenness, Greed Trouble, Sorrows, Falsehood and Happiness. Unfortunately Gowan & Gray wouldn't spring for Kumagusu's fee and that was the end of that. At least we have Yoshitoshi.

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LYNCH, Lawrence L. [Emma Murdoch van Deventer?]. The New Detective Story. The Diamond Coterie. Chicago, Donnelley 1885. Octavo publisher's illustrated plum cloth blocked in black and silver (surface blotch on the back cover); numerous full page wood engravings (not without some crude appeal). Some natural toning of the paper but a rather good copy. Au$100

I'm not sure whether the mystery of the first edition of this book has ever been solved but I can tell you this isn't it. Copyright dates of 1882 and 1884 have led some bibliographers to the conclusion that there is an 1882 edition but I want to know who has seen one. There is an 1884 edition but I doubt the supposed Sumner 1884 edition cited by some really is 1884; my bet is on Donnelley 1884 being the first edition. Emma van Deventer has been long established as Lawrence Lynch but I've come across recent questions about the existence of anyone called Emma Murdoch van Deventer. The publisher tells us that this 'combines the excitement that ever attends the intricate and hazardous schemes of a detective ... with ... as carefully constructed and cunningly elaborated a plot as the best of Wilkie Collins' or Charles Reade's.' This is not unreasonable, it certainly is elaborate.

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HOWE, E.W. The Mystery of the Locks. Boston, Osgood 1885. Octavo publisher's decorated brown cloth blocked in black and gilt. A small, almost tiny, snag at the top of the spine, a rather good, bright copy. Au$125

First (only?) edition. A fine array of gothic chapter headings if nothing else: The Town of Dark Nights; The Face at the Window; Pictures in the Fire; The Locks' Ghost; The Whispers in the Air; The Ancient Maiden; A Shot at the Shadow; The Step on the Stair; The Pursuing Shadow; ... and finally The Going Down of the Sun.

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LEFFINGWELL, Alsop. The Mystery of Bar Harbor. A melo-dramatic romance of France and Mt. Desert. NY, Dillingham 1887. Octavo publisher's cloth blocked in gilt and black (a touch rubbed); some natural browning but quite a good copy. Au$145

First (only?) edition.

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HIGGINSON, S.J. [Sarah Jane Hatfield Higginson]. A Princess of Java. A tale of the far east. Boston, Houghton Mifflin 1887. Octavo publisher's printed pattern cloth with paper labels (spine tips a bit chipped). Au$175

First edition of this sometimes thrilling romance, or sometimes romantic thriller. I can't decide whether Mrs Higginson ever visited Java. This begins more like a travelogue - and she wrote a travel book for children about Java a few years later - than a novel and it's the surfeit of local colour and language that makes me wonder whether it all comes out of Raffles. There is a strong streak of feminism - our heroine princess, infected by association with western women, rejects docile subjection to her arranged marriage and other distasteful traditions - but the extraordinary culmination of this book is the celebration of not one but two interracial marriages. Admittedly the duskier half of each couple is the princess and a handsome young prince and the unions eventuate with some fairy tale inevitability. But the ordeals and dangers, the adventures of the heroines (there are three) are directed by their conflict with the cultural and racist demands of their parents. In the end it's Mrs Higginson's brave appreciation of and close attention to the beauty of the Javanese that lends me to believe she spent time there; more than her cavalcade of murderous amok, Guwa Upas - Valley of Poison - and ular lanang, a king cobra that blows gusts of poison. Trove finds no copy in an Australian library.

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Japanese illustration. Hanai Oume? Set of proof wood engraved illustrations for a Japanese serial story. n.p. n.d. [c 1887?] Oblong quarto by size (260x185mm ) contemporary plain wrapper; 41 wood engravings on 21 double folded leaves. A little browning. Au$475

A prime example of the strange casserole of Meiji Japan. In form, in technique, in content and in production these hold all the paradoxes of Japan embracing western modernisation while hanging fast to tradition. These are the illustrations for what seems a rollicking sword and sash thriller but ... it is set in a modern metropolis; bowler hats, suits and dashing mustachios are not out of place, neither is what looks like a railway station; and these are not ukiyo-e woodcuts for a popular novel, these are western wood engravings for a long serial - there are 41 after all - in a newspaper or broadsheet magazine; an illustration of such a paper helpfully holds a bough of blossoms in one illustration. The subject apart, the glaring difference between these and any western illustrations is the skill of artist and engraver, all but a few western counterparts are put to shame. I'm convinced that these relate to Hanai Oume the celebrated Tokyo geisha-teahouse owner who, in 1887, stabbed her sometime lover and employee who, apparently in concert with her father, was trying to muscle her out of the business. The first illustration here shows two men holding umbrellas that, I'm told, advertise a restaurant or 'licenced pleasure quarter' remarkably similar to hers: Suigetsu. Oume or O-ume - her professional name - was celebrity manifest. Her murder trial was public and though crowds unable to get in became irate every moment was covered in the press; books were published within minutes, kabuki plays and novels performed and published, and the newspapers made rich. Yoshitoshi produced a famous print of the murder as a supplement for the Yamato Shimbun but while there is plenty of violence in these pictures there is no murder. Spin-off or fanciful concoction, there's a good story here. There is an owner's (maybe artist's?) seal which I make out to be 春耕慢虫 - but I suspect I'm wrong.

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HUME, Fergus. Madame Midas: realistic and sensational story of Australian mining life. London, Hansom Cab Publishing Co. 1888. Octavo contemporary half morocco (a little scuffed); original illustrated wrappers bound in. Without the first advertisement leaf before the half title; a very good, fresh copy. Au$675

One Hundredth Thousand and doubtless the first edition. I, and more expert authorities, have been unable to locate anything that looks like an earlier printing. Even given the predilection of publishers of sensation fiction to puff their wares beyond belief, the enthusiasm of the book trade makes it feasible that in this case that a first print run labelled the 'one hundredth thousand' may not only be likely but reasonable: 'Mr. Fergus Hume [ ...] has published a new story, 'Madame Midas'. The popularity achieved by Mr. Hume may be gauged by the fact that the English trade subscribed for 83,750 copies of the book'. The Bookmart Sept. 1888 p.225 (this courtesy of the sedulous Rowan Gibbs, a most expert authority). Hume's third novel, following the 'Hansom Cab' and the slight 'Professor Brankel's Secret' (published in Melbourne as a railway novel and apparently no great success) and a companion piece to 'Hansom Cab', featuring barrister Calton and detective Kilsip. Hume wrote one more novel for the Hansom Cab Publishing Co. (The Girl from Malta, 1889) and they published a few novels by other writers but before the end of 1889 the Hansom Cab Publishing Co. had become Trischler & Co. and published a fair quantity of thrillers and minor fiction (including some Australian novels) over the next three years - but no more Hume.

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[DE MILLE, James]. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. NY, Harper 1888. Octavo publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in gilt, silver and brown; 19 full page illustrations by Gilbert Gaul. Some slight signs of use; a rather good copy. Au$450

First edition, English and Canadian editions appeared in the same year. One of the must-have Antarctic lost race thrillers, it has excited recent critical attention - something that it did not do on publication - largely due to De Mille's unique status as a Canadian author of such a fantastic novel at that time. Published well after his death in 1880, there is evidence that he wrote it in the 1860s. This excuses him from accusations of plagiarism of recent books but there is little point in ransacking the sensational fiction of the 19th century for likenesses; the forms were well set out in the imaginary voyages of a century or two earlier. De Mille's Antarctic society is a dystopia, an inversion of 19th century Christian society, but the book is a true thriller, with wondrous creatures, beauteous women and gruesome death (you can swap those adjectives around to suit yourself). De Mille himself was a respectable academic who scribbled potboiling trash by the ton - all but this novel pretty well forgotten; it is suggested that he had to pay off the debt accrued through a youthful plunge into bookselling.

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SPOTSWOOD, Christopher. The Voyage of Will Rogers to the South Pole. Edited by Christopher Spotswood. Launceston, printed at the Examiner and Tasmanian Office 1888. Slender octavo publisher's limp green cloth titled in black on the front (mild flecking of the cloth); 40pp. Au$1200

A difficult little book to find these days. Spotswood was the recently retired Bench Clerk of the Launceston court so a newspaper search for him will bring copious, tedious, amounts of court cases in progress but little personal outside a friendly brief notice of this book in the Launceston Examiner and a death notice in April 1890. Little to suggest a propensity to get lost in the Antarctic - dragged by a harpooned whale - where he spots what sounds like a snow kangaroo and finds a idyllic civilisation that seems more Presbyterian than anything else: hard work and a modest demeanour is the go.

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NISBET, Hume. The Land of the Hibiscus Blossom; a yarn of the Papuan Gulf. London, Ward & Downey 1888. Octavo publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in colour and gilt (tips worn, cloth a bit dull and discoloured); 23 full page ills by Nisbet. A second hand but quite acceptable copy. Au$185

First edition (only? there was an 1889 colonial issue and a 'new edition' in 1896 but I suspect these are re-issues of the same sheets) of Nisbet's first novel (of some 40) and one of the earliest novels of New Guinea from first hand experience. Nisbet insists on his accuracy of detail and was often criticised for proselytising at the expense of humour and excitement but his ideas have come into their own: "this is not a missionary tale, but the words of one who believes as ... Ruskin believes, that what the savage gains from religion and civilisation is not equivalent to his own beliefs when left alone." Despite dire warnings that a trip to New Guinea was near suicide,a propensity to get lost in the Antarctic - dragged by a harpooned whale - where he spots what sounds like a snow kangaroo and finds a idyllic civilisation that seems more Presbyterian than anything else: hard work and a modest demeanour is the go.

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BROCK, R.W. [ie John Alexander Barr]. Mihawhenua: the Adventures of a Party of Tourists Amongst a Tribe of Maoris Discovered in Western Otago, New Zealand. Recorded By R. W. Brock, MA, LLB. Edited By R. H. Chapman. (Being a Manuscript Addressed to the Editor, Found Attached to a Maori Kite on Mount Alta ... Dunedin, Wilkie & Co 1888. Octavo publisher's illustrated wrapper (spine chipped); 198,[2 adverts]pp. Used but a very decent copy. Au$450

A lost race thriller with the race being discovered in a lush world around a warm lake hidden in the mountains. Barr published a few novels all in a rush, including two thrillers - one Australian - under the name Gilbert Rock but his own story is perhaps more exciting than Moa riding Maoris, cannibals, and treacherous French sailors. A Dunedin lawyer, he petitioned in 1888 for a protective tax on all imported literature, assuring the government that he was "prepared to supply the colonial market with literature if inducement offers." All his known novels then appeared by November. Soon after he did 'the Pacific Slope' (a great term I hadn't heard before), abandoning his family and absconding with many thousands of his clients' pounds either lost or in his pocket. Here Barr vanishes from view except for a startling piece in the Auckland Star of October 1 1894 in which is mentioned a letter just received by Sir George Grey from the author of Mihawhenua with a return address but an indecipherable signature. No-one could decipher the signature so Grey's secretary cut the signature from the letter and pasted it onto the reply. No connection was made between the author of Mihawhenua and the missing lawyer. A final glimpse is a London death notice in 1907 which identifies him as a former solicitor of Dunedin and tells us he has been living in England with his wife and family for five or six years. I wonder if it was the same family. The dedication, to the colonial press in "grateful acknowledgment", of one of his thrillers, 'By Passion Driven', was declined on conscientious grounds by the Christchurch Telegraph who said, "What object Mr Gilbert Rock could have had we do not know". Perhaps his dedication was for The Daily Telegraph who described his 'Colonists' as "not a badly told story."

