Murder on Beacon Hill

New York: Phoenix Press. (c.1941). First Edition. Hardcover. Fair. (lacking the original dust jacket, but encased in a well-made "Colorcopy" reproduction of same; see 2nd image posted with this listing, and see Notes for further explanation) [a well-worn copy, an ex-rental library copy with remnants of labels and jacket flaps on both pastedowns and endpapers, spine turned, fraying with exposure of boards at all corners, one-time owner's initials plus date of purchase in ink at edge of rear pastedown (concealed beneath the jacket flap)]. Murder mystery set in Boston. "Meredith Winslow's garishly modern house jutted out audaciously in the midst of its staid Beacon Hill neighbors, and Meredith's week-end guests were just as startling in that milieu, with their rakish Bohemianism. Duke McCale, erstwhile private detective, smelled trouble brewing as soon as he learned that the party included Ellery Drake, an author who knew far too much about his fellow guests' pasts and was not above publishing what he knew. Sure enough, the gay nocturnal visit to Winslow's Lorelei night club was marred by a dash of poison in Drake's cocktail. Then, the following night, murder climaxed the Lorelei's spectacular floor show." (What any of this has to do with the breaching whale depicted on the dust jacket is unclear to me. The erstwhile Duke's full given name, by the way, is Marmaduke.) One of a zillion mysteries published by the prolific Phoenix Press, whose whacky, sometimes so-bad-they're-great books were affectionately chronicled by Bill Pronzini in his "Gun in Cheek" surveys. Their product was aimed directly at the then-thriving rental-library market, in which most books were beat to hell and then discarded, resulting in their extreme scarcity today. (OCLC records only six copies of this book in American libraries -- none of which are in Massachusetts; for shame!) Gerald Brown -- which may or may not have been a pseudonym; with Phoenix Press, it was hard to know -- wrote just one other mystery (also published by Phoenix), "Murder in Plain Sight" (1945). NOTE again that this book bears a "Colorcopy" reproduction of the original dust jacket, to serve the dual purpose of protecting the book from further wear and enhancing its appearance on the shelf; its presence has not been factored in to our pricing. (A "Colorcopy" jacket, as distinct from a facsimile jacket, is a color print of a raw (unrestored) scan of an original jacket, and therefore displays whatever flaws or blemishes were present on the original.) .