Thieves Fall Out

London: Red Seal Books / L. Miller & Son Limited. Very Good+. (c.1953). First British Edition. Softcover. [modest edgewear to covers, very slight spine roll, short diagonal crease at bottom right corner of front cover]. (Red Seal Book, no. 58) Series Mass Market PB The British edition of Vidal's only novel published under his "Cameron Kay" nom de plume (what his editor at Gold Medal Books called a "cardboard alias"). Although claimed on the cover to be "An Original Red Seal Novel," it's not, having already (or perhaps concurrently) been issued in the U.S. as a Gold Medal paperback (no. 311). (Not even the cover art is original, as this printing uses the same illustration as the American edition, by the great Barye Phillips.) While Vidal himself makes no reference to the book in his memoir "Palimpsest," his biographer, Fred Kaplan, gives it a little more respect, commenting on its "many effectiveVidalian touches, the setting drawn from his Egyptian experiences in 1948, a combination of hard-boiled suspense, a strong love story, and a political/social drama that pits the individual against a corrupt society." More uncommon, it seems, than the Gold Medal edition. .