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The Detective Book Club 3-in-1 Omnibuses

A Guide to Entries

A Pre-1983 Sample

Cover image for Detective Book Clyb 3-in-1 for Legacy Of Fear; Cat And Mouse; The Case Of The One-Eyed Witness from 1951

Detective Book Club for January 1951.

Weston, Garnett. Legacy Of Fear (1950 M.S. Mill)
Brand, Christianna. Cat And Mouse (1950 Knopf)
Gardner, Erle Stanley. The Case Of The One-Eyed Witness (1950 Morrow)

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A Post-1983 Sample

Detective Book Club issue assigned to 1987

Holme, Timothy. At the Lake of Sudden Death (1987 Walker) [Inspector Peroni]
Biggle Jr., Lloyd. Interface for Murder (1987 Doubleday)
Barnao, Jack. Lockestep (1987 Scribner) [John Locke]

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Each entry is an html table row with two columns. The first column will contain a jpg with a picture of the cover, when available. Cover images are mostly not available - I would welcome donated images. If no image is available then the column will be blank. The second column contains information about a specific Detective Book Club volume.

Prior to 1983 each citation will begin with identifying the volume as an issue of the Detective Book Club or the Inner Circle; Cook's reference is the source of this information. Any volumes found that appear to be prior to 1983 and that are not in Cook will be identified as promotional volumes,
After 1983 each volume is assigned to a year based on the logic described under issues. Promotional volumes, which will contain titles that appear separately in other volumes are so identified.
Sometimes - not very often - there will be added text after the date, describing some unusual feature of the volume. Examples include publication prior to a regular US edition, title name differences, and so on.
Next there are three rows, one for each title included in the volume. Content is author, title, then, in parentheses, the year and original publisher of the volume the book club was issuing. Note that this is not necessarily the date of the first US edition. Sometimes an author's work would be reissued, and it is the reissue that the book club picked up.
The name of the publisher is a bit casual. "Harper" is used for Harper Bros, Harper & Row, and HarperCollins interchangeably. Minotaur was an imprint of St Martins (perhaps St Martins was embarrassed by the very large number of detectives they were publishing), M. S. Mill was an imprint of William Morrow.
Occasionally a title entry will be followed by a name in square brackets; this appears inconsistently, is a work-in-progress, and identifies a series character.
The final line contains a series of links.
- WorldCat is a combined multi-national collection of library catalog entries. Not all entries currently have a worldcat link, that is also a work-in-progress, but when the link exist it serves as an added authority that the volume really exists. They often contain pagination information and the publication information from the title page.
- The following series of four links are to book-selling sites. Key word searches are imbedded in the links, and they may lead to offerings for a specific volume on the used book market. Not every one of the 800-odd volumes are on offer at any one time, but many are.