London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1934

8vo, pp. 320. Original red board, lettered in black to front panel and spine. Red endpapers, front endpaper and pastedown illustrated. Illustrated dust jacket. Newspaper clipping and agency slip to front flap. Dust jacket, title page design and endpapers by Bip Pares. Spine ends a little bumped, otherwise a near fine copy in a very good dust jacket, long closed tear to spine fold rendered invisible by mylar wrapper. Browning to rear panel, wear to top edge with a little loss to head of spine, a few small scuff marks to front panel with some paper loss at spine fold.

First edition, IN THE RARE BIP PARES DUST JACKET, AND WITH HER DESIGNS TO TITLE PAGE AND FRONT ENDPAPERS. The fourth of five Knox novels featuring the sleuth Miles Bredon.

Ordained into the Church of England in 1912, Ronald Knox [1888-1957] converted to Catholicism five years later, and served as Chaplain to Oxford University from 1926 to 1939. A brilliant scholar and classicist, Knox wrote and published on a wide variety of subjects, and while working at Oxford supplemented his income by writing detective novels during the holidays. In 1928 he codified his Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction, rules designed to give the reader a fair crack at solving the mystery (Commandment Three: ‘No more than one secret room or passage is allowable.’). The rules were set out in his introduction to The Best Detective Stories of the Year (Faber, 1928), and were rewritten as an oath of initiation for members of the Detection Club, founded the following year. Knox’s hero in five of his six novels is the detective Miles Bredon, employed by the Indescribable insurance company, putting him conveniently at the scene of every crime.

This copy retains its extremely scarce Bip Pares dust jacket -- which in at least one contemporary review received even more praise than the book. A clipping from the Daily Herald attached to the front flap of this copy praises Pares’ work over three paragraphs, and ends: ‘An entertaining, intelligently constructed book. But that dust-cover is a masterpiece.’ A second version of the dust jacket design adorns the title page, and a map of the book’s location, also by Pares, covers the front pastedown and front free endpaper.

Extremely scarce in the dust jacket: there was a copy in the Otto Penzler collection, but we can find a record of no other.

HUBIN p. 242