Synopsis
The story is set around a group of actors and artists in bohemian post-war London, and the poisoning of one of them by deadly Death Cap mushrooms. Once again Professor Stubbs, the rollicking, rumbustious botanist-detective solves the crime in his own eccentric and brilliant manner, assisted by long-suffering assistant Max Boyle, while opposed and supported in equal measure by the argumentative Chief Inspector Bishop. This is the first publication of The Death Cap since its original appearance in 1946. It has been generously annotated by Forbes Gibb, setting it in the context of war-time London, and relating it to contemporary events in Todd’s own life. In an absorbing introduction, Peter Main also provides much background information on Todd’s lifelong interest in the natural world, and in particular his expert knowledge of fungi, which are a central feature of the plot.
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THE DEATH CAP : A DETECTIVE STORY; Introduced by Peter Main; Annotated by Forbes Gibb
Published by
Lomax Press, Stirling, UK, 2013
ISBN 10: 0956028888
ISBN 13: 9780956028884
Used
Hardcover
Seller: Aardvark Rare Books, EUGENE, OR, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine / Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: dj. Limited edition. Octavo, 9.5 in. x 6.25 in., pp. 206. Limited edition #149/300. Black cloth boards with gilt title to spine. Unmarked interior. Protected in mylar. First published in 1946 by John Westhouse (Publishers). This is the first re-publication. Ruthven Campbell Todd (1914-1978) was a Scottish scholar, poet and author, in US from 1947-1958, and then Majorca; his most important nonfiction work, Tracks in the Snow: Studies in English Science and Art (1946), effectively argued the imaginative power - when conjoined - of the two subtitled categories, instancing at length the work of William Blake (1748-1827) and John Martin; as R T Campbell, he wrote several detective novels, beginning with Unholy Dying (1945) [none contain fantastic elements, and are not listed below]; and as Todd, two metaphysical tales, both labouring under the 1930s misconception that Franz Kafka wrote allegories. The quest plot of Over the Mountain (1939), which takes its protagonist into a kind of Lost World, is heavily consanguinous with a search for political self-understanding; the protagonist of the surrealist The Lost Traveller (1943), stranded (perhaps posthumously) in a strange Dystopia, finds himself ordered to quest for a brace of auks, becoming - at the moment of his (final?) death - one himself. In his introduction to the 1968 reprinting of the latter, Todd recognized influences from Wyndham Lewis to Rex Warner. The Space Cats sequence for children, beginning with Space Cat (1952), features a runaway Cat who stows away on a Spaceship. (from Encyclopedia of Science Fiction). Seller Inventory # 86146