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Hume. FERGUSON, W. Humer. The Mystery of a Wheel-Barrow: or Gaboriau Gaborooed. An idealistic story of a great and rising colony. [headed: A Blood-Curdling Romance]. London, Walter Scott 1888. Octavo, without wrappers in early or contemporary cloth; iv,5-168pp, one full page illustration, "The Cryptogram", in the text. Title page quite foxed, the rest not; a neat copy. 1888 ownership inscription of the young Armar Lowry-Corry, fifth Earl Belmore, born in Sydney in 1870 during his father's governorship. There were 13 Lowry-Corry siblings. Three of the girls married but the rest including Armar apparently lived on in the family seat leaving gaps in their ranks in the church pews over the decades as they dropped off. Au$950

First edition, desirable and very uncommon. This parody, if read in short bursts, is amusing - which gives it one marked advantage over its forebear - and is about as readable, but that didn't help where it counts. The Mystery of a Hansom Cab went through dozens of editions but there are only two known editions of this and they are both the same edition. There exists, as well as this, a New Edition published in the same year in Sydney - not Melbourne where both books are set; perhaps Melbourne would not suffer the insult, whereupon Sydney would doubly relish it - by Edwards Dunlop, but it is the same sheets with the imprint changed. It is just as rare, possibly even more so, than this London issue. One mystery still unsolved is who wrote this; it exudes a malicious glee and while its greatest flaw is that it lampoons the Hansom Cab too closely, it exuberantly targets detective fiction in general - the cornered villain, about to scarper, suddenly remembers that "his escape might involve another volume of mysteries" and obligingly agrees that the "exigencies" of the novel require his suicide. For the stylistic detective, what may be an important clue is how wet this novel is - a lot of boozing goes on - and the author is adept at writing funny drunks; that should narrow the field.

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FINN, Edmund. A Priest's Secret. "Under Seal of Confession." Melbourne, Alex. M'Kinley Printers 1888. Octavo publisher's printed wrapper (rebacked, a chip from a corner); [8],11-103pp - complete despite the apparent gap in numbering; the front paste down is part of the first signature. Au$375

Second edition according to the wrapper. I guess it's possible that maybe six editions of this appeared in a year - copies of the first, second, fourth and sixth editions are recorded - sold to an avid public expecting Maria Monk-like salacious scandal. If so, a lot of copies will have been hurled away by disappointed readers. Those who persevered would be relieved to find the "livid, distorted" face of the corpse at the end of chapter four with the wrongly accused standing over it.

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AESCULAPIUS SCALPEL [Edward Berdoe]. St. Bernard's, the Romance of a Medical Student. London, Swan Sonnenschein 1888. Octavo publisher's illustrated boards. Edges rubbed and a little chipped but quite good. Au$200

Second edition, it first appeared in September the year before and went through at few more editions in 1888. The cover is a pretty brazen pinch from a picture by Brouillet of Charcot demonstrating hysteria. St. Bernard's is a ferocious attack on the hospital system and the cruelty and tortures it inflicted on the helpless which medico and Browning enthusiasist Berdoe sensibly published as an anonymous novel. Berdoe insisted on a ratio of three quarters truth to one quarter romance which makes the thrill of the gruesome sharper, but this is, by the way, a somewhat gothic/sensation murder mystery - which seems to have escaped the notice of most bibliographers of detective fiction - solved at last by painstaking research into poisonous fungi.

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ROCK, Gilbert. [ie John Alexander Barr]. Colonists. Illustrating goldfields and city life in Australia between 1851 and 1870. Dunedin, Wilkie & Co 1888. Octavo publisher's printed wrapper; 152pp. Staple stains and minor signs of use; a rather good copy. Au$1350

First edition of this rare thriller; a lousy title but replete with murder, revenge, conspiracy ... I'm only reading from the chapter titles. The misleading title no doubt helped this being well represented in Australian libraries and led to Ferguson recording it, cementing its rarity now. This was issued in London as 'The Mystery of Golden Gully' which barely exists in libraries. Gilbert Rock was missed by Loder. Barr published a few novels all in a rush, including two thrillers under the name Gilbert Rock and his lost race thriller Mihawhenua under the name Brock but his own story is perhaps more exciting. A Dunedin lawyer, he petitioned in 1888 for a protective tax on all imported literature, assuring the government that he was "prepared to supply the colonial market with literature if inducement offers." All his known novels then appeared by November. Soon after he did 'the Pacific Slope' (a great term I hadn't heard before), abandoning his family and absconding with many thousands of his clients' pounds either lost or in his pocket. Here Barr vanishes from view except for a startling piece in the Auckland Star of October 1 1894 in which is mentioned a letter just received by Sir George Grey from the author of Mihawhenua with a return address but an indecipherable signature. No-one could decipher the signature so Grey's secretary cut the signature from the letter and pasted it onto the reply. No connection was made between the author of Mihawhenua and the missing lawyer. A final glimpse is a London death notice in 1907 which identifies him as a former solicitor of Dunedin and tells us he has been living in England with his wife and family for five or six years. I think it was the same family. The dedication, to the colonial press in "grateful acknowledgment", of his thriller, 'By Passion Driven', was declined on conscientious grounds by the Christchurch Telegraph who said, "What object Mr Gilbert Rock could have had we do not know". Perhaps his dedication was for The Daily Telegraph who described his 'Colonists' as "not a badly told story."

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SMITH, J.F. [John Frederick]. Minnigrey. A romance. London, Bradley [1888?]. Octavo contemporary half morocco. A little browning; a crisp, handsome copy. Au$500

First book edition? Bradley editions exist without and without illustrations by John Gilbert but his pictures are so bland and bloodless they are no asset. Minnigrey was serialised twice, in 1851 - a huge hit - and again in 1861; dramatised, translated into Dutch and Danish and inspired a Schottisch, all in the fifties. Smith, as is the way with thriller writers, was fearsomely prolific, hugely popular and sometimes well paid but by the time of this book he was poor again and died almost unnoticed two years later. According to Francis Hitchman he had only one obituary notice in the daily papers in which the writer said, "He had a thousand readers where Dickens had ten, or Thackeray one." In the school of Smith, Hitchman tells us, "innocence and loveliness in a gingham gown are perpetually pursued by vice and debauchery in varnished boots and spotless gloves ... detectives are ever on the watch, and the most astonishing pitfalls and mantraps are concealed in the path of the unwary and the innocent." ('Penny Fiction' in the Quarterly Review, July 1890).

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TAYLOR, Tom. The Ticket-of-Leave Man. A drama in four acts. London, French [c1890?]. Octavo printed wrapper. French's Acting Edition 871. Au$50

A latish issue probably c1890 judging by the wrappers. One of the great hits of the second half of the century, it is credited with being 'one of the first melodramas to deal with criminal life of London, to take as a hero a man who had suffered imprisonment .. to introduce a detective (Hawkshaw) on the stage, and to break away from the familiar domestic interior sets.' (Nicoll). Doubtless part of the reason for its particular popularity in the colonies. For all this it was based on a French play

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FALK, David G. Rick; or, The Recidiviste. A Romance of Australian Life. London, Trischler 1891. Octavo publisher's textured pink cloth blocked in black (spine and around the edges faded). Patterned endpapers browned, signs of use but a pretty good copy. Au$375

Only edition of this elusive thriller set in and around Melbourne that exploits that timeless Anglo-Australian characteristic - fear of foreigners. In this case it's the Recidivistes, escaped French convicts from New Caledonia. Falk prefaces the book with an extract from the Melbourne Argus noting the disquieting increase of French convicts in Australia. Rick and the Recidiviste are not the same person, Rick is an orphaned young woman with a mysterious past and the Recidiviste is Ranq, by name and nature. The young detective Sprowde solves both problems before the most overstretched deathbed scene I've skimmed in years and a gently melancholic but happy enough ending. Falk appears to have written a fair bit for papers and journals but only two novels were published as far as I can work out. Trischler & Co. used to be the Hansom Cab Publishing Co and published a few Australian authors during its brief life.

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BRADLEY, Charles. The Red Cripple. A Tale of the Midnight Express. Melbourne, George Robertson & H.W. Mills 1891. Octavo publisher's colour illustrated wrapper; [6],186pp. Price changed by hand from one to two shillings. An outstanding copy. Au$1500

First edition of this scarce, busy murder mystery, a tangle of disguise, false identity, astounding coincidence and extended comic relief. Despite the often repeated note this has nothing to do with a diamond robbery but in passing near the end. Almost all of this takes place on the Manchester-London train - though the unsolved murders started seven years ago - with hair-raising action, comedy, tragedy and mystery piled upon mystery. An all round Melbourne production though disguised as the account of detective Medway of Scotland Yard sent to Bradley in Melbourne. Bradley was in theatre - manager of the Walter Bentley company's tour of Australia and New Zealand at about this time. He was busy in 1891: he published another thriller, had plays produced and, at the end of 1892 went off to conquer America with his plays. He puffed the forthcoming New York production of 'The Gold Escort' - the introduction of Australian theatre to American audiences. I can't discover that America ever saw the drama, action and slaughter promised but Bradley does surface here and there over following decades as a manager, producer and maybe playwright. If he'd managed to carry off setting the whole thing on the train this would now be hailed as a pioneering modernist work.

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ROBERTSON, Andrew. The Kidnapped Squatter and other Australian stories. London, Longmans 1891. Octavo, fresh in publisher's fawn cloth (spine rubbed and a touch worn at the tips). A 24 page 1891 publisher's list at the end. A pretty good copy, uncommon as such. Au$200

First (only?) edition of Robertson's first book, a gathering of four stories. Austlit separates the Rev Andrew Robertson, essayist, from our author; they had been blended by Miller and Macartney. The Spectator, relieved to find no bushrangers, gave this a good, barely patronising, review - remarkable treatment for a colonial book. I'm less forgiving; it's outrageous providence - a lazy author I say - that catches the miscreants in the title story, not a 'tec or bloodstain in sight. Jack Reeveley, the long piece of the book, does have a detective - one who quotes Shakespeare in his report, violence, convoluted mystery and outrageous coincidence enough for any three books.

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Potter. EASTERLEY & WILBRAHAM [i.e. Robert Potter]. The Germ Growers. An Australian story of adventure and mystery. Melbourne, Melville &c, 1892. Octavo publisher's blue cloth. Spine quite browned and the edges a bit rubbed; the endpapers browned but a rather good copy inside and decent enough outside. Au$300

First edition, Australian issue - the same sheets were issued in London by Hutchinson - and one of the Library of Australian Authors. Called the first alien invasion novel. A science fiction novel involving extra dimensional aliens waging germ warfare from the Kimberleys. The following is from Punch: "he was within an ace of putting aside The Germ Growers, under the impression that it was a scientific work on Bacillus and Phylloxera. On taking it up, however, the Baron soon became deeply interested, but was subsequently annoyed to find how the artful author had beguiled him by leading up to a kind of imitation of the In hoc Signo vinces legend, and had somewhat adroitly adapted to his purpose the imagery of one of the most poetic and sublime of ancient Scripture narratives; i.e., where the prophet sees the chariots of Israel in the air. One remarkable thing about the romance is the absence of 'love-motive,' and, indeed, the absence of all female interest. Here and there the Canon writes carelessly, as instance the following paragraph:- 'Then he got a little glass-tube into which he put something out of a very small bottle, which he took from a number of others which lay side by side in a little case which he took out of a pocket in the side of the car.' Apart from other faults, there are too many 'whiches' here."

