At "The Cedars"

London: Geoffrey Bles. Very Good+ in Very Good- dj. 1949. First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [spine slightly turned, light dust-soiling to top edge, previous owner's address label and pencil notes about reading on front endpaper, another former owner's initials plus date & place of purhcase written in ink along edge of rear pastedown (concealed beneath rear jacket flap); the jacket is a bit edgeworn, with a long diagonal crease in the front panel, shallow chipping at the top of the spine extending just a bit into the rear panel, and some light soiling to the rear panel]. One of this author's numerous mysteries featuring Chief Inspector William Austen of Scotland Yard, first introduced in 1939, at which point Ms. Hocking already had a couple of dozen books under her belt, about evenly split between crime novels and straight novels (the latter under the pseudonym "Mona Messer"). ThIs one is set largely in "one of the those ugly mid-Victorian houses where one felt that anything might happen, and indeed it formed a most sutiable background fro a sinister crime and its sequelae." (In case you were wondering what the plural of "sequel" was.) Reilly's "Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers" is somewhat dismissive of Hocking -- "She always produces a quiet, amiable mystery, of a type now classic" -- but she clearly has some kind of following, as her books are generally quite scarce (except, oddly, in cheap French and Spanish translations). No copies of this title are to found online as of the time of cataloging. .