Oppenheim

Yellow covers in Spain : The Biblioteca Oro

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Sax Rohmer, El Diabolico Doctor (Biblioteca Oro, 35, 1935

It was not long before  a Spanish publisher introduced the  1920’s fashion of Yellow Crime Fiction booklets to Spain.  Only a few years after Mondadori in Italy,  the Barcelona publisher Molino proposed in 1933 (the year of the publishing house’s creation),  a series of Crime Fiction  pulps with yellow covers in its series Biblioteca Oro. Like the Italian series, this Spanish counterpart would become a landmark series, publishing the most representative authors in the genre.  The books were on average some 100 pages long and cost 0,90 cts.

 The first period of the series starts in 1933 and finishes in 1936, the year of the civil war.  In its original period, the series published 25 authors, accounting for 68 books (see list below).  The authors who saw the most of their books translated  in the series were Oppenheim (8), Martyn (7), Christie (6) and Van Dine (5).  Christie published there in that period the following books, whose translated title remain close to the original    (this was not always the case in French)  as can be see here : Continue reading

Yellow Jackets

Scarlet P

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.

Enter TS

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. Continue reading

The Mysterious novels authors

Fergus Hume

Fergus Hume (1856-1932)

French authors and authors translated from the English both feature, albeit in different proportions in Tallandier’s original series “Les Romans Mystérieux” (1910-1919). For eight authors in the Series writing in French, eleven write in English. Among  the latter,  two authors hail from Ireland, Henry de Vere Stacpoole, from  Dún Laoghaire, and   Lillie Thomas Meade, from Cork.

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Mysterious Novels

Tallandier

(With thanks to Philippe Aurousseau, & Courtesy of Oncle-Archibald.blogspot.fr)

Starting more than hundred years ago, in 1910, this series of “mysterious novels” is one of the great ancestors of Modern Crime Fiction Series. At a time when the booklet format was very widespread, these books were instead large volumes  of 250 to 300 pages. They were  beautifully illustrated by Félix-Pol Jobbé-Duval (1879-1961) and Robert Salles (1871-1929).   Continue reading