Chandler, Raymond

Playback. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1958



8vo (7 1/4 x 4 3/4 in; 185 x 120 mm). Publisher's reddish-orange boards lettered in silver in printed dust-jacket; jacket chipped at head of spine panel and title rubbed,  some minor edge wear only to fron panel, slightly more so to top edge of rear panel.

Bruccoli A 11.1.a (first issue binding). See Hiney, Raymond Chander A Biography; Moss, Raymond Chandler a Literary Reference

jacket chipped at head of spine panel and title rubbed, some minor edge wear only to fron panel, slightly more so to top edge of rear panel
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Dedication copy of the first edition inscribed on front endpaper to Jean Fracasse, "To / Jean / With love and dedication, and having given me / the opportunity to be her / bulwark and defender / against an odious and / entirely unwarranted attack. / I still am. I always shall / be. Ray / La Jolla August 1958."

The printed dedication, and this is the only Chandler title to have a dedication, reads "To Jean and Helga without whom this book would have never been written" (which Chandler has crossed through in this copy with the words "Should have been omitted. Printer's error").

Helga was Helga Greene, who was Chandler's agent, one-time fiance (during the last year of his life) and literary executor. Jean Vounder-Davis (formerly Fracasse) and her family were also supremely important to Chandler during this time. Realizing that he needed a secretary to help him complete Playback, his advertisement brought not only transplanted Australian Jean, but her two young children Sybil and her brother Vincent into what had become an isolated and depressed life for Chandler.

From her hiring in 1957, they became a surrogate family for Chandler and very likely prolonged his life as he was often given the task of entertaining and caring for the children, a role he refused to combine with drinking. In effect, this "family life" enforced a sobriety on Chandler that he would have otherwise lacked a reason for, having been in a slow decline ever since the death of Cissy.

The inscription is no doubt a reference to the terrible divorce Jean was going through, which Chandler became deeply involved in,  "Her swine of a husband walked out on his family after clearing out a joint bank account and leaving them nothing ... a man with a vile temper and brutal behaviour to his wife and children, ... I had to hold her together for the long months before the trial ... assist the attorney, and I was even a witness, although I had never seen the man ..." (Moss, pg. 259).

Chandler was indeed a "bulwark" for Jean and her children and for a time even expressed his intentions to friends to marry her. He took the three to New York, then London and paid for a trip to Australia.

Chandler signed over the Commonwealth rights to Playback to Jean (which an alarmed and jealous Greene immediately bought from her). He was continuing to provide at the time of his death, paying for an apartment, filling it with his furniture and his own library.

One of only two possible dedication copies of any Chandler book, the present with an incredibly resonant emotional inscription.