MAPBACK MONDAY: Helen McCloy's The Goblin Market

Mapback Monday! I love these wonderful Dell Mapbacks.

Here's a great Mapback paperback -- Helen McCloy's The Goblin Market. The title and quotation are from Christina Rossetti's poem "Goblin Market." The novel was first published in 1942, but by Dell as a Mapback paperback in 1943.

I'm a big fan of Helen McCloy and her Dr. Basil Willing. The Goblin Market is set during WWII (1942) on the island of Santa Teresa in the Caribbean. This is a spy novel and involves codes and ciphers (cablese), as the foreign correspondents send cables to the home office. And, McCloy adds a good chapter on how cablese works. Helen McCloy was herself a newspaper correspondent in Paris, so she knows what she writes. I like the feminist and psychological elements of this novel. I also like that The Goblin Market foreshadows my favorite McCloy, Through a Glass, Darkly.