The Dark Frontier

The census claim stands: the UK Hodder & Stoughton 1936 edition is the true and only contemporary first — there is no competing first, because no American edition existed for over half a century. The first American edition is The Mysterious Press, New York, published 1 March 1990 (279 pp). That 1990 edition is a textbook "first thus" trap: it is collected because it carries a new introduction by Ambler in which he explains he wrote the book as a parody of the Oppenheim/Buchan/Dornford Yates secret-service thriller, and its jacket copy advertises that the 1936 novel had never before been available in America — but it is emphatically not the first edition.