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GROWDEN, Oliver H. Matthew Redmayne. A New Zealand Romance. London, Melbourne &c, George Robertson 1892. Octavo publisher's red cloth (spine a touch faded or rubbed). Quite a good copy. Au$275

Only edition. A thriller involving a woman falsely accused of murder, an insane sister, secret correspondence, bigamy and much more. "To give an outline of the plot would be difficult, owing to its complexity, devious windings, and numerous bypaths" writes The West Australian (14th July 1893) who gives it a good review and notes that the author is believed to be a young public servant resident in Perth. Growden published another novel - A Man and His Destiny - in The West Australian a couple of years later but I can't find any sign that was ever published as a book.

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COBBAN, J. Maclaren. A Soldier and a Gentleman. NY, Lovell, Coryell [c1893?]. Octavo publisher's grey cloth blocked in gilt & black. Au$125

A thriller. First edition? The copyright date is 1891 - the year it was serialised in Chambers Journal - and the adverts date this copy about 1893 or 94 but this still predates Hubin and the BMC by a decade and appears to predate a Street & Smith issue.

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FAWCETT, E. Douglas. Hartmann the Anarchist; or, the doom of the great city. London, Edward Arnold 1893. Octavo red cloth blocked in black (spine browned and worn at the ends); illustrated by Fred T. Jane. Some scattered spotting. Au$125

First edition but a later issue with a publisher's list dated 1902 inserted after the 1893 list at the end. Futuristic adventure, with flying machines of the best type, and the destruction of London.

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RUSSELL, W. Clark. The Romance of a Transport. NY, Cassell, 1893. Octavo publisher's decorated green cloth blocked in green and gilt. A rather good copy. Au$150

First edition; the English edition with it's better known title, 'The Convict Ship', appeared in 1895. A thriller, detailing the adventures of a young woman who joins a convict ship dressed as a boy to accompany her wrongly convicted love to Australia, their escape and search for truth and vengeance; plenty of death and villainy flavoured with salt water and tobacco juice as you would expect from Russell. This American original was unspotted by Miller/Macartney. Trove finds two copies in Australian libraries, presumably added since Macartney's work.

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HILL, Headon. [Francis Edward Grainger]. The Rajah's Second Wife. London, Ward Lock 1894. Octavo illustrated brown cloth; two plates by Walter Stacey. Endpapers browned, the occasional smudge but quite a good copy. Au$175

First edition. A ripe melodramatic thriller embracing interracial marriage and dirty deeds in the slums and palace of Jhalwa.

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HUME, Fergus. A Knight of the Road. A Romance. in the 1894 Christmas Number of Household Words. Quarto publisher's printed wrapper; pp5-35 (of 64pp including adverts). Au$175

Probably the only printing of this tale (no other has been traced) - a thriller of almost 50,000 words involving a 'modern Dick Turpin'; with an amateur gentleman detective, a somewhat slow police officer and a twist at the end. I think this was turned into the novel 'Claude Duval of Ninety-Five' (1897) which would account for its disappearance from the Hume canon.

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ASTOR, John Jacob. A Journey in Other Worlds. A romance of the future. London, Longman 1894. Octavo publisher's blue cloth elaborately blocked in silver and lettered in gilt; 10 illustrations, nine by Dan Beard; 24 page publisher's list dated September 1894 at the end. Edges a bit rubbed and the title page a bit browned. Quite a good copy. Au$165

First English edition, pretty much concurrent with the New York edition. William Waldorf Astor has been described as the richest novelist ever and without knowing the breakdown of the family fortunes I can't argue that, but John Jacob may well be the richest science fiction writer still. William's pair of novels were no great shakes and neither is this in literary terms. But it is a scientific and utopian romance involving a voyage to Jupiter and Saturn, no worse than most of the didactic science fiction of the period and does provide enough thrills and plenty of monsters. It is set in the year 2000 and Astor's vision of world history over the intervening century can be, with equal or no profit, admired or derided. Astor was caned by the New York Times reviewer, affronted by his view that time wasted learning the classics would be better spent learning science, who remarked that his description of a "weird scene might also serve in a description of a Dutch Christmas festival."

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BOUVE, Edward T. Centuries Apart. Boston, Little Brown 1894. Octavo publisher's gilt decorated blue cloth; x,347pp, two maps and six plates. Minor signs of use but quite a good copy. Au$175

First edition. An Antarctic lost race, this time of comparatively recent origin - Tudor England.

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MURPHY, G. [George] Read. Beyond the Ice. Being a story of the newly discovered region round the north pole. Edited from Dr. Frank Farleigh's diary. London, Sampson Low & Melbourne, Hutchinson [1894]. Octavo publisher's illustrated blue cloth (two small blobs of wax on the front cover, marks on the back). Somewhat canted, not a bad copy of a book guaranteed to respond badly to handling. A signed presentation, dated March 1894, from Murphy to Geelong lawyer Aurel Just, "gentleman, Dremanist and possessor of other titles," with a quote from his character Vernon Dreman. Au$950

Only edition of this polar utopia and dystopia which Murphy - I suspect simple perversity - took to the opposite end of the world in defiance of the usual Australian practice of heading south. Heaps of scientific advances and flying machines as expected but reform and enlightened progress can only go so far: adult women are enfranchised until they marry, then the possible conflict between husband and wife is not worth the candle. "The chief characters seem to spend a deal of unnecessary time in consuming oysters and brown bread" warned the North Melbourne Courier and West Melbourne Advertiser in an otherwise warm review while suggesting it would be commercially more canny to set the book in central Australia.

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TUCKER, Horace. The New Arcadia. An Australian story. London, Melbourne &c, George Robertson 1894. Octavo publisher's brown cloth titled in black. Spine canted, minor signs of use. Floridly inscribed and signed by Tucker in 1897 to John Cuthbert Traill and "dedicated without permission to Mrs Traill." Au$350

First edition. More romantic thriller - with murderous, will tampering, downright communist villains - than utopian polemic but a serious utopian novel none the less; unusual for the time in that it is not set in the future, a lost world or another planet. It's the story of a number of idealistic settlements, including Amazona, a women's community; makes short work of the attempted communist society and ends with the triumph of co-operation. But not so much personal triumph, quite a bit of melodramatic death occurs before then. As one reviewer noted, "the author has an unpleasant knack of killing amiable people." All this is bound to a material if unsuccessful scheme. Tucker and Charles Strong promoted the resettlement of the unemployed in country areas and between 1892 and 1894 some 200 families were established in Tucker Village Settlements in Victoria. They failed for the usual reasons - lack of capital, a declining economy and mismanagement - but did see the Settlement of Lands Act (1893) enacted. Not in Hubin; it should be.

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MacDONALD, Rev. J. Middleton. Thunderbolt. An Australian Story. London, Hurst and Blackett [1894]. Octavo publisher's dark green cloth. A rather good, bright copy. Au$225

Only edition of this thriller - a somewhat sticky novel mixing history into the bushranging thrills - in which we meet the chivalrous and dashing Thunderbolt and equally dashing Major in pursuit, the well bred but unspoilt young ladies, and the rough but true bushmen and diggers. Appended is a short glossary of Australianisms.

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MARCHMONT, A.W. Parson Thring's Secret. NY, Cassell [1895?]. Octavo grey cloth blocked in red and black. A rather good copy. Au$200

First edition? It doesn't seem to have been published in London until 1910. I found a couple of later American printings of this in OCLC, one renamed 'The Marlwych Mystery, or Parson Thring's Secret' but not this, and no British printing until a cheap sixpenny version in 1910, 'One of those exasperating novels which could never become a book, if the people concerned in it had the saving grace of common sense.' (The Book Buyer).

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LYNCH, Lawrence [E. Murdoch van Deventer]. Against Odds. A detective story. London, Ward Lock [c1895]. Octavo green cloth blocked in black and gilt; frontispiece. Title browned but a rather good, bright copy. Au$75

A re-issue or reprint in Ward Lock's uniform series of thrillers which could consist of the first edition, a reprint, or a re-issue of sheets with a new title page which, as this title page is on very different paper to the rest of the book, is the case here. The book first appeared in Chicago, then London, in 1894.

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MARSH, Richard. Mrs. Musgrave and Her Husband. NY, Appleton 1895. Octavo publishers oatmeal cloth blocked in red and green (a touch smudged). A rather nice copy. Au$275

First American edition, pretty much concurrent with the English edition - and both are scarce - of this thriller of murder, madness and heredity.

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EASTWICK, Mrs. Egerton. The Rubies of Rajmar or, Mr. Charlecote's Daughters. A romance. London, Newnes 1895. Octavo publisher's illustrated green cloth (a touch dusty). A rather good copy. Eight page publisher's list at the end announcing this as just ready. Au$250

First edition of this jewel ridden thriller of murder and interracial marriage. The Guardian was kind "There is plenty of sensation ... mysterious Indians and secret passages, and ... a murder, and altogether the authoress contrives to keep up a most praiseworthy atmosphere of creepiness throughout the book." The Athenaeum was more guarded - "not without interest, and the sense of mystery is fairly well sustained" - but not cruel. Unlike H.G. Wells in the Saturday Review: "Mrs. Eastwick imitating Wilkie Collins is quite unforgivable." The usually reliable Spectator shocked me, the staff must have been on a bender: "A story, indeed, that is readable from the first page to the last, disarms criticism."

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MITFORD, Bertram The Sign of the Spider. An episode. London, Methuen 1896. Octavo illustrated green cloth blocked in black (extremities a touch rubbed); four plates by James Grieg. The odd smudge, rather a good copy. Au$150

First edition and, as expected from Mitford, an African romp filled with peril, savagery, love, mystery and horror - none more horrible than the giant man-eating spider worshipped by the Ba-gcatya tribe and none more lovely than the pale, self-sacrificing princess Lindela.

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GALIER, W.H. A Visit to Blestland. Melbourne, George Robertson 1896. Octavo publisher's green cloth (front board flecked); [8],310pp. Still a rather good, bright copy. Au$350

First edition of this Australian utopian fantasy, of socialist and republican bent the book is dedicated to the 'world's workers'. Though fairly profligate with words the author has economised by embodying the evils of law and religion in one character: the villain is a lawyer who, finding no use for his profession in Blestland, turns to missionising. Blestland itself is another planet and the advances of the inhabitants are social rather than technological - transport is by unremarkable carriage or train - and there is surprisingly little description of Blestland or its native inhabitants. Instead the action centres around a representative group of troublesome Sydney characters mysteriously transported to the planet, some while boating up middle harbour. And we thought they were living in Castlecrag.

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BOURDILLON, Francis William. Nephele. NY, New Amsterdam 1896. Octavo publisher's decorated gilt cloth. A touch browned around the edges but a very good copy. Au$100

First American edition, contemporaneous with the English edition. Not quite a haunted violin thriller as suggested by the cover illustration but a haunted piece of music - and a violin does play a part.

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LINDEN, Annie. Gold. A Dutch-Indian Story for English People. London, John Lane 1896. Octavo publisher's decorated cloth blocked in blind; 285pp and 1896 publisher's list. A little browning; a rather good bright copy. Au$475

First edition of this rare Indonesian lost race fantasy; there was also a New York edition which looks no easier to find. I'm not sure exactly where the dread lost land of Moa and its mountain of gold is but our explorers sail through the Moluccas on their way from Java; once we leave the Banda Islands the geography turns imaginary. Ms Linden starts slow but ends pretty ruthless; most of her worthy characters die miserably while our hero is pretty much a faithless greedy madman well before book's end. There is enough, more than enough, local colour to convince me that first hand experience is at work here. I found mention of a couple of short stories - one about untameable half-caste women (who populate these pages too) - by Linden and one other novel, in English: a domestic drama dismissed as "Dutch fiction" in the one notice I saw; nothing else in English or Dutch.

