Rumour at Nightfall - 1931

London: William Heinemann Ltd, 1931. First Edition. First Impression, one of 1,200 copies. Octavo (19cm); maroon cloth, with titles stamped in gilt on spine, and decorative elements embossed onto front cover; [viii],300pp. Spine ends gently nudged, with a faint suggestion of foxing to a few preliminary and terminal leaves, else remarkably clean throughout; Near Fine, with the cloth quite even in color, and without the usual heavy wear. Lacking the rare dustjacket. An attractive copy of Greene's third novel, set toward the end of the First Carlist War. Unlike his first novel, Rumour at Nightfall was a critical and commercial failure, which Greene blamed on the influence of Joseph Conrad on his writing. "My second and third novels, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall...can now be found, I am glad to think, only in secondhand bookshops at an exaggerated price, since some years after their publication I suppressed them. Both books are of a badness beyond the powers of criticism properly to evoke - the prose flat and stilted and in the case of Rumour at Nightfall, pretentious (the young writer had obviously been reading again and alas! admiring Conrad's worst novel, The Arrow of Gold), the characterization nonexistent" (Ways of Escape: An Autobiography, p.19). WOBBE A4a.