Mystery
THE FACE AND THE MASK.
New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers, [1895]. Small octavo, pp. [1-4] [1] 2-250 [251: ads] [252: blank], five inserted plates with illustrations by A. Hencke, original pictorial green cloth, front and spine panels stamped in silver, silver top edge, other edges untrimmed. First U.S. edition. A scarce collection of short fiction including "The Doom of London," a catastrophe story, and "The Great Pegram Mystery, a Sherlock Holmes parody. Anatomy of Wonder (1976) 2-8 and (1981) 1-14. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction 101. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Early Years 126 and 127. Clareson, Science Fiction in America, 1870s-1930s 046. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, p. 28. Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK, p. 55. Wilson, Shadows in the Attic, p. 55. Bleiler (1978), p. 16. Not in Reginald (1979; 1992). Hubin (1994), p. 51.
BEARING SECRETS.
New York: Walker, 1996. Octavo, boards. First edition. Signed. Author's second mystery.
THE INNOCENTS.
New York: Walker, 1995. Octavo, Hardcover. First edition. Author's first mystery.
PINK VODKA BLUES.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. Octavo, Hardcover. First edition. Author's well received first mystery novel.
PINK VODKA BLUES.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. Octavo, Hardcover. First edition. Author's well received first mystery novel.
FAREWELL MISS JULIE LOGAN: A WINTRY TALE.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933. Octavo, pp. [1-10] 1-103 [104-106: blank]. cloth. First U.S. edition, later printing. Later printing of the first U.S. edition, Scribner's colophon is present on the copyright page, but no "A". Supernatural story with hint of vampirism. Bleiler: The Guide to Supernatural Fiction # 1752.
KISS AND KILL bound with ON THE HOOK.
New York: Ace Books, Inc., [1954]. Small octavo, pictorial wrappers. First edition and first paperback edition. Ace double D-47. Paperback original of the Barry novel. The Powell is a reprint, originally published as SHARK RIVER. Jaffery, S., Double Trouble: A Bibliographic Chronicle of Ace Mystery Doubles, pp. 21-22.
THE DELIGHTS OF DETECTION.
New York: Criterion Books, [1961]. Octavo, cloth backed boards. First edition. Collects seventeen stories presented in three sections; Classic Tales, Modern Tales and Historic Tales. Authors include Dorothy Sayers, R. Austin Freeman, John D. MacDonald, Rex Stout and others.
THE BIG STEAL.
New York: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc., 1955. Octavo, boards. First edition. "The $400,000 ransom on a kidnapping case leaves Steve Conway, a copper, holding the bag- the empty suitcase in which the money was once hidden. Bounced off the force, deserted by his wife, Conway alone has to prove his innocence to his enemies as well as the police, while narcotics needlemark the solution through which he redeems himself and his new girl... Under the spell of ""Spillane who insisted"" there is the familiar contusion of flesh and violence." - Kirkus review, 6/1/55. Basinsky was a wartime friend of Mickey Spillane's who encouraged his writing. This is the first of his two novels.
A PARADE OF COCKEYED CREATURES, OR DID SOMEONE MURDER OUR WANDERING BOY?
New York: Random House, 1967. Octavo, Hardcover. First edition. The first Detective Max Van Larsen/Sylvia Plotkin thriller. An Edgar nominee for best novel.
ANTI-ICE.
[London]: HarperCollins Publishers, [1993]. Octavo, boards. First edition. Author's third novel. Signed by Baxter on the title page.
RAFT.
[London]: GraftonBooks A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers, [1991]. Octavo, boards. First edition. The author's well-received first book. "... RAFT features some of the most startling hard SF content in recent years. It is the first volume in the author's loosely connected Xeelee future history." - Anatomy of Wonder (2004) II-84. "Humans are stranded on a 'raft' in a pocket universe of enormous gravity. Baxter's debut novel, in which he describes his young hero's quest through a world that is strange indeed. As an all-too-rare example of British SF rooted in speculative physics, it has drawn praise from Larry Niven, Bob Shaw and others." - Pringle, The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction, second edition (1995), p. [296]. "It is very, very hard SF, and it's great fun, and the cosmogonic precepts of its universe are challenging to grasp, and it's quite quickly told, and it's really dumb about people." - John Clute.
RING.
[London]: HarperCollins Publishers, [1994]. Octavo, boards. First edition. Signed by Baxter on the title page. The fourth book in the "Xeelee" sequence.
TIMELIKE INFINITY.
