Destination Unkown (RARE 1st Australian Edition)

[Sydney]: Set up, printed and bound in Australia for William Collins (Overseas) Ltd. by New Century Press Pty. Ltd., 1954. First Australian edition. Original red cloth boards lettered in black to the spine, published for the Crime Club by Collins, London and Sydney; in the original pictorial dust jacket, unclipped and without a stated price. With the booksellers' ticket of Robertson & Mullens Ltd, "Booksellers to a Continent," of Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, a contemporary ownership signature to the free endpaper (with an old pencil annotation "1st thus"), and light residue where an earlier sticker has been removed from the facing leaf. The first Australian edition of this Cold War-era Christie thriller, published the same year as the London Crime Club first edition. Unusually for the period, this was not a mere colonial import of British sheets but was itself set, printed, and bound in Australia by New Century Press for Collins' Sydney office, making it a genuinely separate, and today considerably scarcer, edition rather than a simple re-issue. The novel follows Hilary Craven, who assumes the identity of a missing scientist's wife in a plot to infiltrate a mysterious international organisation, in a departure from Christie's classical detective fiction reminiscent of They Came to Baghdad. Published in the U.S. the following year as So Many Steps to Death. Boards square and firm, spine lettering bright, no foxing to the text block. Jacket bright with only light edge wear and age-toning, free of foxing; a 1.5-inch tear to the spine panel, stable and unobtrusive. A very good copy of a genuinely uncommon Christie printing.…