A TOAST TO TOMORROW: A Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone Title

Garden City, New York,: Crime Club Doubleday, 1941. 1st American edition. Slight spine slant, black boards lighly rubbed and soiled, else a vefry good-near fine copy in homemade acetate dust jacket. (English title: Pray Silence, 1940). The 2nd Tommy Hambledon adventure. A Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone selection. Goebbels doesn't trust the Chief of the German Police. Hitler loves him. The British are just plain confused. Joseph Goebbels is fuming. It's the mid-1930s and the Nazi Minister of Propoganda has a nice little racket going. He and his cohorts are allowing Jews to slip out of Germany in return for 80 percent of their assets. But longtime Nazi party member Klaus Lehman, the Chief of the German Police. is too much of a prig to let him get away with it. And given that Lehman was one of Hitler 's earliest supporters, he's virtually untouchable. In the meantime, British Intelligence is going around in circles. Someone in Germany is sending them messages in a code that hasn't been used since World War I. When it was first published in 1941 in the U.S., A Toast to Tomorrow , along with its predecessor Drink to Yesterday, was heralded by famed critic Anthony Boucher as "a single long and magnificent novel of drama, intrigue and humor." Howard Haycraft, the dean of mystery historians, called the two books "superior" examples of the new wave of realistic spy-and- intrigue novels, told with a "mood of subtle understatement." A current critic, mystery bookseller Barbara Peters of the Poisoned Pen, called it her "favorite espionage novel of all time." This darkly humorous novel was the work of two Hampshire neighbors, Adelaide Oke Manning and Cyril Henry Coles, and based in part on the Coles' adventures in the British Intelligence. . First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good. Book.