A direct predecessor of  “Le Masque”‘s and “Giallo” Mondadori’s distinctive yellow covers, Hodder & Stoughton’s “Yellow jackets” series  published crime fiction, from 1926 and throughout the 1930’s. Crime  thrillers by popular authors such as Edgar Wallace and John Buchan were published there . So were, from 1928, those by Leslie Charteris: this is where all fifty novels in “The Saint” series were published.

Making the link between the original 19th Century railway Library “Yellowbacks” and the fad for giallo (yellow becoming -before noir,  the colour of crime fiction) all over Europe, this series of  bestsellers  anticipate crime fiction paperbacks. While this particular series found an end in the late 1930.s, a new yellow Series was launched in 1949 with the same publisher.

 Amongst the successful books published there were the Bull-Dog Drummond right-wing thrillers (in this case this is more of an understatement than a pleonasm) by Sapper (Cyril McNeile, 1888 – 1937)

Authors such as Wallace, Freeman, Oppenheim,and Mason would form part of a canon of books to be published under yellow covers across Europe in the following decade.