Violet Books

H(enry) B. Drake's Cursed be the Treasure is seen here in its Burt edition issued from Macy-Masius 1928 US 1st edition plates. In this weird sea pirate adventure, the treasure is cursed with a very great malignance, wreaking a supernatural vengeance on all who seek it; & the ghostly witch Bites-in-the-Night who haunts our hero's dreams is a vampiric manifestation of the hero's inescapable Destiny to confront the hideous curse.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne is best remembered for his Atlantean classic The Lost Continent (1900), but he also wrote excellent historical fiction. Prince Rupert the Buccaneer (New York: Stokes, 1901) is shown here in a 1907 embossed pictorial binding depicting a tallship on bright red cloth. This is a pirate swashbuckler of Tortuga, England, Spain and the New World by an author with a marvelous sense of the dramatic.

The Conqueror's Stone by Berry Fleming (New York: John Day, 1927) is shown here with first edition dustwrapper, a rather pleasantly primitive depiction of swordsmens' encounter. The book also has map endpapers drawn by the author. The tale is a pirate swashbuckler of 1766 set along the coast of the Carolinas.

Here, in first edition dustwrapper, is Frank I. Hutchinson's Out of the Past (London: Edward O. Beck, 1934). After the French Revolution drove Catherine's noble family to England for shelter, escaping the threat of the Guillotine, she promptly fell in love with the scapegrace son of Sir George Cradwell. There follows a tale replete with highwaymen, smugglers, treasure-hunters and swordplay in a romance of the "the old days of stage-coaches and turnpike roads" influenced by Baroness Orczy.

Robert W. Chambers wrote such weird classics as Teh King in Yellow and much else from shopgirl romances to serious historical fiction. The Man They Hanged is shown here in its Burt reissue from 1926 Ridgway Company plates. The dustwrapper's lovely galleon pictorial is signed Edna Reindel. In this pirate romance, Captain Kidd is shown to be a Good Guy with outraged justification for his every act upon the sea.

George Griffith, a pioneer of science fiction, authored many futuristic novels, at which he excelled. He was equally appealing for his historical romances, of which an outstanding example is The Knights of the White Rose (London: Shaw, 1902?). The pictorial spine and front board is the work of Hal Hurest, whose interior black & white illustrations are even finer for action and drama. The hero of this poetically recorded tale, though a Peer of England, becomes a soldier of fortune & outlaw, falling from the privileges of the the royal court to fetters in the shadow of a gallows.

Russell Thorndike is the author of the famous Dr. Syn "Scarecrow" historical mysteries, but Dr. Syn was assuredly not his only claim to fame. The First Englishman, A Historical Romance (London: Rich & Cowan, n.d.) is set the era of William the Conqueror, and features Hereward the Wake, of the Fen Country. The dustwrapper projects an appropriately heroic image.

George R. Preedy is better known by another of "his" pseudonyms, Marjorie Bowen, who also wrote some of the finest historical romances and horror stories of the twentieth century, and about whom an essay can be perused Here. Her novel No Way Home (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1947) is shown in its first edition dustwrapper. It's a "crime & crinoline" period murder mystery of the type more identified with her Shearing pseudonym.

Here's A. E. W. Mason's Musk and Amber (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1942) in a 1950 "Yellow Jacket" edition. The slightly edgeworn pictorial yellow-jacket dustwrapper in such excellent pastels is signed Bip Pares. This swashbuckler of Britain and Venice and Milan was reviewed by L. P. Hartley in The Sketch as "wonderfully told. The pageantry is gorgeous and satisfying; the action swift and exciting."

Who is more associated with swashbuckling romance than Rafael Sabatini? This edition of Saint Martin's Summer (London: Nelson, 1948) is "1st thus" in colorful action dustwrapper. The tale is set in seventeenth century France, one of the most effective "periods" that has fascinated so many authors of high adventure.

This first edition of Maurus Jokai's The Corsair King (A Kaloz Kiralv) (Boston: Page, 1901), translated from the Roumanian, was issued in embossed pictorial binding depicting three corsairs in elaborate costume. A swashbuckling pirate tale stars the well-famed Captain Robert Barthelemy, a "Knight of Fortune" whose character provided material for Sabatini and Farnol as well. This adventure has Jokai's usual gothic touches, as in a long episode with St Elmo's Fire leaping amidst a ship's masts.

Patrick Wynnton's The Black Turret is shown here in its Burt edition printed from 1925 Bobbs-Merrill 1st edition plates. It's a little-known, adult heroic fantasy of two Englishmen who out on a walk one day stumble into the Kingdom of Merklenberg where an evil witch keeps a damsel in need of saving in a high tower, turning their lives into a swashbuckling adventure kidnappings, dungeons, a giant, seemingly in a parallel dimension.