The American Gun Mystery [Death at the Rodeo]: A Problem in Deduction

New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. Near Fine in Good+ dj. 1933. First Edition. Hardcover. (with a Triangle Books (reissue) dust jacket) [a nice clean copy with just a touch of fading to the spine cloth, no significant wear, one-time owner's name plus date & place of purchase and a brief comment (all in ink) on the front endpaper; the jacket looks nice, but the verso displays a previous owner's home-grown "restoration" treatments, consisting of tape-reinforcement along the top and bottom edges and the spine, and some black-ink "touch-up" (not too excessive) mostly to the spine ends; there is also a long vertical crease along the right edge of the front panel]. First edition of the sixth Ellery Queen mystery, in which a down-on-his-luck ex-movie cowboy star is shot to death in full view of a crowd at a "wild west show" in New York -- the crowd, naturally, including Ellery Queen himself. The mismatched jacket (which was on the book as we received it) is probably from a circa 1940 Triangle reprint, which has replaced the original playing-card-motif jacket art with a photographic cover featuring a masked man -- which (although it doesn't say so on the book itself) is "Ellery Queen" himself, using the same head shot that was used on several of the original Stokes jackets, back when the publisher was still promoting the author as an unknown man of mystery (instead of a pair of cousins from Brooklyn). (A facsimile of the actual first edition jacket is available (not from us), however, should you wish to dress it up a bit more properly.) .