This checklist includes all of the 3-in-1 omnibuses published by the Walter J. Black
Publishing Company that I have been able to identify. This includes the regular issues
of the Detective Book Club from 1942 though 2000; the issues - identical in format -
sold via the Inner Circle book club that began in the early seventies and continued
into the eighties or nineties; and various promotional volumes, as long as they are "3-in-1" and
have the same general format as the monthly offerings.
The primary source of information on the Detective Book Club and Walter J. Black is
the book "Murder by Mail. Inside the Mystery Book Clubs" by Michael J. Cook, second
edition 1983, published by the Bowling Green University Popular Press.
This book includes background information
on the Walter J. Black Publishing Company, and also lists the books
distributed by competing book clubs in the mystery field.
Cook had assistance in compiling the list from the Walter J. Black company, and was able to assign
month and year to almost all volumes though 1983, and to identify which were
from the Detective Book Club and which for the Inner Circle. In the Cook listing a
reference number is assigned to each entry (either a simple number or, for the Inner Circle,
a separate sequence of numbers prefixed with "IC-"). That numbering is not used in the
current listing, which includes many entries - largely from 1983 to the end of the century -
that can not currently be accurately sequenced.
After 1983 a
year can be inferred from the dates of the mysteries included in each volume, but
post-1983 dating is mostly an approximation. Books were issued by the club very close to original
publication, but it would be perfectly reasonable for a book issued in, for example,
January 1985, to contain three mysteries that originally appeared in late 1984, and
which would in this listing be assigned to 1984. The volume Cook assigns to
January, 1982,
for example, includes three titles first published in the U.S. in 1981. See
Issues for more details.