Black Orchids [in] Rex Stout Mystery Quarterly #1, May, 1945

New York: Joseph Meyers / Avon Book Company, 1945. 5.25" wide by 7.5" tall. Original wraps, printed in green, maroon, black, and yellow. No owner's name or bookplate. Clean, square, and unmarked. Tight binding. Text pages (wartime paper) browning, as usual. Cover still bright and shiny. First issue of this digest. Contains a brief Introduction by the "editor-in-chief" Rex Stout, and his photo (see Townsend F6). In all there are 9 stories: BLACK ORCHIDS (complete) by Rex Stout; DEATH AND COMPANY by Dashiell Hammett; FOUR SUSPECTS by Agatha Christie; THE SNAKE by John Steinbeck; IMAGE IN THE MIRROR by Dorothy L. Sayers; SMART GUY (first time in print) by Bruno Fischer; LAWYER'S FEE by H. Felix Valcoe; IN THE LIBRARY by W. W. Jacobs; THE ROUSING OF MR. BRADEGAR by H. F. Heard. "The story [BLACK ORCHIDS] has a superb surprise ending." - Townsend B35d. From chapter 1: "I didn't particularly resent it when Nero Wolfe sent me up there Monday afternoon and, anyway, I had been expecting it. After all the ballyhoo in the special Flower Show sections of the Sunday papers, it was a cinch that some member of our household would have to go there to take a look at those orchids, and as Fritz Brenner couldn't be spared from the kitchen that long, and Theodore Horstmann was too busy in the plant rooms of the roof, and Wolfe himself could have got a job in a physics laboratory as an Immovable Object if the detective business ever played out, it looked as if I would be elected. I was.". First Edition. Softcover. Near Fine condition/Printed cover price 25 cents. 165pp.