For Love of Imabelle (A Rage in Harlem)

The census claim is correct and, importantly, refutes a common dealer error. The US Gold Medal paperback original of 1957 is the true first. The French edition — La Reine des pommes, Paris: Gallimard, Série noire no. 419, translated by Minnie Danzas, 253 pp. — appeared in 1958, a year AFTER the American issue, notwithstanding that Marcel Duhamel commissioned the book for the Série noire and that the French edition won the 1958 Grand Prix de littérature policière. Catalogue copy asserting the novel was "first published in France" is wrong on precedence; the Gallimard 1958 is collected as the first French edition and as the prize-winning issue, not as the first edition. The retitling to A Rage in Harlem is a first thus, not a first: Avon, 1965, Avon G1244.