This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items from the newly acquired Santo Domingo collection.
The depredations of the drug trade are fertile ground for crime and mystery fiction: pulp, in a word. In the Santo Domingo Collection, these lurid works stand on the shelves alongside opium-inspired poetry and countercultural acid narratives. Pictured here is Snow vogue, written by one Darcy Glinto and published in London by Wells Gardner in 1941. Copies are held at only three other libraries. It’s the tale of Dario, a ruthless gangster who, as the title suggests, gets involved in peddling cocaine. Violence, victimization, and death inevitably ensue. The jacket copy promises Snow vogue to be “just as slick and twice as fast as any other gangster story. That is because Dario was that kind of man.”
The name “Darcy Glinto” is, of course, too good to be true. It’s a pseudonym for Harold Ernest Kelly (1899-1969), an author and freelance journalist who wrote in the crime, sci-fi, and Western genres, among others, under a host of assumed names.
Harold Ernest Kelly. Snow vogue. London: Wells Gardner, Darton & Co., [1941]. EC9.K2965.941s
Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.