Search Results: Authors starting with C from Honey & Wax Booksellers

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1943. First edition of Vera Caspary's romantic psychothriller, an international bestseller that inspired the blockbuster 1944 film starring Gene Tierney. Caspary's legacy of strong, independent female characters was most realized in the fiercely self-possessed Laura, an advertising executive who is alternately considered a murderer and victim: "I picked up a cigarette. He hurried to light it. / 'Don't do that,' I said. / 'Why not?' / 'You can't call me a murderer and light my cigarette.'" Caspary was herself a formidable woman, who started her prolific writing career early. Her dust jacket biography is as entertaining as the novel itself: "Vera Caspary has been around. . . . A genius in selling things by mail, she has distributed in this way cold cream, milking machines, dancing, singing, one-pipe furnaces, rat virus, Zane Grey, Sax Rohmer, heredity, and sex." Recognized as a major contribution to the suspense genre, Laura was listed as a Haycraft-Queen cornerstone… Read More

Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. First American edition, published three months after the British, of the fifth title in the Philip Marlowe detective series, signed by Raymond Chandler. The Little Sister follows the private eye to Hollywood, where Marlowe investigates a scandal involving a starlet, her gangster beau, and her missing brother. Chandler's disdain for the film business, informed by his own experiences as a screenwriter, is evident: "Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else." The Little Sister inspired the 1969 semi-noir film Marlowe, starring James Garner, who would go on to portray the equally sardonic detective Jim Rockford in the 1970s NBC television series The Rockford Files. Bruccoli A8.2.a. A scarce signed copy, in the original dust jacket designed by… Read More