Until the Day she Dies. A Tale of Terror

London: Hamish Hamilton, 1960.

First Edition, first impression. Publisher's red cloth with the excellent and unclipped dust-jacket which is lightly rubbed at the edges and ends of the spine. Without old inscriptions or other internal markings. A near fine copy. Pulpish thriller very much in the style of Dashiell Hammett involving a detective-story writer and a young woman he meets on the London-Oxford train. The English writer and dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross, was part of the raffish world of mid-twentieth-century Soho, where he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Dylan Thomas, Quentin Crisp, John Minton, Nina Hamnett, Joan Wyndham, Aleister Crowley, John Deakin, Augustus John, and the two Roberts, Colquhoun and MacBryde. His nattyl dress sense - a sharp suit combined with his famous teddy-bear coat, aviator-style dark glasses, cigarette-holder, and silver-tipped cane - ensured he stood out even in such flamboyant company. Intrigued by his stylish get-up and dissolute way of life, numerous writers, notably Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning, used him as a model for characters in their fiction. During the 1940s Maclaren-Ross was usually to be found in the saloon bar of the Wheatsheaf Pub on Rathbone Place, From the late 1930s until the late 1950s, this took over from the nearby Fitzroy Tavern as the most fashionable of the many watering-holes in North Soho, an area that has since become known as 'Fitzrovia'.