Paperback 743: The High Window / Raymond Chandler (Pocket Books 320)

Paperback 743: Pocket Books 342 (1st ptg, 1945)

Title: The High Window
Author: Raymond Chandler
Cover artist: E. McKnight Kuffer

Yours for: $8


Best things about this cover:

• Well, they can't all be sexy. 
• As abstract/representational hybrid covers go, this one's pretty cool (is there a word for that style? pretty common on '40s paperbacks). There's a nice dramatic interplay between that angry red building, with its crazily barred windows, and the lonely falling silhouette.
• This guy's got a weird signature. Had to look it up. I think the letters read "E MCK K" (for E. McKnight Kuffer)
• For a more, let's say, realistic version of this cover, see Paperback 91.

Best things about this back cover:

• This description is just a mess of "things that might appear in a mystery novel." Not even much of an attempt to take it out of list form.
• Not sure what number incarnation of the pocket kangaroo we're up to here, but I like this one, with the joey holding the book for bespectacled mom.
• Other war-time books tell you exactly what postage you'll need to send the book to a soldier. Here, the plea is much vaguer. Can I "share" it with my diner waitress? She's in "uniform."

Page 123~

I felt myself getting pinched around the nose. My mouth felt dry. I needed air. I took another deep breath and another dive into the tub of blubber that was sitting across the room from me on the reed chaise-longue, looking as unperturbed as a bank president refusing a loan.

My new life's goal is to own a reed chaise-longue. Wait. Nope. On further research, it looks like a rickshaw for Victorian invalids, so I'm good.

~RP

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Paperback 738: The Lady in the Lake / Raymond Chandler (Pocket Books 389)

Paperback 738: Pocket Books 389 (4th ptg, 1947)

Title: The Lady in the Lake
Author: Raymond Chandler
Cover artist: [Tom Dunn]

Yours for: $15


Best things about this cover:

• Not my favorite cover, but I love the movie tie-in angle. Audrey Totter died just last month.
• It's a pretty, evocative cover—I like the way the bubbles and her hair float up in soft curves. I also like how her bright purple dress pops against the blue/yellow/green-ness of the rest of the cover.
• Ten years later, this cover would've been way more sexed-up, which I realize is a morbid thing to say about a cover featuring a corpse, but … you know I'm right.

Best things about this back cover:

• Gah. Nothing. 
• I like "susceptible blondes," but "moves with the speed and general effect of a well-aimed bullet to its suspected target" is noxious, for more reasons than I care to go into.
• If these scans look a little odd, it's just the permagloss, which is fraying (book still in excellent condition, though)

Page 123~

"Women are always leaving their handkerchiefs around. A fellow like Lavery would collect them and keep them in a drawer with a sandalwood sachet. Somebody would find the stock and take one out to use. Or he would lend them, enjoying the reactions to the other girls' initials. I'd say he was that kind of a heel. Goodby, Miss Fromsett, and thanks for talking to me."

So *that's* what he meant by "The Long Goodbye"—it had an "e" on the end, unlike all his other goodbys, which, apparently, didn't.

~RP

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New Adventures in Kiwi Bookstores

Used bookstores are seemingly more plentiful and generally quirkier in NZ than they are here in the states. I went into every one I could find (duh). I pulled a couple things out of Gone West Books (in Titirangi, a neighborhood in / close suburb of Auckland) that seemed of probably interest to readers of this blog. First, there was this hardbound book that practically leapt off the "NZ Fiction" shelf and into my hands. You ever have that experience, where a book seems to Shout at you from the shelves, even if it's not particularly flashy or specially displayed? Yeah, that's what happened here:


There's something so simple, elemental, and badass about this design. I found myself thinking "Why don't more books like this?" Slightly frantic font set off against the slightly frantic geometrical linear configuration. Hot and cool at the same time. Minimal but substantial. Colorful, but with a B&W feel. Love! I also love the back cover, where we get to learn a thing or two about our author:

Armed! Only other armed author I've seen on a paperback cover is Spillane! I'm so reading this.

The other book I pulled out of that shop is less surprising, but no less intriguing:



How am I supposed to resist this? The genius of Penguin design, the beat-upness of a good book well read, the Chandler of Chandler of Chandler. I didn't even ask 'how much?' (answer: more than it was worth, less than I would've gladly paid). If I had to design a book to read on a train, it would look like this. I think it would *be* this. HOWEVER, I completely forgot that, for reasons I now forget, Philip Marlowe was not called Philip Marlowe in the UK editions of Chandler's work (despite the fact that the playwright Marlowe was British, and the fact that Marlowe evolved out of the earlier Mallory—another important British writer (minus one "l")). Instead, the detective is called Johnny Dalmas. You would not think a simple name change would affect my reading pleasure. You would be dead wrong. I just couldn't get past it. Marlowe is so far from a "Johnny" that I found it hard to take the stories seriously. It's like if Yakkity Sax started playing over the climactic scene in "The Godfather." To my ears, all kinds of tonally wrong. Anyway, the book still looks cool, which is mostly what matters.

More from The Collection very soon—I'm gonna step up production to make up for the lengthy hiatus.

Later,
RP