Gavin Lyall BLAME THE DEAD First Edition
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Gavin Lyall BLAME THE DEAD First Edition
First UK edition, first print hardback of BLAME THE DEAD by Gavin Lyall and published by Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., London, in 1972.The book is in very good condition (Clean green cloth boards with gilt lettering on the spine which has only minor rubbing to the bottom edges) with slight shelf wear to the dust jacket , which is price clipped (light creasing & rubbing around the edges and corners, slight peeling and chipping to top corners of the spine, a small closed tear at the bottom near the spine, a folding crease along the inside flap at the back). Internally, the pages are clean and tight and there are no tears and no inscriptions.
Gavin Lyall won the British Crime Writers' Association's Silver Dagger award in both 1964 and 1965. In 1966-67 he was Chairman of the British Crime Writers Association. Lyall was not a prolific author, attributing his slow pace to obsession with technical accuracy. According to a British newspaper, he spent many nights in his kitchen at Primrose Hill, north London, experimenting to see if one could, in fact, cast bullets from lead melted in a saucepan, or whether the muzzle flash of a revolver fired across a saucer of petrol really would ignite a fire. He eventually published the results of his research in a series of pamphlets for the Crime Writers' Association in the 1970s.
He wrote "Harry Maxim" series of espionage thrillers beginning with The Secret Servant published in 1980. This book, originally developed for a proposed BBC TV Series, featured Major Harry Maxim, an SAS officer assigned as a security adviser to 10 Downing Street, and was followed by three sequels with the same central cast of characters.
"One shot on a snowy Sunday evening spoils James Card's reputation as a bodyguard - apart from leaving him with a body he hardly knew and a pistol he didn't want to explain. So he takes a look into the ex-life and times of Martin Fenwick, sobersided shipping underwriter at Lloyd's of London, and finds reactions vary widely. Mrs. Fenwick is dry-eyed at the funeral but secretary Maggie Mackwood cries into the office whisky. Willie Winslow, who once belonged to a rather good regiment, is polite but secretive; Paul Mockby, another rich man from the insurance syndicate, simply sends round his private riot squad in order to improve Card's memory. But it is Fenwick s schoolboy son who hires Card to find out the real truth - and starts him on the trail that leads from the jungle of London shipping insurance to the lonely fjords of Norway, via other bodies and violent meetings, and more questions. Who hired the private detective following Card to Bergen? Would Jonas Steen have said anything useful if he hadn't been killed first? Is the crumbling old Chief Engineer drinking himself to death because he knows something worth millions - or wants to forget it? When Card forces a showdown in the mountains beyond Stavanger, he finds more than one truth - including some about himself - and yet another reason to blame those who can't answer back: the dead."
319 pages.
ISBN: 0 340 16614 2
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Gavin Lyall BLAME THE DEAD First Edition