Monday, October 30, 2017

… and two from a ‘hard-boiled’ Hammett admirer … and the ensuing edition confusion …



… and I have also been eyeing these two books for quite some time … lots of eyeing going on, actually … and only dealstar on amazon had them under the used-books category … one is the ‘prequel’ to The Maltese Falcon and the other is a fictionalized biography of Dashiell Hammett, just called Hammett … both written by Joe Gores … 

Joe Gores was an award winning American crime-mystery writer … wrote novels and short stories set in San Francisco … his novels feature the fictional private investigation firm Dan Kearney and Associates … and Joe Gores himself was a private eye once … see, lots of similarities with Hammett … and whenever you search for books by Hammett, you are bound to bump into these two novels … at first you ignore, then you are curious … you want to find out more … what, a novel titled Hammett?  you exclaim … and another what! a prequel to The Maltese Falcon? … by now you are intrigued … and if you are hard-boiled enough, then you want to explore further … dig deeper … this is exactly what happened with me … all this curiosity, intrigue-ment, and exploration, and digging, led me to this uncontrollable desire towards possess-ment of these books … aree, arre, badebhai, kya hora yeangrezi poora kundhal de rein … sambhalo, badebhai … and so, I seriously contemplated buying these books and started my search for used editions of these books … and I found this edition of Spade and Archer with a suitably old-looking, hard-boiled, and grungy looking cover … I was hooked … and I wanted Spade and Archer with this cover …
 
Actually, Spade and Archer was published only in 2009 and Hammett is in fact the older book, published in 1975 … anyway, I also found a copy of Hammett with the same used-books seller, dealstar on amazon … so after some hesitation and realizing neither will get these books with another used-books seller or with the same price, or with the similar Spade and Archer cover, I bit the bait … and after a couple of weeks look what the bookseller delivered … !!
 


The Hammett edition and cover are the same as was shown on the dealstar portal … but my face fell when I saw Spade and Archer … I was so thoroughly disappointed that I wanted to pick up a fight with the seller for showing something and delivering something else … such a bland undercooked cover … I felt dealstar was using that other cover as a bait, and like a fool I bit it … I wanted to read the book and I got the book, I thought resignedly … but did I really … ??

Then I saw this line at the bottom of the orange cover …


Whoa … what is this? Now, I was really intrigued … I opened the book and on the inside cover there was a whole paragraph … !!!



After reading this I felt like I had transgressed some law or something … who wants all this aggravation, chichcha … I searched the book for further warnings … and found some pieces of reassurance … a sticker at the back with a barcode … and a sticker on the cover with a name I recognise as respectable, namely, Oxfam, and price of the book in Pounds … I heaved a small sigh of relief … oof … secure in the belief that I was not indulging in book-legging … so, the book has legitimately come from England … I surmised … these are extra manuscript proof copies that the publishers had donated to Oxfam … and Oxfam has sold these as used books … and one such copy reached me … and moreover the book has already been printed and all, no ... so, nothing to worry ...

The romantic in me thought “Oh my god!  Is this a rare book or something … they don’t make proof copies in large numbers, do they?  should I preserve this book? put it under a glass case or something?  maybe it will fetch me a good price in the future and finance my retirement” … the cynic in me laughed like a villain and said… “naan-sense … stop day-dreaming, you idiot, you’ve been sold a lemon … this is only an uncorrected proof copy, not the final finished book … you’ll have to buy the final version of the book …” 

Oh, is that so?  I’d better start searching then …

Saturday, October 28, 2017

Three from the Hard-Boiled Master …



When I bought those volumes of short-stories by the hard-boiled masters, Hammett and Chandler, sometime in February this year, I had identified some novels by Chandler which I don’t have and haven’t read, and put them on my mental wish-list.  This used-books seller on Amazon, dealstar, has a good collection of books which no other used-books seller on Amazon has.  So, after waiting for around four months, I thought now is the time for some Chandler novels.  The prices are on the higher side, given that we are speaking of used-books, but I am lured by them books all the same; not that I have lots of money, it is that I am more of a succumb-er to book temptation … yen maadodu

Recently, when Prof T P Ashoka, Kannada scholar and senior literary critic, visited my home, he saw my Hammett collection arranged on my shelf and “… oh, you like Hammett … he is one of my favourite writers …” That, sort of, made my day.  Anyway, to come back to Chandler … I have two of Chandler’s novels, and two collections of short stories … I wanted some more novels … some of the novels were priced very high, so I choose those which were priced the lowest among the lot.  And so, I choose The Long Goodbye, The Little Sister, and The High Window … the portal showed that two of these had good looking covers, but then the third was shown without a cover, just a bland image …



And when I finally received the books, this is how their covers looked … (this ‘perception and reality’ thing happened with another book from the same seller, but that is for the next post … )




I was happy with the covers on The Little Sister, and The High WindowThe Long Goodbye cover doesn’t have style I thought … cover courtesy details on the back cover of The Little Sister, and The High Window say that – The covers of this series designed by James Tormey, incorporate material supplied by courtesy of 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, and RKO Pictures … the chaps on the covers are probably stylised images of actors who played Marlowe in films produced by these movie production houses … one of them resembles Humphrey Bogart … anyway … and the other thing is that all three books were published in the 1970s … and this gave me reason for tassalli-fication saying that the price I paid for these three Chandler novels is not that high … that these are rare, almost antique editions … hai na