Available Copies from Independent Booksellers
Price: US$200.00 + shipping
Description: Presentable first edition of this classic of hardboiled detective fiction set in Southern California. 8vo, 213pp. Red cloth lettered in black. Staining to boards, worn at corners and spine ends, spotting to page edges, page block toned. A very good copy in facsimile jacket
Seller: Peruse the Stacks, Gig Harbor, WA, U.S.A.
Price: US$495.00 + shipping
Description: Octavo (21cm). Red linen boards, titled in black on spine and front cover; yellow top-stain; 213pp. Bit of soiling to upper edge of text-block, with consequent dulling to top-stain; very minor thumb-soil within; in all a tight, straight copy, VG+ to Near Fine. Lacking the scarce dustwrapper. Classic hard-boiled, hard-luck tale of the Thirties, long-forgotten but revived in the Eighties and given a new cult following by Black Lizard Press. Though generally discussed as a crime novel, You Play The Black has many great proletarian elements, including a drifter protagonist who thumbs his way out of the Oklahoma dustbowl to Los Angeles at the height of the Great Depression. Author Eric Knight is best known as creator of the juvenile classic Lassie, Come Home; the present work is his only venture into the hard-boiled genre, though his first novel (Sound on Your Bugles, 1936) was a straightforwardly proletarian depiction of British working-class life.
Seller: Lorne Bair Rare Books, ABAA, Winchester, VA, U.S.A.
Price: US$750.00 + shipping
Description: Octavo, [1-8] 1-213 [214-216, blank], original red cloth, front and spine stamped in black. Classic hardboiled mystery novel set in Southern California. From a new essay on the book by Woody Haut at the online Los Angeles Review of Books (7/29/11) -"The book does read like James Cain filtered through Thomas Pynchon. Although Knight's first person narrative begins in typical tough-guy fashion, with Dick Dempsey, an Oklahoma-born AWOL Marine hopping a freight in Texas for Southern California in pursuit of his wife and son, it soon moves off in another, wilder direction - more like a noir Alice in Lotus Land than a cool and conventional hardboiled novel." The author's only mystery novel, best known for creating the character Lassie the dog. Stamp "Property of Vangaurd Films, Inc." at endpapers and title page, touch of shelf wear to spine ends and corners, a little soiling at edges, a bright nearly fine copy, without the dust jacket. (13990)
Seller: John W. Knott, Jr, Bookseller, ABAA/ILAB, Laurel, MD, U.S.A.
Price: US$750.00 + shipping
Description: Octavo, pp. [1-8] 1-213 [214-216, blank] [note: last leaf is a blank], original red cloth, front and spine panels stamped in black. First edition. Classic hard-boiled mystery novel set in Southern California. "The book does read like James Cain filtered through Thomas Pynchon. Although Knight's first person narrative begins in typical tough-guy fashion, with Dick Dempsey, an Oklahoma-born AWOL Marine hopping a freight in Texas for Southern California in pursuit of his wife and son, it soon moves off in another, wilder direction - more like a noir Alice in Lotus Land than a cool and conventional hard-boiled novel." - Woody Haut, the online Los Angeles Review of Books (29 July 2011). The only mystery novel by Hallas who is best known as the creator of Lassie the dog. "Property of Vanguard Films, Inc." stamped on endpapers and title page. Touch of shelf wear to spine ends and corners, a little soiling at edges, a bright, nearly fine copy, lacking the dust jacket. (#137046)
Seller: Currey, L.W. Inc. ABAA/ILAB, Elizabethtown, NY, U.S.A.