Thrift Shop Book Covers: "Flight Into Fear"

Flight Into Fear, by Duncan Kyle, was published as a hardcover by William Collins in 1972. The edition that caught my eye is the Fontana paperback published in 1980. The cover has everything that makes my inner-book-buying-dork stammer, “Must buy, must buy.” Which is to say, an orange airplane with a cool split tail design and a bi-plane with something suspicious happening. The artist: Chris Foss.

The first line:

I suppose it’s been going since Ur of the Chaldees and I’ve no more right to complain than anybody else who has fallen for the old tale of glory in the last five thousand years.

Duncan Kyle is the pen-name for British newspaperman John Franklin Broxholme, born in Bradford, England June 11, 1930. Under the name Duncan Kyle he wrote 14 adventure novels, favorably compared by critics and readers (including me) to the best in the genre, between 1970 and 1993. He died in June 2000.