New York: Brentano's, 1930

8vo, pp. 304. Original tan boards, lettered in dark brown to front panel and spine. Illustrated dust jacket. Top edge red, leading edge uncut. Slight darkening to endpapers, but a near fine copy in a near fine dust jacket with just the lightest of edgewear.

First US edition. First published in the UK by Methuen the previous year.

The Australian John G. Brandon [1879-1941] was an itinerant actor in his youth before moving to England in 1923. His first book appeared that year. By the time of his death in 1941 he had published more than 120 novels, averaging more than one a month for much of the 1930s. Brandon's most memorable original character is The Honourable Arthur Stukeley Pennington, a gentleman sleuth in the style of Sexton Blake -- a franchise to which Brandon more than fifty titles.

Nighthawks! was only Brandon's seventh novel and is set in the familiar Sax Rohmer world of Far Eastern dope rings and sinister,dubiously stereotyped Chinese. The striking jacket art, redolent of the period, is the work of the Latvian (then Russian) emigré William Siegel.

An excellent copy in an unrestored, near fine dust jacket: