DEATH OF A FOOL: Insp. (Supt.) Roderick Alleyn; Mystery

Marsh, Ngaio

Published by Little Brown and Company, Boston, MA, U.S.A., 1956

About this Item

First Edition, so stated. (precedes English edition published as "Off With His Head" Collins, 1957). Bright yellow board with blue lettering at spine with drawing. Yellow boards show some discoloration but remain bright, inside boards and endpapers with browning but with tight binding. Neat owners Christmas gift inscription at front endpaper. Dust jacket with rubbing to folds, spine panel faded with wear to ends, one small piece out, corners nicked and small piece out. Rear panel moderately soiled. Not price-clipped, $3.50 price intact. A good to very good copy of an increasingly scarce title. Jacket illustration by George Kelley. 302 pages. The village of South Mardian likes the old ways. The very old ways. This may be 1957, but South Mardian still features a blacksmith, a village idiot, and an elaborate fertility ritual performed at the winter solstice. There's squabbling, of course, and worse like when one of the ritual's main players is found beheaded, everything north of his neck having been neatly lopped off by a ritual sword. Inspector Alleyn does have to contain a certain incredulous amusement at the village's fetishistic embrace of the eighteenth century he does not, for example, have a real passion for morris dancing but he'll try to keep a straight face long enough to find the killer and let South Mardian return to the warm embrace of pre-Industrial Britain.

Seller Inventory # 021515

Bibliographic Details

• Title: DEATH OF A FOOL: Insp. (Supt.) Roderick Alleyn; Mystery
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company, Boston, MA, U.S.A.
• Publication Date: 1956
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Kelley, George
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Good-Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Good
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Mystery and Crime
  • England
  • Small Town / Country Village
  • Crime Fiction