An Unvarnished History 
 
Gordon Daviot. 
 
D. Appleton: 1929. First edition. Hardcover in a jacket. Octavo. Tears, some of them mid-sized, along the jacket's edges. Smudges and stains on front and back of the jacket. Foxing on its inside. Dings on the boards' corners and splotches on those edges. Impressions from shelf wear are on spine's crown and heel. A wrinkle of the boards runs down the spine. Top edge of the text block is browned and the bottom edge has some stains. Smudges on preliminary leaves. There is a rip at the bottom of the gutter between the back of the book's endpapers. 353 pages. Book very good, jacket good.
 
Josephine Tey's first novel, written under what would be her long standing penname Gordon Daviot. A wonderful addition to a Daviot collector's shelves. Any first novel of a great writer has its charm, and here this has something to do with its set up, a Scottish battalion stationed in the Highlands before World War I, and its titular hero. As a boy Kif enlists and his life becomes tragedy as desolation forces him from innocence to crime. 
 
"Kif had waited in the intolerable racket of that first colossal bombardment like a two-year-old at a starting-gate, nervous, panicky, heart-quickened. And inside was that other quickening which had nothing to do with his clamorous heart and which made Danger for him a siren - loved and hated and sought again."