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Cost Price

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Cost Price
File:Cost Price dustjacket.pdf
1949 dustjacket
AuthorDornford Yates
SeriesChandos books
GenreNovel
PublisherWard Lock & Co[1]
Publication date
1949[1]
Media typePrint
Pages286[1]
Preceded byRed in the Morning 

Cost Price is a 1949 adventure novel by the English author Dornford Yates (Cecil William Mercer), the eighth and last in his 'Chandos' thriller series. It serves as a sequel to his 1939 novel Safe Custody.
The book was published in the US under the title The Laughing Bacchante.[2]

Plot

Chandos and Mansel recover the gems that had in Safe Custody been left in a walled-up chamber of Hohenems castle.

Background

The book was published soon after Mercer had completed the building of a new house in Southern Rhodesia to which he and his wife had retired. This was his replacement for "Cockade" in Southern France (described in The House That Berry Built) which was empty and still a worry to him.[3]

Critical reception

US edition

Mercer's biographer AJ Smithers, writing in 1982, expressed admiration for the way in which Mercer marshalled his characters. By continually bringing back old friends who give the impression of being one big family, his readers feel almost honorary family members themselves.[4]

References

  1. ^ a b c "British Library Item details". primocat.bl.uk. Retrieved 15 May 2020.
  2. ^ Macdonald, Kate (2015). Novelists Against Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 226. ISBN 978-1137457714.
  3. ^ Smithers 1982, pp. 206, 208, 120.
  4. ^ Smithers 1982, p. 208.

Bibliography