The Sling and The Arrow

First published in the USA in 1947, this is a first UK edition of 1962 (it was banned for many years from publication in the UK). Some slight edge wear to top and bottom of jacket and spine, some slight overall dust staining, corners slightly rubbed, some spotting to page fore edges, not price clipped (18s), no inscriptions, internally clean tight and square, overall a vg+ copy for its age in bright unsunned jacket. 288pp. A full blown novel of sexual perversion, which doesn't miss a chance to fictionalize feverishly psychosexual performance. This is the story of Herbert Dawes, California dress designer, who unconsciously tries to kill his wife, Lonna, and is revealed to be a latent homosexual, and whose split personality, half male, half female, leads him through a fairly tortured pursuit of a handsome carpenter, to nervous hysteria and the crippling of an arm, to his taking up of a woman's work, and finally to his murder of Lonna, his attempt to escape disguised in woman's clothes. At the time of publication, Stuart Engstrand's (1904-55), disturbing novel was called a 'sensational exploitation of scientific case history material'. A scarce book.