BEEDING, Francis. The Ten Holy Horrors. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1939.
8vo., black publisher's cloth, printed in red to upper cover and spine; in the original pictorial dust jacket; the price added in pen to the inner front flap; pp. 318, [ii]; a lovely bright and tight copy, only faintly foxed to the fore and upper edge and offset to endleaves; else near-fine in very good jacket which is slightly shelf marked and has some small nicks and short closed tears to the edges; an unusually bright example.
First edition. Likely a publisher's review or file copy, with the inner flaps blank. Published at the beginning of WWII, this spy thriller tells the story of the head of the British intelligence service Colonel Granby who, together with Alec Ogilvie, MP, finds himself involved in a life and death struggle against Von Nessel, the most dangerous German agent in England.
'Francis Beeding' was in fact John Leslie Palmer, who co-authored 31 novels with Hilary Saint George Saunders under this pseudonym. Their most famous work, The House of Dr. Edwardes, was later used as the basis for the Hitchcock film Spellbound. The Beeding pseudonym was kept secret from its commencement in 1920, until 1925, when Saunders delivered a lecture about his writing methods as Francis Beeding. When Palmer heckled from the audience, Saunders invited him to the platform, and the dual authorship was revealed.
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