The Man in the Net

First UK edition, first impression. Ex Sam Remo Hotel, Torquay Library but with only a couple of discreet stamps and bookplate to ffep. Some edge wear, chipping and closed tears to top and bottom of classic Gollancz yellow jacket and spine, corners rubbed with small loss, scratch to bottom spine, some overall dust and time staining, not price clipped (12/6), no personal inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg copy for its age. 222pp. John Hamilton left his lucrative job with a New York advertising agency to move to the country and try his hand at painting. His first show is not a success and he is under some pressure from his wife Linda, to return to the city to make some money. Linda is having increasing difficulty coping with the dullness of life in the country and has succumbed to alcoholism, although she is able to keep this completely secret from everybody except John. So when John returns from a business trip to find his paintings slashed and Linda missing, later to be found dead, he cannot prove how unstable and violent she had become and the suspicions of the locals put him firmly in the frame for her murder. Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912-87), Richard Wilson Webb (1901-66), Martha Mott Kelley (1906-2005), and Mary Louise White Aswell (1902-84), collaborated to write detective fiction. Most of the stories were written by Webb and Wheeler in collaboration, or by Wheeler alone. …