London, Manchester, Dundee: D.C. Thomson N.d. [?1938]

8vo, pp. 256. Original illustrated paper wrappers, lettered in green to front wrapper and black on white spine. Browned to cheap paper stock, but a well preserved copy.

First edition of this compendium of crime stories featuring Dixon Hawke, the fictional Scottish sleuth who made his first appearance in The Saturday Post in 1912, and went on to solve crimes in more than five thousand stories, written by a legion of authors, over more than seventy years. In the 1930s Dixon Hawke was at the height of his fame, and in 1938 publishers D.C. Thomson began issuing anthologies of Hawke short stories: this outsize paperback priced at a shilling was only the second of a series which would run for the next fifteen years.

Poorly made and printed on cheap paper stock, few copies have survived in collectable condition.