Item #123388 The Creole's Crime: A New Orleans Detective Story. [and] The Great Adams Express Robbery. Myron and Frank Pinkerton.

The Creole's Crime: A New Orleans Detective Story. [and] The Great Adams Express Robbery.

1887. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1887 [and] n.d.

2 vols., 8vo (140 x 218 mm), 127; 128 pp. Original color-printed wrappers; ads on lower and inner sides of wrappers and verso of title pages. Both vols. wrappers darkened, spine panels deteriorated; Express Robbery upper wrapper detached and lacking lower wrapper; both vols. internally very good. Together in a custom red cloth slipcase with the bookplate of Florence and Edward Kaye on the portfolio sleeve.

§ Uncommon London issues of two detective stories from the Pinkerton Detective Series, both published with slightly longer titles by Laird & Lee in Chicago also in 1887. (See Wright 4258, which does not list The Creole's Crime.) OCLC lists only around half a dozen copies of the London issue of each title worldwide. The sensationalist stories were intended primarily to promote Allan Pinkerton's agency; that they could be sold to English publishers keen to satisfy their reader's fascination with American crime and vulgarity was presumably a perk. The Creole's Crime is a wildly objectionable story of paternity and revenge driven by "a female fiend"; The Adams Express Company was one of Pinkerton's earliest clients and the victim of many real-life train robberies.

From the collection of Florence and Edward Kaye, whose extensive collection of detective fiction was ultimately sold by Lew Feldman in 1974 with the 20-page catalogue: The distinguished library of detective-crime-mystery fiction formed by Florence and Edward Kaye, covering the period 1591-1974. Item #123388

Price: $675.00

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