[London]: HarperCollins Publishers, [1992]. Octavo, boards. First edition. Signed by the Baxter. The author's second novel and the second book in Baxter's "Xeelee" sequence. "Nastly alien's enslave the human race, but there may be a way for humans to avoid this fate via time travel. An incredibly complex time-and-space opera, bumptious, merry, scientifically well informed, and all-round fun to read (though, as is usual with this kind of fiction, the characterization leaves something to be desired)." - Pringle, The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction, second edition (1995), p. 378. "Neat aliens, good plot-reversals, much hand-waving with physics and a pretty damn cosmic ending. I didn't think they were writing them like this any more." - Mary Gentle, Interzone. The sequels are FLUX (1993) and RING (1994). "The sequence –- as centrally narrated here and in RING -– follows humanity into the fraught arena of interstellar space, already dominated by the complex and enigmatic Alien Xeelee, who soon prove to be highly inimical to the fragile expansionist hopes of humanity. The long epic ends darkly, aeons hence, giving with strong hints that the universe, and the Intelligences capable of comprehending it, may become coterminous. Though the incessant fertility of Baxter's imagination makes it appropriate to think of his larger-scale effects in terms of space opera, the Xeelee sequence, like most of his later fiction, is dense with thought experiments; along with Greg Bear and Gregory Benford, he is perhaps the most successful of all modern SF writers in marrying space opera and hard SF.
PEREGRINE.
New York: Congdon & Lattes, 1981. Octavo, cloth backed boards. First edition. Winner of the 1982 Edgar award for best novel.
SWITCH.
New York: Linden Press/Simon and Schuster, 1984. Octavo, cloth backed boards. First edition. The second Frank Janek novel. "The Janek stories...have been of a high standard; literate, inventive, and distinguished by the author's sympathetic appreciation of the sometimes ragged human condition." - Pederson (ed.): St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers (4th ed.), pp. 53-55.
THE MARDI GRAS MYSTERY.
Garden City, NY, and Toronto: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1921. Octavo, pp. [1-6] [1-2] 3-313 [314: colophon] [315-316: blank], jacket and frontis illustration by John Newton Howitt, original green cloth, front and spine stamped in black. First edition. Author's first mystery novel. Hubin, p. 60.
BUTCHER'S DOZEN: AN ANTHOLOGY BY THE CRIME WRITER'S ASSOCIATON.
London: William Heinemann, [1956]. Octavo, cloth. First edition. The first in this series of anthologies. Collection of 15 short stories.
PRECIOUS PORCELAIN.
New York, London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1931. Octavo, cloth. First U.S. edition. Mix of supernatural, sf, mystery and thiller novel in which the main character discovered a means of isolating the various personality fragments within himself and projecting them as living beings." - Bleiler: The Guide to Supernatural Literature #122. Anatomy of Wonder (1995) 2-7.
THE GRAY MAN WALKS.
Garden City: Published For The Crime Club, Inc. by Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1936. Octavo, pp. [i-vii] ix-x [xi-xii] [1] 2-307 [308: blank], original gray cloth, spine stamped in black, top edge stained gray. First edition. Murder mystery mixed with Southern Gothic set in an island off South Carolina. Characters include an escaped lunatic, a local conjure man and the appearance of the "Gray Man" of Southern Legend. Isaac Anderson in NY Times book review of 22 April, 1936 wrote "...in painting a convincing picture of a Southern community that has never recovered from the effects of the Civil War. There are plantations run to seed and once stately mansions that are falling into ruins and there are individuals very like them. In this grim setting the story moves on to a conclusion that is surprising but not altogether satisfactory. But it is, for all that, a better than average mystery tale. The author is well known for his later novel KING'S ROW (1940). Hubin, p. 63.
THE WINDOW WITH THE SLEEPING NUDE.
Kingston, New York: Quinn Publishing Company, Inc., [1950]. Small octavo, pictorial wrappers. First edition. Paperback original. The second published novel under his own name by this prolific writer, known for his hard-boiled stories, usually with plenty of slang and a touch of the comic. He published under numerous pseudonyms and is thought to have written as many as 3,000 stories (see-Pederson (ed.) - St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers, 4th ed., pp. 63-64).
THE 25TH HOUR.
New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., [2000]. Octavo, boards. First edition. Contemporary crime novel, filmed in 2002 by Spike Lee.
THE 25TH HOUR.
New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., [2000]. Octavo, boards. First edition. Contemporary crime novel, filmed in 2002 by Spike Lee.
SQUEEZE PLAY.
New York: Avon, [1984]. Small octavo, pictorial wrappers. First Avon edition. Paperback. This was originally published in a very scarce softcover edition in 1982 by Alpha-Omega books. Hard boiled mystery novel.
THE LOOT OF THE CITIES: BEING THE ADVENTURES OF A MILLIONAIRE IN SEARCH OF JOY. A FANTASIA.
Philadelphia: Oswald Train: Publisher, 1972. Octavo, cloth. First U. S. edition. A sequence of six detective stories serialized in WINDSOR MAGAZINE in 1903 and published in book form by A. Rivers in 1905. The first edition was published in Britain in 1905 and is quite uncommon. Queen's Quorum #34. Hubin, p. 64.