Banditisme

1930 · 88102 — New York: Cosmopolitan 1930. First Edition. First printing. Octavo 19cm. Orange-red cloth titled in black; dustjacket; 309pp. Very Near Fine copy with just a trace of light rubbing to bottom board corners. In the original dustwrapper unclipped priced $1.50 at base of front flap slightly sunned on spine panel with a few tiny nicks to extremities and a short split to upper portion of front flap-fold; still Near Fine most uncommon thus. <br /> <br /> A hard-boiled novel set in the world of New York gangsters focused not so much on a single criminal plot as on the day-to-day machinations of its central figure one Antonio Scarvak head of a small-time rum-running and extortion racket. The New York Times in its 1931 review noted with some pique that Coe's antihero seemed ".an incredibly dull-witted gunman.who moves rather absurdly through the web of murder graft and corruption that makes the background for the novel." Coe a former boxer and federal agent specialized in works that brought to life the criminal underworld with which he was long familiar and his work is unusual in that while it was clearly designed to appeal to the growing audience for lurid hard-boiled crime it kept one foot firmly planted in the realm of social fiction. There are only a few novelists of the period whose work is equally likely to be cited in Hubin's Bibliography of Crime Fiction this title cited on p.88 as in Archibald Hanna's bibliography of American social fiction A Mirror for the Nation no. 728. Uncommon in jacket this is a particularly fresh example. Cosmopolitan unknown