Reign of Hell

270pp. In black cloth-covered boards with silver lettering on spine. 8vo. Cloth slightly dull, just a tad rubbed at corners and spine ends. Text block edge and pages have a touch of toning. In its original illustrated dust jacket, a little sunned over spine, small tear on upper leading corner. There’s a WH Smith stamp on the front inner flap of dust jacket, extending onto front paste down. Sven Hassel was the pen name of the Danish author Borge Willy Redsted Pederson. Pederson was a war veteran and claimed to have spent the last years of the second world war in various prisoner of war camps but in reality had been arrested in Denmark and imprisoned for various crimes. His works, written in the first person, often feature himself as a key character and reveal a brutal view of war. His books are not deemed suitable for the public libraries in his home country but proved popular elsewhere, especially in the UK and USA.