Never In Vain

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.. Very Good+ in Poor dj. 1936. First American Edition. Hardcover. [modest shelfwear, spine very slightly turned; the jacket is heavily edgeworn, with a large ragged chip at the lower left corner of the front panel, nearly separated at the front flap-fold, some additional paper loss at the top of the spine, various other chipping and tears]. "The fierce and passionate novel of a man who was born a killer, of one woman who tamed him and of another who again released the tides of violence." The author drew his inspiration "from those days which followed the World War when men, young in years but old in ways of violence, their senses dulled to the shock and horror of sudden death, eagerly joined the British forces fighting a guerilla warfare of ambush and murder with Ireland's Sinn Feiners." The inspiration would also seem to have been rather nakedly autobiographical: as summarized by Wikipedia (better than I could do it), he had been "a British Army officer famed in Britain for his courage on the battlefield and repeated escapes from German prisoner of war camps during the First World War. Between 1920 and 1922 he served in Dublin as part of the British counter-insurgency against Republican forces during the Irish War of Independence and is considered one of the most ruthless and effective British intelligence officers combating the IRA who subsequently accused him of brutality. He retired from the army to become a successful writer. His nickname, 'Hoppy,' stemmed from the loss of a leg in combat during the final months of World War One. Fitted with a prosthesis, he trained himself to disguise the fact, by walking at a very quick pace, almost completely disguising that he had a wooden leg." An uncommon book -- OCLC records 10 copies of the English (Collins) edition and only eight of the American -- and even more so in the current marketplace, with all other copies offered online at the time of this writing being ex-library books. .