Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 12, No. 60, November 1948

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Roy Vickers has two significant detective-story creations to his everlasting credit. The wore important of the two is the Department of Dead Ends, that fascinating bureau of Scotland Yard which has proved Mr. Vickers to be the most brilliant contemporary manipulator of the “inverted.” detective story. The lesser conception is that of ethereal, saint faced Fidelity Dove, one of the most accomplished lady larcenists in the fictional history of crime... At the time we published THE DETECTIVE SHORT STORY: A BIBLIOGRAPHY (1942), we thought we had a first edition of THE EXPLOITS OF FIDELITY DOVE. As a matter of fact, we had in our collection two copies of this very scarce book, one bound in gray cloth and the second, identical in all other respects, bound in light blue cloth. On the basis of these two variants we listed the first edition as published in 1935 by George Newnes of London. There was nothing about either copy of the book that made us even remotely suspicious — they both seemed like genuine first editions. But recently we discovered a book which confirmed for the umpteenth time the utter fallibility of bibliographic data and research.

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