The Man Who Was Murdered Twice

LEITFRED, Robert H.

The Man Who Was Murdered Twice.

FIRST EDITION. New York: Green Circle Books, 1937.

Octavo. 255 pp. Red cloth in the publisher's color-illustrated dust jacket. The book belongs to the broader 1930s San Francisco crime tradition associated with Dashiell Hammett and his contemporaries — writers who turned the working geography of the city into genre material.

A Depression-era San Francisco crime novel, here in its scarce original color-illustrated dust jacket. Ned Anderson, a wealthy young San Francisco playboy, returns from a round-the-world trip to find that his attorney has swindled him out of his fortune and that the attorney's secretary has been kidnapped; Anderson hires the private detective Simon Crole, and the case turns on a victim who meets the same fate twice over. It is hardboiled San Francisco crime in the staccato manner of its decade, written in the years when the pulp magazines were feeding a generation of writers into hardback genre fiction.

Green Circle Books was a small Depression-era hardback house, and copies of its titles in the original jackets are uncommon; The Man Who Was Murdered Twice in jacket is among the less frequently encountered. The novel is not recorded in Baird and Greenwood's standard bibliography of California fiction.

SKU TO-2026-084