Miracle in the Drawing Room

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc.. Very Good in Good dj. 1936. First Edition. Hardcover. [ex-rental library book but only minimally marked as such (remnants of label on front pastedown), moderately shelfworn, some soiling to bottom edges, slight bumping at several corners, vintage bookseller's rubber-stamp at bottom of front pastedown (Bertrand Smith's Book Store, Long Beach, Calif.); jacket scuffed and edgeworn, a couple of small tears, shallow chipping at top of spine, fading/color-shifting to spine panel]. "A daring and cynical novel of the modern world's reaction to an old fashioned miracle" -- i.e., the intrusion of God Himself into the affairs of a dysfunctional British family, "nurtured in the miasma of every ultra-modern ism." Specifically: when the one more or less normal member of the family, young Francis, "faints, and when he comes out of his faint his hands and feet bear the stigmata of Saint Francis." The author was a former actor and stage director who also directed a number of silent films and also had a bit of a career as a film scenarist, with notable credits on a couple of Alfred Hitchcock's British films, the 1934 version of THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and the 1937 film THE GIRL WAS YOUNG (released in the U.S. as YOUNG AND INNOCENT). .