Description

GRAHAM GREENE’S PERSONAL FILE COPY OF THIS GUN FOR HIRE, SIGNED BY HIM, AND WITH HIS TYPED LETTER NOTING THAT THIS COPY BELONGED TO HIM, ALSO SIGNED BY HIM

GREENE, Graham. This Gun for Hire. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1936. Octavo, original ivory cloth, dust jacket supplied from another copy of the first edition. Housed in a custom cloth clamshell box.

First edition of Greene’s brisk thriller—his own personal copy, signed by him on the title page, and with a laid-in typed letter signed by Greene, dated March 10, 1990, that states “This is to certify that this copy of: This Gun for Hire is my own personal copy, and bears my ownership signature.”

The film rights to This Gun for Hire (published in England under the title A Gun for Sale) were sold to Paramount studios before the novel’s official publication date, in June 1936. The novel “offers much to the reader that no film could hope to capture. A killer’s mentality cannot be adequately conveyed on the screen, but Greene’s novel is able to subject it to microscopic scrutiny… What he understood was the ‘unhealthy’ mind, but, until he wrote A Gun for Sale, he did not attempt to place an extreme case at the center of a novel… The vague descriptions and uncertain pace that mar some of Greene’s earlier works are absent from this novel” (Shelden, Graham Greene: The Enemy Within, 181). First edition, published June, 1936; not issued in England until July that same summer, under the title A Gun for Sale. Woode A12b. Miller 16a. Bookseller label; “6-19” penciled to front panel of dust jacket.

Without front free endpaper; evidence of original dust jacket flaps having been glued to the pastedowns. Interior generally clean, cloth with mild toning. Supplied dust jacket price-clipped, with light edge-wear, a few shallow chips, small tape reinforcement to verso of spine head, very good condition. A very desirable copy from the author’s personal files.