GARLAND, Rodney

NY: Coward-McCann, 1954. First edition. 252pp. Red patterned boards backed with black cloth; dust jacket. Bumping to spine ends. Else very good in an unclipped ("$3.50") jacket with tattering to spine ends and a few shallow chips.  A gay novel blending mid-century espionage with homosexual themes; a struggling writer is pressed into service by the British government to entrap a pair of gay Foreign Office agents suspected of spying for Moscow. Garland was the pseudonym of Hungarian-born writer Adam de Hegedus (1906-1955); his earlier bestseller The Heart in Exile (1953) broke ground as an openly treatment of the gay experience in 1950s Britain. Young 1356.