Derricks

New York: Pan Books. Very Good in Very Good- dj. 1957 (c.1951). 3rd printing. Hardcover. [moderate shelfwear to book, old bookseller's rubber-stamp on front endpaper (Al's Books & Magazines, Los Angeles); the jacket is edgeworn and lightly soiled, with a small chunk missing from the top right corner of the front panel, a little paper loss at the top of the spine]. A volume of seven short stories, exploring "aspects of the theme of sexual inversion" (i.e. homosexuality), a follow-up to his 1950 novel "Quatrefoil," often cited as an early example of positive treatment of gay relationships in modern fiction. These stories "exhibit a wide variety of situation and mood"; at least one ends with a suicide, which of course was a major trope of gay fiction of an earlier time. .