Persons Unknown

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Co., for the Crime Club. Good. 1931. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket, but encased in a nice-looking facsimile reproduction of the original first edition jacket; see 2nd image posted with this listing) [shelfworn copy, bumping and slight exposure of boards at most corners, hinges a little loosey-goosey but not cracked or split, small label affixed to front pastedown with typed information about date and place of purchse]. MacDonald's sixth Colonel Anthony Gethryn mystery. The author, in a lengthy jacket blurb, calls it "an exercise in detection," going on to explain how the first two parts of the (truncated) book contain "all the information upon which Gethryn has to work," and that therefore "you, the reader, and he, the detective, are on an equal footing." He then tosses down a challenge to the reader: "I have striven to be absolutely fair to the reader. There is nothing -- nothing at all -- for the detective that the reader has not had. More, the reader has had his information in exactly the same form as the detective -- that is, the verbatim report of evidence and question. If you [the reader] get the right answer -- not merely a 'guessed' answer but an answer for which you are prepared to put forward reasons -- then you are as good at this job as A.E. Gethryn. If you don't, you are not. In either case, I think you ought to be satisfied." NOTE again that this book bears a FACSIMILE dust jacket (from which the foregoing material was quoted), which has not been factored in to our pricing. . (Inventory #: 29411)