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HILLCOAT, Captain C.H. [Charles Henry]. Ida Hall or a Mystery of the Suez Canal. Glasgow, David Bryce [1896]. Narrow octavo publisher's red cloth (mild signs of use). A bit canted, pretty good. Au$300

Only edition of this uncommon thriller which sees our young Miss Ida Hall of Berkley Square [sic] snatched by slavers from a Port Said hotel. Despite the thousand pound reward posted nothing has been known of her until this account. Fear not, she will be alive and well at the end of the book despite her terrible sufferings. This wasn't Captain Hillcoat's most successful book, his Notes on Stowage went through at least three editions.
Now - at the risk of drawing too long a parochial bow - can we claim some place for this in Australian literature? Captain Hillcoat (Charles Henry Lorenzo Westernra Hillcoat in full) was of a clan of emigres. His immediate family, after time in India, emigrated to America when he was a child while at least one uncle headed for Australia. His sister Cecilia joined the Australian rush in 1866 so the place was soon packed with cousins, nieces and nephews. He certainly sailed Australian waters, as the captain of the Anglo Indian in the eighties and as captain of the Futami Maru in the late nineties. His wife died in Townsville during a voyage, in 1883, and he himself died in Gosford, NSW, in 1902.

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GRIMSHAWE, Helena. Trapped by Avarice. London, Digby Long 1896. Octavo publisher's blue ribbed cloth. Edges foxed, still, a good bright copy. Au$200

First edition of this most uncommon high society stew of murder, theft, fraudulent wills, gipsies and stolen children. I haven't read anything so marked by the absence of an editorial pencil and so in need of one since that model of publisher's inattention, Stoker's 'Lair of the White Worm'. Just how did the villain have a secret gipsy mother and brother yet have an admirable father and attend a good school? How did he have a mother apparently younger than him? How did the Stanhopes sail to America in a liner decades before it was built? Decades before any such liner was built. How did Stanhope's brother spell his name? They had to yacht around the Great Lakes so that Stella could be gored by a buffalo but why did we have to read the whole itinerary? Why did the Honourable Cecil, so determined to unravel the mystery of the theft of the diamond necklace, forget to return next day to the jewellers for fifteen years? How could Stella and Ethel write regularly for fifteen years and each not wonder why they never had a reply? How did even a falsely accused village peasant get away with three months hard labour for the theft of the priceless necklace? And why did no-one wonder what happened to it? I have many more questions but that's enough for now. There is supposedly a copy of a third edition of this at Newcastle (UK) but I doubt it. Helena Grimshawe - who has apparently used family records for the American parts - seems a one book author, as does Henry Grimshawe, also published by Digby Long in the same year.

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OAKES, Leslie M. Ben Tillett's Fortune. Sydney &c, George Robertson [1896?]. Narrow octavo publisher's printed wrapper. Rather a good copy. Coo-ee Series No.1 - was there ever a number two? Au$750

Only edition of this rare thriller but not mystery of murder and robbery set on the goldfields and in Sydney; we're with the villain all the way - he's the main character. Ben Tillett, of the title, whose mother was murdered is no better than the villain. He's a greedy drunkard, gambler and cheat, an all-round creep. Mentioned but unseen by Loder.

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HORNUNG, E.W. [Ernest William]. Irralie's Bushranger. A story of Australian adventure. NY, Scribner's 1896. Narrow octavo publisher's pale cloth elaborately blocked in dark green. A bit smudged, a couple of blotches near the end, a quite decent copy. Au$100

First American edition, contemporaneous with the English; part of the Ivory Series while the London edition was one of the New Vagabond Series. Here we meet Stingaree, the apparently well-bred bushranger, who reappears in later Horning stories. In this near farce of mistaken identity Stingaree makes the mistake of moving too far south of his usual patch, to the Riverina station of the dauntless, blue-eyed, young Irralie.

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FRITH, Walter. The Sack of Monte Carlo. An adventure of today. Bristol, Arrowsmith; London, Simpkin Marshall 1897. Octavo publisher's maroon cloth blocked in gilt and red. The spine appears to have been retouched but still a rather good copy. Arrowsmith's 3/6 Series, no. XXIX. Au$285

First edition. Is this the first caper novel? The modern caper novel - parent to the caper film - I mean, forget Robin Hood and suchlike. Our young English gentleman narrator tells us how he, stymied in love for the while and unhappy and restless, comes up with the idea of looting the casino at Monte Carlo and sets out to enlist some chums - first among his sister's friends for some inexplicable reason, then among his own old school friends and members of his club - and rustle up a fast steam yacht for their getaway. His sister does sign up for the job. Gentleman, and lady, burglars were thick on the ground within a few years, they must have been elbowing each other in Mayfair salons, country house ballrooms and the gaming rooms of Monte Carlo but I can't think of an earlier book having such fun with the planning, execution and scrapes of the big score.

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NISBET, Hume. The Swampers. A romance of the Westralian goldfields. London, F.V. White 1897. Octavo publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in red, black and gilt (light signs of use); frontispiece. Inner hinges repaired - professionally by the look of it; a good bright copy with the baronial bookplate of Sir James Ramsay Gibson Maitland who did little to mark his place in the world except unsuccessfully vie for the Lauderdale title and die the year this was published. Au$165

First edition of this partly suppressed thriller in which Nisbet took a stick to the inhabitants of Sydney and a flask of acid to Archibald and The Bulletin who responded with the incensed lack of humour that Nisbet had ascribed to them and threatened legal action against booksellers or libraries circulating the book. This naturally made it "one of the most popular books in Sydney ... passed about surreptitiously, and under pledges of secrecy" according to the Northern Star. The Australasian Pastoralists' Review merely recommended a good horsewhipping. Nisbet has fun with Sydney's mania for fraudulent occultists and takes time off from the story for Judge Jeffreys - hanging judge and spiritualist who decides his cases by the testimony of two spirit guides. Until he is visited by the ghosts of Chinese murder victims bent on revenge for releasing their killers. I would like to know who the original of Judge Jeffreys is. Of course Nisbet sometimes goes too far, as in the passage that begins: "Aboriginals, Kanakas, Chinese, Japanese, Afghans, all who do not represent Western civilisation we treat like beasts ... Our murders on them are acts of justice, their retaliations on us are atrocious murders." The Pastoralists' Review was indignant about accusations of settlers laying poisonous baits for Aborigines like pests. Nisbet avoids his lack of first hand knowledge about the Westralian goldfields by mostly staying away from them. Our hero, the master criminal Jack Milton (not Sydney bred), is rescued by Aborigines from the traps and trackers long before he reaches Kalgoorlie and instead landed in a lost race novel bringing him to an ancient gold mine with a Greek inscription carved in a wall.

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DAWE, W. Carlton. Kakemonos. London, John Lane 1897. Octavo publisher's illustrated mustard cloth. A few insignificant marks, endpapers a bit browned, a rather good copy. Keynote series. Au$150

First edition of a collection of tales of the far east. An almost acceptable amount of blood and violent death, plenty of the dangers of racial and cultural conflict and reams of now unacceptable calumny.

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KERNAHAN, Coulson. Captain Shannon. London, Ward Lock 1897. Octavo publisher's near black cloth titled in red; 16 plates by F.S. Wilson. Inner front hinge cracked by insertions but solid. A rather good copy. The insertions are a signed cabinet photo of Kernahan (top gone from this); a signed card with an aphorism and a one page letter from Kernahan. Au$300

First edition of this thriller, one of Kernahan's more successful. Captain Shannon was what is now called an Irish terrorist.

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MARSH, Richard. The Datchet Diamonds. London, Ward Lock [1898]. Octavo publisher's maroon cloth; two plates by Stanley L. Wood. Some pages opened coarsely and a couple of minor blotches but still a very good copy. Au$185

First edition; a detective thriller.

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NEWCOMB, Josiah Turner. A Fight for a Throne. NY, Tennyson Neely [1898]. Octavo publisher's red cloth blocked in white and black (spine a bit darkened and rubbed). Inscribed and signed by Newcomb in December 1898. Au$400

Only edition of this scarce Pacific thriller; part lost race and part Ruritanian romance in which the exiled king and his glorious daughter must be restored to their south seas kingdom and our hero must atone for his father's crime. We won't question how the hero came across the heroine by chance on a remote Long Island beach just before his father drops dead leaving his confession of the crime that killed the queen and sent the king and baby daughter into exile in New York. Like the actual result of the self-immolating - presumably sardonic - remark of Holmes, once we have eliminated the impossible there is nothing left. Newcomb was a New York newspaper editor at the time he wrote this, later he turned lawyer and politician; this seems to be his only book.

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LAW, Frederick Houk. The Heart of Sindhra. A novel. NY, Tennyson Neely [1898]. Octavo publisher's blue cloth blocked in silver and red (spine a touch rubbed). A rather good copy. Au$200

First edition of this India set fantasy with a lost city, native fanaticism and some mightily portentous dialogue.

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JUNOR, Charles. Dead Men's Tales. Melbourne, George Robertson 1898. Octavo publisher's colour illustrated boards (edges worn). Last leaf, a blank before the endpaper, removed, natural browning of the paper, inner hinges cracked but firm enough; certainly read but still quite a good copy. Au$1200

First edition, Australian issue; the same sheets were issued by Swan Sonnenschein. A most busy collection of tales with, within very few pages, cannibals, a ghoul in the waterhole, a vampiric leper, a death adder, a husband cuckolded by his unsuspecting companion (puzzling huh?), and a fatal curse laid on the discoverer of the remains of the two protaganists (see cover). On to the second story - and we have photographic safeguards over a bank vault and an hypnotic burglar. Soon we are in the realm of hereditary catalepsy leading to premature burial; horrors in the tomb; a murderous husband who takes a razor to himself to prevent his dead wife meeting her suitor in the hereafter; the inadvisability of women lion tamers; Queen Victoria astral travelling to Melbourne; an Afghani ghost attending a picnic; a machine that will "read the last thoughts of a dead man's brain" ... but I give too much away. An early reader has, in a tiny neat hand, deemed a trip between the Victorian and the Queensland borders in 24 hours as absurd. The rest passes without comment. Here's a lesson for us all: "The sudden shock to my system, caused by total abstinence, effected so seriously a decline in my physical health that my mental faculties seemed unstrung, and my intellect dislocated."

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GRIFFITH, George. The Gold-Finder. London F.V. White 1898. Octavo publisher's illustrated green cloth (a bit used, spine wrinkled); frontispiece. An ok copy. Au$75

First edition of this thriller involving the Gold Magnet, high speed yachts, merciless modern piracy and tangled family secrets.

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HIND, Lewis. The Enchanted Stone. NY, Dodd Mead 1899. Octavo publisher's cloth & colour illustrated boards. Outstanding in probably the original tissue wrapper. Au$200

First American edition, which apparently differs from the English edition. I haven't found out what those differences are, I suspect few people have read both. A fantasy involving magic, mysterious orientals and suchlike. I think this is Hind's first book.

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MORETTE, Edgar. The Sturgis Wager. A detective story. NY, Stokes [1899]. Octavo publisher's decorated cloth blocked in red and black. Minor signs of use, a pretty good copy. Au$150

First edition of this fast paced New York murder mystery that opens in the chaos of Broadway traffic. Well before the end of chapter one we have our corpse and three mysteries. Another chapter, more mystery and the bet that gentleman reporter Sturgis can't solve them. Soon enough we enter the realm of scientific fantasy with the criminal genius who has disposed of hundreds of victims and dissolved their remains in his laboratory.

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BOOTHBY, Guy. The Red Rat's Daughter. London, Ward Lock 1899. Octavo gilt cloth; 4 plates by Henry Austin. A used, decent copy. Au$50

First edition. An east-facing thriller.

