New York: Detective Book Club, (1944) dj. Hardcover first edition - An omnibus edition containing three complete mystery novels - "He Wouldn't Kill Patience" by Carter Dickson (pseudonym of John Dickson Carr, 1906-1977), a Sir Henry Merrivale locked room mystery featuring an ingenious apparent suicide in a sealed room on the zoo grounds, two young professional magicians with a grudge against each other that dates back four generations and a tree-snake from Borneo named Patience; "You Only Hang Once" by H. W. Roden featuring publicist John Alden Knight and his PI friend Sid Ames; and finally "Fire Will Freeze" by Margaret Millar which begins with an ordinary bus ride to a Quebec resort, during a bad snow
storm, but when the bus driver,gets out to "fix something" and then vanishes, the riders manage to walk to the nearest house - one occupied by a mentally disturbed woman and her guardian. One of the pleasures of these omnibus volumes, which combine three very different works in one book, is the opportunity they create of discovering authors or novels which might be unknown to you. The pages appear to be acid free, and are still white and supple, unlike many books from this era. Each novel paginated individually - 217, 218, 182 pp. Back cover of dust jacket has an ad for the Detective Book Club.