Description
“A KIND OF LIGHTNING STRUCK ON EVERY PAGE”: RARE PRESENTATION/ASSOCIATION FIRST AMERICAN EDITION OF RAYMOND CHANDLER’S THE LONG GOOD-BYE, WARMLY INSCRIBED IN THE YEAR OF PUBLICATION BY HIM TO CBS VICE PRESIDENT HARRY ACKERMAN
CHANDLER, Raymond. The Long Good-Bye. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1954. Octavo, original blue and green cloth, original dust jacket. Housed in a custom clamshell box.
First American edition of Chandler’s fa,ed Philip Marlowe novel, a distinctive presentation/association copy inscribed by him in the year of publication, “To Harry Ackerman, with my best wishes, Raymond Chandler, La Jolla June 22, 1954,” at a time when the Emmy Award-winning Ackerman was CBS Vice President of CBS-TV West Coast programs and the radio series, Adventures of Philip Marlowe, was gaining “the biggest audience of any drama series on American radio.”
“The Long Good-Bye was Raymond Chandler’s last great attempt to write the sort of crime novel he believed could and should be written… [His intent was] to find ‘a means of expression which might remain on the level of unintellectual thinking and yet acquire the power to say things which are usually said only with a literary air” (Keating, Crime and Mystery: 100 Best Books, 107). Chandler “is a craftsman so brilliant,” wrote Elizabeth Bowen, “he has an imagination so wholly original, that no consideration of modern American literature ought, I think, to exclude him” (World of Raymond Chandler). To Paul Auster, Chandler “invented a new way of talking about America” and to director Billy Wilder, Chandler’s art generated “a kind of lightning struck on every page.”
Chandler’s inscription is to Harry Ackerman, the Emmy Award-winning Vice President of CBS-TV West Coast programs, serving in that position until 1958. This was at a time when Chandler’s contract for the radio series, Adventures of Philip Marlowe, guaranteed him “the right to veto the quality of each script before it was broadcast, and writers working on the show would frequently telephone him, or even drive down to La Jolla, in order to ask questions. This screening process, which Chandler insisted on, paid off. First on NBC, then CBS, the series ran for four years at a prime-time slot of 5:30 p.m., with Marlowe being played by famous radio stars… By 1949 the show was pulling the biggest audience of any drama series on American radio” (Hiney, Raymond Chandler, 177). In addition to his role as CBS Vice President, Ackerman was also a highly influential radio and television producer and director. Among his many programs, he was “responsible for the development of I Love Lucy… and helped develop Gunsmoke as a radio series” (Variety). In addition, Ackerman was “one of a handful of TV producers to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame,” and played a key role, as well, in the “widely heralded Suspense and Studio One dramatic anthologies” (Los Angeles Times). Preceded by the 1953 first English edition. Basis for Robert Altman’s 1973 film starring Elliott Gould, with a screenplay by Leigh Brackett (The Big Sleep). Crown Crime Companion: Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time 13. Bruccoli A10.1.a.
Book fine; lightest edge-wear mainly to spine ends of colorful near-fine dust jacket.