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de Rougemont, Louis. [Henri Grien]. The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont as told by himself. London, Newnes 1899. Octavo publisher's illustrated cloth; 46 illustrations, some full page. A bit of a lean but an excellent bright copy. Au$200

First edition, with the preface by the editor of World Wide, Fitzgerald. I have seen copies with this removed - embarrassment after de Rougemont was definitively proved a liar? Grien did make living as 'The Greatest Liar on Earth' for a while, and likely a better living than his apparently sad true life in Australia. Once a common book but getting hard to find in decent condition.

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SMEATON, Oliphant. A Mystery of the Pacific. London, Blackie 1899. Octavo publisher's illustrated red cloth printed in black and white and blocked in gilt; eight plates by Wal Paget. Covers a touch dusty, a few spots at the beginning but a rather good, bright copy. Au$200

First edition of this Pacific lost race thriller - by the sometime editor of the Queensland Daily Northern Argus - which begins on board a blackbirder for the Queensland labour trade and ends in Nova Sicilia - a Roman offshoot in the western Pacific.

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BOOTHBY, Guy. Pharos the Egyptian. London, Ward Lock 1899. Octavo publisher's gilt decorated navy cloth; 12 plates by John H. Bacon. Endpapers browned as usual; a rather nice bright copy. Au$200

First edition of this exotic, fast moving and cosmopolitan thriller which begins in London: "Drawing my hand across my forehead, which was clammy with the sweat of real fear, I looked again at the river ... and by the light of a lantern on board I could make out the body of a man ... such was my first meeting with the man whom I afterwards came to know as Pharos the Egyptian." From here we leap around Europe to Egypt and back, with horror at every step.

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BOOTHBY, Guy. Love Made Manifest. London, Ward Lock [1899]. Octavo publisher's decorated blue cloth blocked in gilt. Endpapers a bit browned as usual, a pleasing bright copy. Au$125

First edition. From Apia to Sydney to Belgrave Square our hero wins his way to fame and fortune only to find a peril worse than any of Boothby's opium addled Asiatic fiends lying in wait for him.

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SAVILE, Frank. Beyond the Great South Wall - being some surprising details of the voyage of the S.Y. Racoon. London, Sampson Low &c 1899. Octavo publisher's illustrated red cloth blocked in black, white, gilt and blue (spine a bit faded and rubbed); [6],302pp and 10pp publisher's list included in the last gathering. A bit used, browning of the endpapers and round the edges. Inscription of a Lawrence Fishburn dated 1916 and 1917 on the front endpaper with a short message written in some secret code. Pretty good; as this is the only copy I've found after some years of looking I can't compare it to others. Au$1500

First edition and close enough to rare. George Locke noted in the first volume of his Spectrum of Fantasy (1980) that he'd traded his way up to a good first American edition but not yet seen this. At the end of volume two he announced that, in 1993, he'd seen and finally got one. These original sheets were re-issued as an undated 'cheap edition' with a cancel title page and, I suspect, sat in the warehouse for decades - the only copy of that I've seen was apparently bought new and given as a prize in 1927. In other words it was a forgotten dud. How, with that cover? - who could resist it? It seems to have been better received in America where it had two editions in 1901 and received a friendly notice in the NY Times. This is an Antarctic adventure discovering a now extinct Mayan civilization and a not extinct prehistoric monster. By no means the worst lost race novel ever written; indeed it stands proud of most Antarctic novels in being brisk, breezy and easy going.

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GRIFFITH, George. Gambles With Destiny. London, F.V. White 1899. Octavo publisher's cloth (tips a little worn). Endpapers spotted, a pretty good copy with Ronald E. Graham's Virgil Finlay bookplate. Au$185

First edition of this collection of shorter things, mostly sci-fi or fantasy - one of which introduces the countdown: 10, 9, 8 ...; another involves a Faustian bargain made with haschisch.

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DAKE, Charles Romeyn. [spelt 'Romyn' on the title page and 'Romeyn' on the cover which seems to be correct]. A Strange Discovery. NY, Kimball 1899. Octavo publisher's red cloth (spine a bit discoloured and worn at the tips); [4],310pp and three plates, one a map. Au$325

First edition of this Antarctic lost race thriller. An elaborately set up continuation of Poe's 'Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym'; it includes a photo of Loomis House in Bellevue Illinois, a focal point of the introduction to the story. Bellevue is apparently Belleville, Dake's home where he was a homeopath - as is the character Bainbridge in this book. Dake committed suicide in 1899; ostensibly because he discovered he had cancer, not because his only novel had his name misspelled on the title page.

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GRIFFITH, George. Brothers of the Chain. London, White 1900. Octavo publisher's grained cloth blocked in gilt and black. A rather good, bright copy of a book that usually hasn't aged gracefully. Au$325

First edition, second issue with a cancel title; copies are known to exist with the title dated 1899, but not many. The colonial edition though is dated 1899. One of Griffith's baroque thrillers of particular interest to us in the Pacific. "In the triple-walled fastness of the Central Prison on Ile Nou, in New Caledonia there exists, so those who should know, say, the head centre of the most mysterious and the most terrible secret society in which men, or rather fiends in human form, ever bound themselves together." This is not from the novel but from Pearson's Weekly - Griffin building a buttress of supposed fact to support his fiction. The book itself leaps around the world, from Park Lane and Paris to the seas off north Australia and New Caledonia. Trove finds no copies much to my surprise. His non-fiction follow-up on the convicts of New Caledonia, In an Unknown Prison Land (1901), is well represented.

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AUBREY, Frank [ie Francis Henry Atkins]. A Queen of Atlantis. A romance of the Caribbean Sea. Philadelphia, Lippincott 1900. Octavo publisher's gilt decorated blue cloth (light signs of use); eight plates by D. Murray Smith. A touch of browning at the very beginning; quite a good copy. Au$185

First American edition, using the London sheets. Most desirable, all the expected thrills of an Atlantean thriller plus some: flying damsels; immortals; a satisfying variety of monsters including the 'frightful shape, with its maddening leer and its blood-curdling scream' that welcomes us to the book, towering over the insensate maiden in the frontispiece; giant cuttle or devil-fish; even a vampire.

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NEWLAND, Simpson. Blood Tracks of the Bush. London, Gay & Bird 1900. Octavo publisher's red cloth. Sixteen page publisher's list dated January 1900 at the end. Some light spotting at the beginning; a nice, bright copy. Au$850

First edition. We begin, as we must, on an English country estate with an unscrupulous debt-ridden squire directing his equally unscrupulous son to take his young ward's inheritance, make his fortune in the colonies and save the family home. Scene change to Wilcannia and no-one behaves any better. It's a well filled novel, plenty of murder and robbery, false identity, a dash of lost race fantasy when the last survivor of the Leichhardt romp is discovered and points our hero west into the setting sun to rediscover, under the snow capped mountain, the mysterious chamber filled with gold, and - most notable - graphic accounts of the massacre of Aborigines foolish enough to cause trouble. Not much mercy here; I don't think it's giving too much away that the only protaganist left standing at the end of the book is the noble and loyal young ward and she's badly scarred. Trove locates only two copies of this first edition - the Bell colonial edition is a bit more plentiful - and OCLC and Copac add few copies outside the four British deposit libraries.

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BOOTHBY, Guy. Farewell, Nikola. London, Ward Lock 1901. Octavo navy cloth with colour onlay on the front and blocked in white on the spine (this white rubbed off as usual); 8 plates by Harold Piffard. Endpapers foxed but a decent copy. Au$50

First edition.

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WALSH, George E. The Mysterious Burglar. New York, Buckles 1901. Octavo, excellent in publisher's illustrated green cloth. Au$100

First edition. A working burglar falls in with a mysterious gentleman burglar and becomes determined to unravel his secret.

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TAYLOR, William Alexander. Intermere. Columbus, XX. Century Pub. Co. 1901-1902. Octavo publisher's grey cloth; 148pp, frontispiece portrait. An inserted publisher's card advertising the book has made a faint brown patch on the title but this copy is pretty well as new. Au$250

First edition. An Antarctic lost race race utopian thriller. Again a ship, or in this case yacht, is enveloped in fog, comes a mighty storm and the narrator finds himself in an unknown land. Intermere is populated by a physically, mentally, scientifically and socially advanced race. The book exists in a plethora of different coloured cloths but I don't know of any, and don't see any reason to look for, issue points.

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HUME, Fergus. The Millionaire Mystery. London, Chatto & Windus 1901. Octavo publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in black and gilt (some marks and signs of use). Inside a surprisingly clean bright copy. Au$185

First edition. Here our expectations are baffled: the millionaire is already dead before the book begins. But, his corpse is snatched by the end of chapter one.

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DANIELS, Heber K. Dol Shackfield, a novel. London, F.V. White 1901. Octavo publisher's decorated blue cloth blocked in black. Light signs of use, an attractive copy. Au$185

First edition of a melocomic crime thriller so far unknown to Hubin. The heroine could kindly be labelled irrepressible and so she is to the extent that you might wish her secret husband did succeed in murdering her.

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BOOTHBY, Guy. The Kidnapped President. London, Ward Lock 1902. Octavo navy cloth blocked in red and gilt (a little rubbed; a splodge on the back cover); four plates by Stanley L. Wood. Old and unneccesary tape mark at the end of the publisher's list; quite a decent copy with Ron E. Graham's (Virgil Finlay) bookplate. Au$50

First edition.

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HUME, Fergus. The Pagan's Cup. NY, Dillingham 1902 [but 1905?]. Octavo publisher's decorated blue cloth blocked in tan. Quite a good copy. Au$40

Ostensibly the first American edition but the conjugate advertisements at the end include titles from 1905. So now at less than I paid for it.

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HUME, Fergus. The Crimson Cryptogram. A Detective Story. NY, New Amsterdam 1902. Octavo publisher's cloth (spine a bit rubbed). Quite a good copy. Au$90

First American edition, the London edition appeared in 1900. Unlikely coincidence that young doctor Ellis happens to be discussing Moxton and his wife the moment his first ever patient rings the bell: Mrs Moxton to announce that her husband has been murdered? Coincidence schmoincidence, such things are beneath notice. Any more likely that all characters in film and tv still - after years of mockery - find a parking space right outside their destination?

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KUPPORD, Skelton [Sir John Adams]. A Fortune from the Sky. London, Nelson 1903. Octavo illustrated green cloth; frontispiece and extra illustrated title. Front endpaper cracked along the hinge, the occasional spot or smudge but quite a decent copy. Au$65

First and probably only edition of this quite readable, pacy and sometimes sardonic thriller involving an out of control death ray and (apropos of the title) a machine that could write advertising across the sky in flaming letters. Britain, finally gaining control of the death ray, decides that the knowledge and power of the machine is not to be trusted to a world council.

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BOOTHBY, Guy. The Countess Londa. London, F.V. White 1903. Octavo blue cloth (spine faded with a small snag at the very top); frontispiece. Endpapers browned but quite a decent copy. Au$50

First edition.

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SEVERY, Melvin L. The Darrow Enigma. New York, Dodd Mead 1904. Octavo, very good in publisher's black cloth blocked in blind and red with a small onlay (a touch rubbed); illustrations by C.D. Williams. Au$100

First edition; a laboured locked room mystery. I came across a relatively recent defence mounted by Severy's great grand-daughter against ridicule of Severy's science and his unlikely invention of a lawyer-chemist hero. First she pointed out that Severy was a successful inventor whose science was sound; then that she was herself a lawyer-chemist.

