“No city before the war, not London, Paris or Oxford, had such a hold on my affections.” So said Graham Greene about Brighton. One reason he loved it so much was the book shops and junk shops where he and his brother, Hugh, hunted for Victorian detective fiction. The brothers were passionate bibliophiles and spent many happy hours trawling the narrow Lanes for old books. Brother Hugh went on to issue four collections of short stories in the 1970s around the theme of ‘The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.’ As he pointed out in the introduction, many of the stories were just as good as Doyle’s and deserved to be re-published and read. His brother Graham’s Brighton Rock has never been out of print. The first edition, from 1938, is not uncommon, but the dust jacket has always been a talking point amongst collectors. It is inexplicably rare, and nobody can agree why. There is just one example on the market today, for over £50,000. Here’s a chance to own a small part of it, along with your first edition of the novel. The book is mildly ex-library, but the ‘blurb’ from the front and rear flaps of the jacket is pasted inside the front cover. This enabled the borrower to read the plot. Most of the front flap is present, and all of the back one, both trimmed to the text. Most collectors despise ex-library books, but in this case the presence of the jacket-parts makes ex-library desirable. Even better, it has not been overly stamped. There are no stickers. There is just one stamp and a few ink numbers on the title page, of the ‘Dalton Grange Club’, a private social club in a large country house. There is also another small stamp, ‘Plant Protection Ltd, Yalding, Kent,’ which appears on the front free end paper and the rear pastedown. This, by the way, is a sinister sounding research plant established by ICI in 1937, so they too presumably owned the book at some point. Nevertheless, the book was clearly not borrowed much and is still very presentable in the original red cloth boards. The points are a little rubbed and there is a tiny nick to the cloth at the top of the spine. The pages are a little foxed and marked here and there, with evidence of a newspaper bookmark at pages 308/309. The binding is still sound but becoming tender, as are the front and back boards.