
Is it possible to pass up a Pocket Book edition of a Freeman Wills Crofts novel? Aside from the recent (and ongoing) reissues of Crofts catalog by Collins Crime Club, your options up to now have pretty much been paying a criminal amount of money for a two-decade old House of Stratus edition, or scooping up the handful of titles released by Penguin in the 60s. So yeah, when I stumbled upon a 1941 paperback of Sir John Magill’s Last Journey by Pocket Books, I had to grab it. This is a pretty early year for Pocket Books, and I was lucky that my copy was in a condition robust enough for a comfortable read without breaking out the tweezers and velvet gloves.
I recall JJ from The Invisible Event commenting that it took him two weeks to make it through this book. Given that I don’t have much time for reading, it took me full on three. What a journey it was though. The introductory map suggested that I was going to get to know the triangle between England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland well. Seriously, it looks like someone fired a blast of buckshot into the UK. You’ve got dots littering the western coast of Great Britain, accompanied with a travel guide’s worth of town names I’ve never heard of.
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