Thunder Below

First UK edition, first impression. 8vo. Original cloth. Dust-jacket. A first novel of love and loyalty among oil prospectors in the Venezuelan jungle. Susan, the only woman in a community of men, stays loyal to her husband Walt, the engineering boss, as he goes blind, while his best friend Ken fights his own love for her. "Thomas Rourke", the pseudonym of Daniel Joseph Clinton, a mining engineer who had lived for years in South and Central America, later wrote biographies of Simón Bolívar and of the Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. Filmed by Paramount in 1932, directed by Richard Wallace, with Tallulah Bankhead, Charles Bickford and Paul Lukas. First UK edition, following the Farrar & Rinehart edition of the same year. Some foxing, later bookplate to front pastedown; some minor marking to cloth; jacket worn at edges with some loss, spine tanned. Provenance: Richard Hughes (armorial bookplate) - possibly the British author, author of A High Wind in Jamaica (1929), also published by Chatto & Windus; the motto on the bookplate is in Welsh, and the author lived in Wales between 1934 & 1976.…