Fast One

Garden City: Doubleday Doran, 1933. Hardcover. Fine/Near Fine. First edition. Fine in a handsome, about near fine example of the rare dustwrapper with slight rubbing, a tiny hole on the lightly sunned spine, and very shallow loss at the crown. A legendary rarity of hardboiled detective fiction, about a mysterious criminal loner who insinuates himself into, and wreaks havoc on, the Los Angeles underworld. The protagonist is unremittingly merciless, but loyal to those who deal squarely with him, and is a prototype for scores of similar characters. The publisher's promotional material compared the book to *The Maltese Falcon, Little Caesar*, and Raoul Whitfield's *Green Ice.* This is the author's only novel, written, appropriately for a hardboiled novel, on a bet. Paul Cain was the pseudonym of Peter Ruric, a Hollywood screenwriter (*Gambling Ship* with Cary Grant, *The Black Cat* with Karloff and Lugosi, etc.). He is referred to in Bill Pronzini's survey of mystery literature *1001 Midnights* as "(unquestionably)... the hardest of the hardboiled writers for *Black Mask* in the early 1930's." Only the second jacketed copy we have found in over 30 years (and by way of example, we have handled nearly a dozen jacketed copies of *The Maltese Falcon* in that time).