John Creasey, Inspector West Cries Wolf, Hodder & Stoughton, 1954

Hodder & Stoughton original Yellow Jacket series were published in England from 1926 until 1939. A second series was launched in 1949. Each book cost 2 shillings. The covers remained yellow until 1957, when the series gave way to Hodder Pocket books.  Uber-prolific English author John Creasey  (1908 – 1973) published there some of the six hundred novels he is credited with (under twenty-eight pseudonyms). Hodder & Stoughton published  notably   books with his Inspector Roger West , and his eccentric,  aristocratic,  “Saint”- like character, the “Toff”, a sort of later days Arsène Lupin.  The Toff was created in 1938.  Charteris’s The Saint was also published and republished in the same series, as were many successes from the first,  interwar series : Wallace,  Oppenheim and Sapper amongst many others. Or  Patricia Wentworth, with her upper-class compatible, governess-detective, Miss Silver.  The yellow covers signal classicism, in the detective novel or the thriller traditions.