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BRONSON, Clark H. Twice a Man. A psychological romance. Chicago, Bronson & Co. 1904. Octavo publisher's olive cloth decorated in green and gilt (spine a little dull and faded); frontispiece portrait, illustrations by French. Natural browning of the paper, a rather good copy. Au$185

Only edition of this rare oddity, a novel of "double memory" in which the hero has two lives thanks to a kind of amnesia. As the author says himself, "It contains humor and pathos, sentiment and philosophy" and in case this alarms the shy reader it also "abounds in dialogue and dramatic situations". At the end is an appendix with two authentic cases and the author's theory followed by three closely packed pages of enticements for readers, booksellers and canvassers. While priced at $1.50 a copy will be mailed to anywhere in the world, whether England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, Van Dieman's Land, New Zealand, India ... for $1.40. Customers in all these places have closely held their copies: Worldcat finds only three copies, all in the US. Bronson self published a book of verse in Iowa some years earlier and Bronson & Co apparently existed only for this book.

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CALDERON, George. Dwala. A romance. London, Smith Elder 1904. Octavo publisher's green cloth. Some browning or spotting that seems endemic to the paper; a rather good, bright copy. An inscribed presentation from Calderon's wife Katherine Calderon - by 1921 his widow - to Frederick O'Brien of South Seas fame, with an effusive letter thanking him for the review in the New York Times of Calderon's posthumously published 'Tahiti' (1921). Au$250

Only edition of this scarce satirical fantasy which begins in Borneo where the just discovered Missing Link is being taught to read and write by an American who plans to put him in the "London Shows". The Missing Link escapes this and is soon Prince Dwala, the obscenely rich darling of London society, promising to fund an expedition to Borneo to discover the Missing Link. The reviewer of The Spectator had difficulty, as he had with Chesterton, in "extracting a moral, lesson, or meaning" from the "too anarchical" satire and lamented the waste of so much talent on a book that required "nothing short of genius" to pull off. Calderon was one of the golden boys of the English intelligentsia, Russian and Slavonic scholar, pioneer translator of Chekhov and middle aged volunteer, killed at Gallipoli in 1915.

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TURNER, Edgar. The Lady and the Burglar, a fantastic romance. London, Ward Lock [1905]. Octavo mauve cloth blocked in blind, white and gilt (tips a little rubbed); frontispiece. Quite a good copy. Au$100

First edition of this ridiculous but readable thriller with a semi-gentleman and up-to-date burglar (he and his team rode bicycles), a show-girl, and a race to find her buried diamonds.

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TRAIN, Arthur. McAllister and his Double. NY, Scribner 1905. Octavo illustrated tan cloth blocked in red, black and white; 12 plates. Some light browning and the tan cover a bit browned or smudged but quite a good copy. Au$75

First edition of Train's first book; a series of misadventures of a society prig with a criminal ex-valet.

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HILL, Frederick Trevor. The Accomplice. New York, Harper 1905. Octavo, very good in publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in red and gilt. Au$100

First edition, a thriller worked as a court room drama; described by Carolyn Wells (in her 'Technique of the Mystery Story'; 1913) as 'unusually good' despite her make an example of it for using a particularly implausible device for catching the criminal.

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CAMDEN, John. The Hundredth Acre [subtitled: A Detective Story on the front cover]. Boston, Turner 1905. Octavo, very good in bright publisher's decorated cloth blocked in black, gilt, white and green; frontispiece. Inscription of Anna Peabody on front endpaper recording her second reading of the book in March 1917 and pronouncing it "excellant". Au$125

First edition? probably. Ward Lock published the English edition in the same year but it is an American book. An obscure detective thriller missed by most bibliographies for some reason, which is a shame. Set in Paris with a cast of Americans it has everything: a mysterious poisoning; secret passages; switched identities; a suspicious detective genius; wrongly accused hero; the works.

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HORNUNG, E.W. [Ernest William]. A Thief in the Night. Further adventures of A.J. Raffles cricketer and cracksman. NY, Scribners 1905. Octavo publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in white, red and green; 10 plates by Cuneo. Tips and the white moon a bit rubbed but a rather good copy. Au$120

First American edition, contemporaneous with the London edition - they both appeared in early October.

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GARLAND, Hamlin. The Tyranny of the Dark. NY, Harper 1905. Octavo publisher's illustrated blue cloth blocked in gilt, black and white; eight plates. A nice, bright copy. Au$100

First edition. A thriller revolving around psychics, a delectable young medium and those who would malevolently conrol her.

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HORNUNG, E.W. [Ernest William]. Stingaree. NY, Scribners 1905. Octavo publishers green cloth with a mounted illustration on the front; eight plates by George Lambert. A rather good copy. Au$175

First American edition or first edition? April according to the copyright page and the reviews and advertisements. Did the English edition beat it into print? It seems unlikely - May 15 is the publisher's announcement I found. One of Hornung's relatively few proper Australian thrillers.

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PRATT, Ambrose. Vigorous Daunt: Billionaire. London, Ward Lock 1905. Octavo publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in gilt, black red and white (some marks and smudges); frontispiece and 12 plates by Stanley L. Wood. Signs of use, a pretty decent copy. Au$225

First edition. An English gentleman on his scuppers in Berlin becomes a German spy in France, meets and is foiled by Vigorous Daunt, the Australian "mad billionaire". Daunt then, naturally, saves him from certain death on Devil's Island, recruits him as assistant and the adventures begin.

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HOLMES, Gordon. [ie Louis Tracy and probably not M.P. Shiel]. The Arncliffe Puzzle. New York, Clode 1906. Octavo publishers illustrated cloth blocked in red, black and gilt. Inner front hinge cracked but firm; a very good copy. Au$150

First edition (probably - the closest thing to a bibliography places this before the London edition of the same year). Detective fiction by the journalist and writer of thrillers and sometime collaborator of Shiel. Tracy and Shiel collaborated as Holmes and as Robert Fraser but Shiel denied any involvement with this, the second Gordon Holmes novel.

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GARDENHIRE, Samuel M. The Long Arm. New York, Harper 1906. Octavo, excellent in publisher's illustrated blue cloth blocked in black and white (a small surface blemish to the varnish over the white); illustrations. Au$175

First edition. Starring the amateur super sleuth Ledroit Conners, who never really took off. Carolyn Wells ('Technique of the Mystery Story'; 1913) helps explain this when she uses Conners as an example of a poor choice of name for a detective. She adds that the title itself is a so obvious that at least four writers used it: Mary Wilkins, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Richard Harding Davis and Gardenhire.

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WALCOTT, Earle Ashley. Blindfolded. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill 1906. Octavo publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in red, black and white; eight plates by Alice Barber Stephens. Spine a touch rubbed but a rather good copy. Au$85

First edition. A snappy murder mystery set in San Francisco involving near identical cousins - cleverer than twins huh? - and an insanely ferocious villain. Apparently there is a torturously titled translation in Slovak published in New York in 1923. Curious. Walcott wrote a few thrillers and a paper on water supply.

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GOULD, Nat. A Straight Goer. London, John Long [1906?]. Octavo publisher's green cloth. A rather good copy. Au$150

Undoubtedly the first edition; the adverts at the end suggest that minor adjustments to Morris Miller's chronology are needed. I pity anyone who takes on a bibliography of Nat Gould; some books are advertised in boards at 2/- or cloth at 2/6; some are advertised in wrappers only. One of Gould's Australian romps, within the first few pages we are introduced to a far flung outback station, the owner's daughter with mysterious antecedents and an unjustly accused younger son of English plutocracy. I skipped to the end in fear that Gould would have this youngish gentleman end up with his arms about the girl, who is only twelve at the start, but rightly he ends up with the faithful young woman at home who always believed in his innocence (who seems to be his first cousin). In between there are bushrangers and horses and other thrills but having reached the end I don't want to give away the middle.

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SMITH, James & John Wren SUTTON. The Secret of the Sphinx or, the Ring of Moses. London, Philip Wellby 1906. Octavo publisher's cloth blocked in black (a repair to the front hinge). Used but still a very acceptable copy. Au$600

A later issue of the only edition of this still rare Australian occult fantasy in a Rider binding; Rider took over Welby in 1908. I think this is the only novel by the journalist and Melbourne cultural luminary Smith and the only publication I can find with Sutton's name attached. Sutton was a medium, a self described "magnetopath" in one news item I found. A John Wren Sutton, sculptor, appears in more papers, including being named as co-respondent in a 1908 "painful" divorce case, and the kind note sculptor Sutton received in Smith's 'Cyclopedia of Victoria' leads me to designate them the same person. The book received fair coverage, as far as reviews are concerned, largely on the strength of Smith's prominence and one notice claimed this as the first of a projected trilogy; perhaps public indifference put paid to that scheme, perhaps it was the painful divorce case. Trove now finds three copies of this in Australian libraries and Worldcat adds not many more outside the deposit libraries of Britain.

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PRATT, Ambrose. The Counterstroke. London, Ward Lock 1906. Octavo publisher's decorated cloth blocked in gilt, red and pale yellow; frontispiece and one other plate by Harold Piffard. T.P.'s Weekly's 'Private Review Copy', so stamped; front fly removed marring a bit quite a good copy. Au$125

First edition. Aristocratic members, from three nations, of the secret order of Knights of the Ninth Arch are ordered to uncover the secrets of Europe's most dangerous woman - the diabolical nihilist siren Madame Viyella. Then it gets complicated.

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KERNAHAN, Coulson. The Dumpling. A detective love story of a great labour uprising. London, Cassell 1906. Octavo publisher's black cloth titled in white with an illustrated onlay; four plates by Stanley L. Wood. A very second hand copy, rubbed and worn at the tips, one plate loose ... but, inscribed by Kernahan 'To "S.L.H." (Sledge Hammer") from C.K.' Au$50

First edition of this cleverly subtitled thriller. It doesn't leave a lot to say about the book - except for the opium den of course.

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MANSON, Marsden. The Yellow Peril in Action. A possible chapter in history. Privately published, San Francisco, January 2 1907. Octavo publisher's printed wrapper; 32pp (including two blank leaves at the end), folding map. Au$125

A salutary piece of yellow peril literature, this is the history of the war between the USA and China - with help from Japan - in 1910. I can tell you now it didn't end well for America. Manson was the San Francisco City Engineer during the immediate post earthquake years and some of his predilection for technical detail has crept in here. This understandable desire to reinforce polemic with fact is the mark of the amateur and usually the reason why such tales are forgotten but Manson hasn't tried to disguise his aim with fiction; a fair bit is straightforward xenophobic agitprop. I wonder how much the cataclysm of the San Francisco earthquake and fire had to do with this but I find no direct mention. It's odd that it went to press so soon after the quake - Manson's preface is dated December 1906 - without a word. Did Manson think the shock of the quake was a good prompt for a rocky public to take notice of an even greater threat? Certainly there was a movement to push the Chinese out of central San Francisco as rebuilding began. Was this a misguided bit of timing that guaranteed his book would be ignored?

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DANE, John Colin. Champion. NY, Dillingham 1907. Octavo, very good in publisher's red cloth with mounted colour illustration; eight plates. Au$125

First American edition - the English is contemporaneous - of an anthropomorphic racing thriller with plenty of dark deeds and a moustachioed, possibly even half-Spanish, villain. The narrator, Champion, is a revolutionary new racing car.

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TURNER, George Frederic. The Toad and the Amazon. London, Ward Lock 1907. Octavo publisher's decorated cloth blocked in white and gilt (minor signs of use, a little white gone from the spine); frontispiece and one other plate. A pretty good copy. Au$250

First edition. I'm not sure why Turner's books have disappeared so thoroughly. The style is a bit precious but no more than most of his contemporaries and the repartee is often witty and amusing. The necessary conceit - or gimmick - to keep us reading: a pair of society gentlefolk disguise themselves to follow their passion - boxing - might seem ordinary until we discover that one is a beautiful young woman. In case our interest flags, cut to the meeting of the high society Entomophagites where the abolition of section C of Rule 15 is being argued. Section C is the requirement that any outsider who stumbles over or into the Entomophagites is summarily executed. Needless, maybe, to say, our hero is going to be lured into blundering into the Entomophagite stronghold by his rival for the beautiful Amazon.
Turner, a London architect, published a decent number of novels between 1906 and 1920, most with some thrilling or macabre twist, and all apparently sank with barely a ripple.

