New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947

8vo, pp. 284. Original blue boards, lettered in black to spine. Leading edge uncut. Illustrated dust jacket. Light offsetting to endpapers, but a near fine copy in a very good dust jacket with a small closed tear at spine, some inevitable discoloration to the (white) rear panel, and an area of abrasion to the front.

First edition. An Otis Beagle title. (Yes. Otis Beagle.)

'Everything was grist, every avenue of publication was explored. Every type of writing that offered a buck was attempted. Nothing was too low, nothing too cheap. I wrote Sunday School stories, I wrote spicy sex stories, I tried detective stories, sport stories, love stories. I wrote short-shorts and I even wrote a novel.' (Frank Gruber, Brass Knuckles, Sherbourne Press, 1966).

The superhumanly prolific Frank Gruber, one of the kings of pulp fiction, was being modest: he wrote more than fifty novels -- as well as sixty-five screenplays, dozens of TV scripts, and many hundreds of stories for a legion of pulp magazines. And he was only sixty-five when he died.

HUBIN, p. 42