The first paragraph:
It was one of the mixed blocks over on
Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all Negro. I had just come out of a
three-chair barber shop where an agency thought a relief barber named Dimitrios
Aleidis might be working. It was a small matter. His wife said she was willing
to spend a little money to have him come home.
But it’s the inscription that sold me the book:
7 comments:
That's a wonderful, curious inscription. I'd love to know the story behind it. Thank you for sharing.
Cheers,
Jeff
Noir novel (or short story) setup: so our Everyman protagonist goes to a used bookshop, buys this book w/this inscription & becomes fixated/obsessed w/the story behind the inscription. Of course it's a girl on the run who...well, there's the setup. I'm too lazy to write it.
The cover artist is Richard Waldrep. Walker Martin has a post relating to this on the mysteryfile blog: http://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=39787. Other web searching finds the 1976 Vintage Books Big Sleep original cover art with Waldrep's signature present.
I was always torn between enjoying the way Waldrep's cover looked and being annoyed at the blatant swipe from the cover of the February, 1935 issue of the Nick Carter pulp magazine.
http://www.philsp.com/data/images/n/nick_carter_canada_193503.jpg
Much pulp cover art was so striking I guess we should be glad this kind of thing didn't happen more often.
John Hocking
Thanks for the heads-up, John. Blatant is right!
I have never read Raymond Chandler, partly because I have never come across his books.
https://www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?author=Chandler,%20Raymond
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