Un Mystère • Presses de la Cité • 001–050

Un Mystère from Presses de la Cité

“All the works of this collection were carefully selected from the best titles of the best modern authors of the crime novel. They put the most enthralling reading within the range of every pocket.” Based on the principle of the American Pocket Books, this was the stated goal of the “Un Mystère” editions from the Presses de la Cité, launched at end of 1940s.

Published in Paris, the series includes some of the best post-war mystery fiction. Most of the books were translated into French from contemporary British and American authors, but the series also included some original French stories. The books all have fabulous cover designs, some completely original to the series, but most using the cover illustrations from the British or US editions, with the addition of some very creative typography, the series logo, a yellow stripe and the red postage-stamp author name panel. The logo for the series is an elephant reading a book and in the first editions of the early titles, the logo is used to make decorative endpapers.

The books covered the full range of mystery fiction: from detection and suspense, to hard-boiled and espionage. For more than fifteen years – between 1949 and 1966 – they published initially fortnightly, then weekly, to create a list of 769 numbered titles (although numbers 647, 683, 686, 695 and 711 don’t seem to exisit).

The logo on the first 50 books seems to have been re-drawn on each cover, then standardised to include the series title, with the elephant drawn in a more cubist style.

Below are the first 50 titles, with the rest of the first 200 on following pages.

Un Mystère aux éditions des Presses de la Cité

“Tous les ouvrages de cette collection ont été soigneusement choisis parmi les meilleurs titres des meilleurs auteurs modernes du roman criminel. Ils mettent à la portée de toutes les bourses les plus passionnantes lectures” : tel est le but que se fixent les éditions des Presses de la Cité en lançant à la toute fin des années 1940 leur collection “Un Mystère” sur le principe des pocket books américains. Des couvertures illustrées très colorées (apparaissant aujourd’hui si délicieusement kitsch), une marque identifiable en un clin d’oeil (l’éléphant, en haut à gauche, lisant énormément), un format adapté aux poches les moins accueillantes, une certaine diversité dans les contenus, qui rallient les amateurs de romans policiers “classiques”, de romans noirs, à suspense, “durs”, ou encore d’espionnage : telle est la recette d’une quinzaine d’années de publications populaires. Bimensuelle, puis hebdomadaire comme un bon vieux roman-feuilleton, la collection accueillera jusqu’au milieu des années 60 près de 800 titres [les numéros 647, 683, 686, 695 et 711 ne semblent pas exister. 9 titres sont des hors série numérotés en chiffres romains]; voici réunis les 200 premiers.

French text from from www.chapitre.com – where you can buy many of the Un Mystère books, also try www.bibliopoche.fr or, of course, ebay