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GORON, M.F. The Truth About the Case ... edited by Albert Keyzer. Philadelphia, Lippincott 1907. Octavo, excellent in publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in red and black; illustrations by Arthur G. Dove. Au$120

First edition in English. Ostensibly taken from the diaries of the ex-Chief of the Paris Surete; there were a few of these memoirs published under his name in French - but read it only as detective fiction.

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CLEGG, T.B. [Thomas Bailey]. The Wilderness. London & NY, John Lane 1907. Octavo publisher's cloth. Minor signs of use, a rather good copy. Au$200

Only edition of this uncommon melodramatic Australian thriller; apparently the American issue judging by the binding. We jump from the orphaned girl in imagined Golden City - a gold town grown into a city - to the embittered doctor playing with poisons and dissecting Kanakas in Queensland cane fields but we know their fates cross somewhere soon. Given that Clegg was Ballarat born is it safe to presume it is the model for Golden City? Clegg was a journalist, lawyer and magistrate who in the eighties had investigated the penal system in New Caledonia and the indentured labour industry in Queensland. New Caledonia found its way into his 'The Bishop's Scapegoat' (1908) and the cane fields into this.

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THANET, Octave [ie Alice French]. The Lion's Share. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill 1907. Octavo, very good in publisher's decorated cloth blocked in gilt and black; illustrations by E.M. Ashe. Au$125

First edition. Apparently her only detective novel.

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RINEHART, Mary Roberts. The Circular Staircase. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill 1908. Octavo publisher's illustrated dark olive cloth blocked in red and black. An outstanding copy. Au$350

Her first book and one of her most successful thrillers, later dramatised (and renovelised) as The Bat.

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TRAIN, Arthur. True Stories of Crime, from the District Attorney's Office. NY, Scribner 1908. Octavo illustrated navy cloth blocked in green and warm red; photo plates. A couple of bookshop stamps and the murderous bookplate of Harry Bateson. Au$65

Ostensibly true cases.

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DOUBLEDAY, Roman. [Lily A. Long?]. The Hemlock Avenue Mystery. Boston, Little Brown 1908. Octavo publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in black and yellow; four plates by Charles Grunwald. A very good copy. Au$100

First edition. Lily Long sounds as unlikely as Roman Doubleday but that's who our author supposedly is. A reasonably fast paced murder mystery involving a young reporter, a rising legal star and a young woman with a face of mystery.

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ROSENKRANTZ, Baron Palle. The Magistrate's Own Case. London, Methuen 1908. Octavo publisher's red cloth decorated in gilt (spine a little discoloured); 32pp publisher's list for 1911 at the end - clearly not a fast seller, this book. Prize inscription for spelling on the front fly; quite a good copy. Au$165

First English edition of this thriller which, despite what the sloppy Encyclopedia of Nordic Crime Fiction says, is not a translation of Mordet i Vestermarie (1902), Denmark's first detective novel. This particular Danish crime is the murder of an English lord in Germany and the magistrate is German, most cosmopolitan. Rosenkrantz was maybe Denmark's busiest writer in the early 20th century - he had to support a noble's lifestyle which had already seen him in trouble when he was arrested for misuse of public funds and bankrupted.

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CRAWFURD, Oswald. The Mystery of Myrtle Cottage. London, Hodder & Stoughton 1908. Octavo publisher's decorated cloth blocked in black and gilt (somewhat rubbed). Inner hinges cracked. A second hand copy. Au$60

Warwick Colonial Library; published by Chapman & Hall in the same year, these are probably the first edition sheets of this rare feminist comedy of gender and sex - a thriller of sorts. Two young women go into London Bohemian society - polite and milquetoast as it is - as two young men, determined to win the laurels in art and letters that would be denied them as women. Perhaps the most curious thing about this book is Crawfurd's age - by this time he was in his seventies, he died the next year. The scathing contempt for socialism that erupts throughout the book may be characteristic of a crusty ex-diplomat but the rest occasionally verges on the racy. Crawfurd's DNB entry is hardly enthusiastic: a competent if unenergetic diplomat, a minor writer and a publisher out of his depth as director of Chapman & Hall. Unsurprising for a colonial edition, I found two colonial notices; one each for Australia and New Zealand ("absurd" and "preposterous" respectively) but the book has vanished since then. The usual library searches find four copies - presumably the domestic edition - in the British deposit libraries and one unexpected copy in Switzerland.

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APPLETON, G.W. [George Webb]. The Down Express. London, Long 1908. Octavo publisher's red cloth titled in gilt and black. Mildly used, a pretty good copy. Au$125

First edition of this thriller revolving around fraud, imposition, long lost deeds to a mine and the long lost heiress to those deeds.

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MITFORD, C. Guise. The Paxton Plot. London, John Long 1908. Octavo publisher's decorated cloth blocked in gilt, black and orange. Some foxing, a bright copy. Au$90

First edition of this thriller of a socialist revolutionary plot masterminded by a woman. This is known, but is it the old Miss Delaval or her charming niece, the young Miss Delaval? Our hero is "half vagabond, half Bohemian" yet by instinct a rigid Tory.

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JEPSON, Edgar & Maurice LEBLANC. Arsene Lupin. From the play by Maurice Leblanc and Francis de Croisset. London, Mills & Boon 1909. Octavo, very good in publisher's cloth with onlaid illustration (a small flaw to the front edge of the back cover). Au$185

First edition. An early entry into what became the Lupin industry. Leblanc's first tales of the gentleman thief appeared in Paris in 1906 (and in book form in 1907), in 1908 he had his first movie and the first production of the play from which this is adapted. Bought in Paris at Brentano's by Californian politician John Raglan Glascock in 1909 - an apposite and cosmopolitan mix of story, book and buyer.

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KIRMESS, C.H. [i.e. Frank Fox?]. The Australian Crisis. Melbourne, George Robertson 1909. Octavo publisher's decorated red cloth blocked in black and white (a little flecked); 336pp. A nice copy. Au$300

First edition, Australian issue. Presumably the first binding - it also came in undecorated red cloth. One of the classic yellow peril novels, this chronicles (from 1922 looking back to 1912) the Japanese invasion of Australia - first by wile and cunnning, then by war. It is of course a bit more complex; there is social turmoil and political breakdown, civil war and the abandonment, if not betrayal, of Australia by Britain. The central section of the book is the romance of the White Guard - the volunteer militia - and their guerilla warfare against the Japanese in the Northern Territory.

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FITZPATRICK, Ernest Hugh. The Coming Conflict of Nations or the Japanese-American War. Springfield Ill, H.W. Rokker 1909. Octavo publisher's cloth; 306pp. A rather nice copy, inscribed and signed by Fitzpatrick. sold

First edition. A rare yellow peril novel. We begin with rebellion in India, inspired by the Japanese victory over Russia, but meanwhile back at the ranch Japanese-American tensions erupt into armed conflict in California after local anti-Japanese legislation is enacted. War is declared and America invaded by Japan. Meanwhile, complicated stuff is happening with war between England and Germany and England's alliance with Japan collapsing. Things are dire in America until England, and dominions, comes to her aid. We end with a confederation of English speaking peoples. Fitzpatrick, possibly a British medico emigre to Illinois, published a few books and one other - The Marshall Duke of Denver (1895) - was a foray into the future: an account of the labor revolution of 1920.

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DORRINGTON, Albert & A.G. STEPHENS. The Lady Calphurnia Royal. London, Mills & Boon 1909. Octavo publisher's red cloth; with ten pages of publisher's adverts at the end. A used but reasonably decent copy. Au$300

First edition, colonial library issue, of this cosmopolitan Australian thriller, later retitled 'Our Lady of Darkness', the first of the new Thrilling Adventure Library series. Revenge and opium fuel the Lady Calphurnia as she circles the world in a drug induced nightmare attended by her enslaved Chinese dwarf, mute servant girl, the embalmed corpse of her husband, and her fair daughter. Throw in an outback Queensland station, a wrongly convicted prisoner in Noumea that Calphurnia hasn't punished enough, and his fair son and you are well into chapter three.

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RINEHART, Mary Roberts. The Window at the White Cat. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill 1910. Octavo publisher's olive cloth blocked in white; four plates by Arthur Keller. Slight signs of use but an uncommonly good, bright copy. Au$95

First edition of this detective thriller.

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PRATT, Ambrose. The Living Mummy. NY, Stokes 1910. Octavo publisher's illustrated cloth blocked in yellow, green and grey (spine ends worn, a couple of surface scratches on the boards); four colour plates by Louis Fancher. A bit used but not a bad copy. Au$300

First American edition which I believe is the proper first edition. "It fairly out-Poes Poe in the region of weird impossibilities" (New York Times).

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DORRINGTON, Albert & A.G. STEPHENS. Our Lady of Darkness. NY, Macaulay 1910. Octavo publisher's cloth; four plates by John Rae. Edges a little dusty, a rather good, bright copy. Au$275

First American edition of this cosmopolitan Australian thriller, published the year before in London as The Lady Calphurnia Royal, without illustrations. Revenge and opium fuel the Lady Calphurnia as she circles the world in a drug induced nightmare attended by her enslaved Chinese dwarf, mute servant girl, the embalmed corpse of her husband, and her fair daughter. Throw in an outback Queensland station, a wrongly convicted prisoner in Noumea that Calphurnia hasn't punished enough, and his fair son and you are well into chapter three.

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WELLS, H.G. The Country of the Blind and other stories. London, Nelson [1911]. Octavo blindstamped blue cloth. A few spots on the edge, quite a good copy. Au$100

First edition. All the short stories that Wells considered worth preserving. A number are scientific fantasies.

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WICKS, Mark. To Mars Via the Moon. An Astronomical Story. London, Seeley 1911. Octavo illustrated cloth blocked in gilt; 16 plates. Some browning at the beginning but an excellent, bright copy. Ronald E. Graham's copy with his bookplate on the front fly and, loose inside, the bookseller's label of science fiction pioneer G. Ken Chapman with the pretty steep price of four guineas. Au$375

First edition, first of two binding variants according to Locke ('Spectrum of Fantasy'). Sometimes dismissed as being for 'younger readers', but this seems a mistake based on the appearance of the book - it is plump, gilded and illustrated - rather than its contents. It is a lesson in astronomy anchored in Percival Lowell's certainty that Mars was crisscrossed with canals - and hence home to an intelligent species; but it is also an interplanetary adventure, a novel of reincarnation and a utopian novel.

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WHITELAW, David. The Man with the Red Beard. A story of Moscow and London. London, Greening & Co 1911. Octavo publisher's black cloth blocked in gilt and red; four plates by Frank Wright. Edges a bit dusty, a nice bright copy. Au$125

First edition of this most uncommon thriller of intrigue, terrorism, revolutionaries, murder and villainy.

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HORNUNG, E.W. [Ernest William]. The Camera Fiend. NY, Scribner's 1911. Octavo publisher's illustrated red cloth blocked in black, white and gilt; six plates. A rather good, unfaded copy. Au$165

First American edition with a better, much better, cover than the comparatively drab English edition of the same year and the illustrations. Here's what happens when an asthmatic English schoolboy meets a cracked German doctor (naturally) determined to catch on film the human soul. Hornung himself had been an asthmatic English schoolboy sent to Australia for his health, unlike his protagonist whose family refused his doctor's recommendation to send him on a voyage to Australia. Asthma cigarettes are an important plot device. Luckily for the boy the gluttonous and apparently alcoholic detective Eugene Thrush is soon on the case.

