The Shadow of the Rope

This is the back cover (or plain cloth binding) of a 1909 hardcover novel — not a pulp magazine cover — stamped in burgundy cloth with a gilt interlocked monograph at center. The library barcode identifies it as a holding of the School of Theology at Claremont. The Shadow of the Rope by E.W. Hornung (creator of gentleman-thief Raffles) is a courtroom thriller built around a woman tried for her husband's murder. Pre-pulp in format, it belongs to the Edwardian crime-fiction wave that fed directly into the hardboiled and mystery pulps of the 1920s — Black Mask, Detective Story — which in turn seeded the noir comic books of the 1940s.