Category: hardcover

Killer in the Rain x 6

London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964. First UK Edition, preceding all others. The first collection of these stories.

“Killer in the Rain” (Black Mask Magazine, Jan. 1935)

“The Man Who Liked Dogs” (Black Mask Magazine, Mar. 1936)

“The Curtain” (Black Mask Magazine, Sept. 1936)

“Try the Girl” (Black Mask Magazine, Jan. 1937)

“Mandarin’s Jade” (Dime Detective Magazine, Nov. 1937)

“Bay City Blues” (Dime Detective Magazine, June 1938)

“The Lady in the Lake” (Dime Detective Magazine, Jan. 1939)

“No Crime in the Mountains”(Detective Story Magazine, Sept. 1941)

introduction by Philip Durham

1st Pocket edition, December 1965

June 1973 Bantam reissue

cover art by Tom Adams

2011 Penguin UK reissue

July 1977 Ballantine mass market, 3rd print

cover art by Whistlin’ Dixie

August 25, 2013

1979 Pan/Macmillan reissue – cover photo by Robert Golden

[post reworked 7/4/25, 3/1/26]

Build My Gallows High/Out of the Past

1946 William Morrow, first edition.

Geoffrey Homes, Build My Gallows High, 1946 Morrow hardcover

1956 Ace Double paperback reissue

cover art by Harry Barton

basis for the 1947 film noir classic Out of the Past

better image than previously posted

[post updated 7/3/25]

1978 Random House first edition hardcover

1978 Random House first edition hardcover, a modern classic

cover illustration by Stan Zagorowoski

1st novel with private eye C.W. Sughrue with begins with the masterful and oft-quoted sentence: “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”