One Night in Laguna: The Dark Wheel (1948), by Philip MacDonald and A. Boyd Correll

American first editionThe page-long authors' blurb on the back of the dust jacket of The Dark Wheel (1948), a suspense novel co-authored by Philip MacDonald and A. Boyd Correll, informs us that the two men "met over a game of chess" and "decided to continue their friendship over a good book," adding: "This is the book." The previous year in May 1947 Boyd Correll--his full name was Augustus Boyd Correll, so now you know why as a crime writer he reduced his first name to the single initial "A."--had hosted, with his Turkish born (of American parents), operetta singer wife Helen, a reception for MacDonald's twenty-year-old daughter Caryl when she married a local electrician, so they evidently had indeed become good friends. Boyd and his wife Helen, a childless couple, and Philip and his second wife Ruth (Caryl's stepmother) lived about a mile apart in Laguna Beach, California, a small, charming, then remote oceanside community about sixty miles from Hollywood that was home to bohemian,…