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HUME, Fergus. The Jew's House. London, Ward Lock 1911. Octavo publisher's black cloth blocked in gilt, red and blind; colour frontispiece. A bit of browning of the edges and at the ends, minor signs of use; quite a good copy. Au$185

First edition. The delectable girl is not an unpleasant millionaire's daughter but that doesn't save him from being murdered at the end of chapter one. She is a quaker farm girl - or is she? A convoluted plot with plenty of spectacular admissions and secrets unveiled. The Jew of the House - Ben-Ezra of Tanbuck Hall - is a millionaire but not the murdered one, rather one falsely accused of murder. He is really the hero of the story and still ends up badly.

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PIDGIN, Charles Felton. The Chronicles of Quincy Adams Sawyer, Detective. Boston, Page 1912. Octavo publisher's illustrated cream cloth blocked in red and black. Illustrations by Harold James Cue. An excellent, bright copy. Au$185

First edition.

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DORRINGTON, Albert. The Radium Terrors. NY, Doubleday 1912. Octavo publisher's red cloth titled in gilt and blocked in blind (mildly darkened area along the top of the front); four plates by A.C. Michael. Rather good. Au$100

First American edition. I'm not sure whether the English edition beat the American onto the market but it should have - it's rather British. A radioactive yellow peril detective thriller - the diabolical scientist here is Japanese - not a bad mix. Just a pity Dorrington didn't throw in some of his sweat soaked south east Asian settings.

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HUME, Fergus. Red Money. London, Ward Lock 1912. Octavo publisher's decorated black cloth blocked in blind, red and gilt; colour frontispiece. Name erased from the front fly, edges a bit foxed; a second hand but decent copy. Au$125

First English edition; the American edition probably beat it into print. The Dillingham edition was copyrighted in late October 1911 and presumably appeared before the end of the year, this Ward Lock edition may well have appeared before the end of 1911 too but I can't swear to that. Another thriller with murder, fraud and gipsies - gipsies were busy participants in high society in those days.

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DORRINGTON, Albert. The Radium Terrors. NY, Doubleday 1912. Octavo publisher's red cloth titled in gilt and blocked in blind (spine a bit dulled or rubbed); four plates by A.C. Michael. Quite decent. Au$60

First American edition. I'm not sure whether the English edition beat the American onto the market but it should have - it's rather British. A radioactive yellow peril detective thriller - the diabolical scientist here is Japanese - not a bad mix. Just a pity Dorrington didn't throw in some of his sweat soaked south east Asian settings.

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HUME, Fergus. The Mystery Queen. London, Ward Lock 1912. Octavo publisher's black cloth blocked in gilt, red and blind (spine blocking a bit rubbed); frontispiece and one other plate. Title and the pages adjacent to the other plate foxed, still a rather good, bright copy. Au$200

First edition. How did unappetising millionaires have such delectable daughters? Why is as unimportant as why said millionaire must be murdered by the end of chapter one - two at the latest. Reliable Hume gives us a dead millionaire early, and a secret society of villains from good families ruled by a diabolical queen and a lot more dead bodies by the end of the book.

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HORNUNG, E.W. [Ernest William]. Witching Hill. NY, Scribner 1913. Octavo gilt cloth; illustrations by F.C. Yohn. An excellent, bright copy. Au$125

First American edition, contemporaneous with the London edition - both arrived in February I believe.

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ALDEN, Winthrop. The Lost Million. New York, Dodd Mead 1913. Octavo publisher's green cloth with onlaid colour illustration. A couple of minute flaws to the onlay but an excellent, bright copy. Au$175

First edition. An obscure, uncommon and ripe thriller with mysterious adventurers - male and female, mysterious charges, mysterious threats, exotic strangers, and mysterious, exotic, threatening strangers, all surrounding an ancient Egyptian bronze cylinder which contains a deadly secret. Hubin denotes Winthrop Alden to be the pseudonym of a distinguished author but can't help more. Winthrop Alden was a character in Henry van Dyke's 'The Ruling Passion' (1901) but there are real people with the name.

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HILL, Headon. The Hour-Glass Mystery. London, Ward Lock 1913. Octavo publisher's black cloth blocked in blind, gilt and red (small repair to the spine top); frontispiece. A bit of foxing and mild use, quite a good copy. Au$100

First edition of this thriller of inexplicably sinister and convoluted murderous conspiracy with false identities and disguises galore.

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MEGRUE, Roi Cooper. Undercover .. novelised by Wyndham Martyn. Boston, Little Brown 1914. Octavo publisher's red cloth blocked in white (a couple of small spots); illustrated by William Kirkpatrick. A very good copy. Au$100

A high society thriller set in Paris and Long Island. Megrue's play was considered revolutionary for 1914 for introducing the final twist: the true identity of the hero was kept secret until the very end of the play. Megrue wrote, in a 1914 article, that during tryouts he gave in one night to the advice of convention and let the audience into the secret in the proper place - the second act - after which 'at the end of the third act the entire lot got up in a bunch and walked out'. The novel was synchronised with the play - published in August, at the end it advertises the New York and Chicago openings for the end of August.

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SLADEN, Douglas. Fair Inez. A romance of Australia. London, Hutchinson [1918]. Octavo publisher's cloth; 16 page publisher's list for spring 1918 at the end. Minor signs of use and some spotting or browning, a pretty good copy. Inscribed affectionately and signed by Sladen in June 1935 to "Dorothy ... another English soul who married an Australian." A small pencil note on the front paste down suggests that Sladen paid 2/6 for this copy in April 1935; if so, not the only author to buy their own books to give away. Au$400

First edition of this futuristic fantasy which opens in the year 2000 with the great airship Murrumbidgee from London coming into land at Melbourne. Returning home is Pat Lindsay Gordon, son of Adam Lindsay Gordon IV and great-grandson of Adam Lindsay Gordon II, in turn the grandson of a cousin of the revered poet. The Gordons obviously breed hard and fast. His sister Inez will doubtless be the femme fatale of the book. Read on yourself.

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SLADEN, Douglas. Fair Inez. A romance of Australia. London, Hutchinson [1918]. Octavo contemporary brown cloth (spine lettered and decorated in gilt); 16 page publisher's list for spring 1918 at the end. Front fly removed and inner hinge cracked. Mild natural browning of the paper. Not a bad copy. Au$300

First edition of this futuristic fantasy which opens in the year 2000 with the great airship Murrumbidgee from London coming into land at Melbourne. Returning home is Pat Lindsay Gordon, great-grandson of Adam Lindsay Gordon II, in turn the grandson of a cousin of the revered poet. The Gordons obviously breed hard and fast. His sister Inez will doubtless be the femme fatale of the book. Read on yourself. Was this published in wrappers? I see no other reason for replacing the binding when it must have still been new but I can't find a reference to wrappered copies.

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HILL, Headon. [Francis Edward Grainger]. The Jesmond Mystery. London, Ward Lock 1919. Octavo brown cloth lettered and blocked in black. An excellent, bright copy. Au$125

First edition; the detective here is the mildly alcoholic provincial reporter Sam Sprot.

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McCUTCHEON, George Barr. Anderson Crow Detective. NY, Dodd Mead 1920. Octavo green cloth. Some browning, mostly at the ends; quite a good copy. Au$50

First edition.

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FREEMAN, R. Austin. The Surprising Adventures of Mr Shuttlebury Cobb. London, Hodder [1927]. Octavo publisher's decorated brown cloth. A few spots on the edges and the first couple of leaves but a rather good, bright copy. Au$75

First edition.

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ROGERS, Ben. [ie Roger Pugh?]. The Vengeance of the Tong. London, Modern Publishing [193-?]. Octavo publisher's boards and dustwrapper (this a bit frayed frayed with a chip from the spine top). A rather good copy. Au$200

Only edition of this splendid yellow peril thriller. The usual searches find only the British Library copy. Grubby reading copies can be found but once you've seen the cover what's left to read?

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OWEN, Eric R. Doctor Zollinoff's Revenge. A mystery and detective novel. London, Modern Publishing [193-?]. Octavo publisher's boards and frayed and chipped but very decent dustwrapper. Natural browning of the paper, a rather good copy. Endpaper advertisements for quack remedies and fortune tellers. sold

Only edition presumably of this scarce bit of occult ridden detective trash. Scotland Yard's best could make no headway with the case as they were mesmerised. Owen was in the film business - the utilitarian section: news reels and so on - from about 1918. It's likely that he was director of photography for the classic 1960 documentary of Blackpool: 'Playground Spectacular'. He is reputed to have written a few novels but this is the only one that has been identified. OCLC and Copac find two copies, one in England and one in the US.

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BELOVE, B., M.D. The Split Atom Last human pair on earth The whirling of ideas. Boris Ackerman, Los Angeles 1946. Octavo publisher's cloth and dustwrapper (torn & touch chipped); 478pp, illustrations (as is the dustwrapper) by the 'talented, imaginative artist, Joseph Creaturo'. Au$50

Headed on the dustwrapper: 'An amphibian novel' - and from the foreword: 'The author has hewn a new path in literature. It is an amphibian creation - a link between fiction and non-fiction.' An exuberantly crazed book, seething with unintelligible and indigestible lumps of polemic. B. Belove (pictured on the back of the d/w with what I suspect is a World War I photo in uniform looking worryingly like Himmler) was a pioneer of Steinach's and Lorenz-Doppler's methods of gland rejuvenation. He mixes his rejuvenation theories with interstellar mysticism and atomic cataclysm in such an uncontrolled process and prose that it is really almost the perfect response to the shock of the bomb.

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MERRITT, A. The Metal Monster. [with The Face in the Abyss; and The Ship of Ishtar]. NY, Avon 1946. [and 1945]. Three volumes octavo publisher's colour illustrated wrappers. A bit used, pretty good. Au$75

First edition of The Metal Monster. The accompanying pair were published earlier as books.

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PRAGNELL, Festus. The Machine-God Laughs. Los Angeles, Griffin Publishing 1949. Octavo publisher's cloth and dustwrapper (this laminated later, apparently with clear contact). Au$40

It seems inconceivable but apparently Festus Pragnell is not a pseudonym. This appears to be his third and last book. A badly written thriller involving a race to beat the evil Chinese in developing a 'super-intelligent mechanical brain' - which once developed takes over its own growth, the war, and spawns itself. Mechanical brains, rocket ships, television, and the mushroom clouds of atom bombs - the preoccupations of the age combined - crude but timely.

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ELLIOTT, R.C. Sabotage. Leigh-on-Sea, Barrington Gray [1956?]. Octavo colour illustrated wrapper with most of the necessary ingredients: a mushroom cloud, a jet liner and a scientist at microscope but being English the scientist is an elderly man and there is no siren. Au$30

'An 'Atomic Age' thriller' the cover tells us, starring 'Blast' Furnace, a 'new and revolutionary character in THRILLER fiction.' This he is not. Elliott seems to have been a specialist in racing thrillers before the war, the BM has a number of these. Atoms and the cold war have given him a new theme but his career in these years is hard to trace. This is the only post war thriller known to Hubin and I don't know whether Blast ever battled any more atom spies.

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TRALINS, Bob. The Miss From S.I.S. [and] The Chic Chick Spy [and] The Ring-a-ding UFOs. NY, Belmont Books 1966-67. Three volumes octavo illustrated wrapps. The first a bit used but pretty good, the others rather good. Au$75

Apparently all first editions, if it matters, of these fragile, vulnerable bits of trash, one self-titled 'the most absurd book you will read this year', sort of fun pieces of sexploitative, secret agent guff starring the 'swingin'est secret agent thatever changed into something more comfortable than a trench coat' with 'feminine allure raised to the nth power'.

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