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Corruption

Richard [Henry Parnell] Curle

Richard Henry Parnell Curle (1883-1968) was a Scottish novelist, critic and compulsive traveller who in his later years acted as an assistant to Joseph Conrad. Conrad dedicated his novel The Arrow of Gold (1919) to Curle.

Curle was an Assistant Editor and columnist for The Daily Mail before leaving England to edit a newspaper in Rangoon. He later lived in the Americas (see the article by Adam Curle in the Joseph Conrad Society (U.K.) Newsletter, Vol. 1, No. 6 (March, 1975), pp. 12-14). This novel is Curle's only thriller.

Blampied had designed very few dust jackets since the mid-1920s and probably only started again in 1933 because of the collapse in the market for his drypoints. He worked for four other publishers in that year: Philip Allan, Hodder & Stoughton, Geoffrey Bles and Heinemann. In early 1933 he was commissioned by Sir Bruce Ingram of The Illustrated London News to produce a page of drawings of types of people. These drawings in ink and sepia wash appeared in 50 issues of the magazine between 17th June 1933 and 6th October 1934, an amazing 114 illustrations over a period of 16 months, so this was Blampied's last flurry of designs for dust jackets. This is the only dust jacket that he designed for Constable in 1933 that I have found, but there may be others.

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Dust jacket (click to enlarge)

Notes: The copy of the first edition in the British Library (without the dust jacket) is bound in dark green cloth with the title, author and publisher on the spine in yellow with horizontal bars. The title was published in the USA by Bobbs Merrill in 1933 with a different jacket design.

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