Description

“IT’S FUNNY ABOUT THIS GUN. I FOUND IT ON THE STAIRS”: INSCRIBED FIRST EDITION OF CHANDLER’S THE LADY IN THE LAKE

CHANDLER, Raymond. The Lady in the Lake. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943. Octavo, original green cloth, original dust jacket.

First edition of Chandler’s fourth novel, inscribed, “For James Keddie Jr with my best wishes, Raymond Chandler, La Jolla, Sept 7, 1949.”

Recalling Chandler’s influence on his own work, Tom Stoppard wrote, “It was not just the wisecracks, the smart one-liners. Derace Kingsley, Marlowe’s client in The Lady in the Lake, has ‘a voice you could crack a brazil nut on,’ but it was not that. It was not the fancy figures of speech. Waiting in Kingsley’s plush outer-office for his client to emerge, Marlowe smokes while ‘the minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips,’ and it surely was not that? It was more?what happens next? writing at 24 frames per second” (New York Times). W.H. Auden once called Raymond Chandler’s works “not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art” (DAB). Basis for the 1947 noir classic. The Lady in the Lake had a modest first printing of 6000 copies—smaller than any of his novels other than his first, The Big Sleep, which had a printing of 5000 copies. Because it is a wartime book, published under the restrictions on paper usage in effect during World War II and therefore using thin, cheap paper, it is probably the scarcest of the early novels obtainable in collectible condition. Bruccoli A4.1.a. Inscribee Keddie was a noted mystery collector.

Interior fine; very light wear to cloth extremities and light soiling to cloth. Bright dust jacket expertly restored. A near-fine copy, scarce inscribed.