Kuzmichev, A. On a Fresh Trail: A Novella (Po svezhemu sledu). Illustrated by N. Chernyshkov. First edition. Tbilisi, 1955. In Russian.

Кузьмичёв А. П. По свежему следу: Повесть. Рисунки Н. Чернышкова.
Тбилиси: Заря Востока, 1955. 100 с., ил.; 19,5х14 см.
Мягкая издательская иллюстрированная обложка. Тираж 50 000 экз.
Первая книга автора.
Обложка: потёртости корешка с небольшими утратами, пятно на задней обложке. Блок: следы подтёка в нижних полях части страниц, карандашная пометка на последней странице.
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Kuzmichev, A. P. On a Fresh Trail: A Novella. Illustrated by N. Chernyshkov.
Tbilisi: Zarya Vostoka, 1955. 100 pp., illustrated; 19.5 x 14 cm.
Illustrated paper wrappers. Print run 50,000 copies.
The author's first book.
Wrappers: rubbed spine with small losses, a stain on the back cover. Text block: water marks to the lower margins of some pages, a pencil note on the last page.

This is the first book by the Soviet writer and military journalist Anatoly Petrovich Kuzmichev (1923-2011), published in Tbilisi in 1955. Kuzmichev served in the war as a radio operator of a guards mechanised corps and on a front-line newspaper, and after 1945 worked for Leninskoye Znamya, the paper of the Transcaucasian Military District, before becoming deputy editor of the journal Literaturnaya Gruziya in Tbilisi (1956-1959). The novella belongs to the Soviet counterintelligence adventure genre of the early Cold War. Told in short chapters, it follows officers of the state security in a Black Sea settlement of Georgia who hunt a foreign agent codenamed "the Jackal" and protect the drawings and test data of a new tank designed by the engineer Pylaev, while a foreign intelligence officer directs the operation from abroad. The book is set in the Caucasus, with Georgian names and places in the plot, which makes it one of the Russian-language genre books issued by Zarya Vostoka, the main Russian-language publisher in Soviet Georgia. The illustrated wrappers and the text drawings are by N. Chernyshkov. The print run of 50,000 copies was large, but small paperback detective novellas of this kind were read to pieces and survive in modest numbers, especially in good condition. It will interest collectors of Soviet spy and detective fiction, of publications from Soviet Georgia, and of Cold War popular literature.