The Long Goodbye [*his Hollywood agent's copy*] de Chandler, Raymond - 1954 (c.1953)

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Very Good+ in Fair dj. 1954 (c.1953). First American Edition. Hardcover. [solid copy, moderate wear to cloth at top and bottom edges, agency stamp on ffep and title page (see notes), old tape marks on both pastedowns; jacket is well-worn, with several large chips, significant paper loss at spine ends (including loss of about half the title), tape marks on both flaps]. The first American edition of Chandler's last great novel (published in England the previous year), this copy bearing the stamp of Chandler's long-time Hollywood agent, H.N. Swanson, on the ffep and the title page. This would have been one of several copies that Swanson would have had on hand, with the wear and tear to the jacket perhaps attributable to his initially fruitless attempts to peddle the book to the Hollywood studios. (He had successfully peddled the film rights to four of the author's five previous novels, and raised a good deal of additional coin for Chandler via the "Philip Marlowe" radio series and the various screenwriting gigs that kept him gainfully employed during most of the 1940s -- but didn't succeed in making a deal for "The Long Goodbye" until long after Chandler himself had ceased to cash the checks. The result of that sale was the anti-traditional Robert Altman adaptation, released in 1973 -- brilliant in its way, with Elliott Gould as not-your-grandma's Marlowe.) .