WILD ONION
New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1930. First Edition. Carroll's only crime novel, centered around protagonist Joe Dulac, "Chicago beer baron and king of bootleggers, from the days of terrified apprenticeship, through a career of violence and murder, to wealth and power and the inevitable finale...But this is not merely another "gang" book. It is a shrewd and masterly portrait of a type which has too often escaped the literary camera. The author gives us the inside dope on the mental make-up of the master urban bootlegger and as a background has provided a panoramic view of the Volstead area - Chicago, with its noisy turbulence, its ubiquitous machine gun, its rococo gangster funerals, its purple boudoirs, its grimy jails - a picture that reveals in swift, bold strokes the origins of a catastrophic disorder" (from front flap). A reprint was issued by Grosset & Dunlap, but the first is uncommon, especially in dustjacket. OCLC notes 11 holdings. Hubin, p.67. Item #5005
First Printing. Octavo (19.25cm); green cloth, with titling and decorations stamped in black on spine and front cover; green topstain; pictorial endpapers; dustjacket; [viii],312pp. Upper corners gently tapped (though still sharp), else a fresh, very Near Fine copy. In the pictorial dustjacket designed by Arthur Hawkins, Jr.; $2.00 price vertically rubber-stamped at lower margin of front flap, some trivial wear to extremities, with some corresponding mild wear to upper corners; a bright, Near Fine example.
Price: $750.00