My Scrapbook
Raymond Chandler complains about his book’s cover…
For the homepage of my November 2011 issue, I “borrowed” a cover from a reprint edition of one of my all-time favourite books by one of my absolutely all-time favourite writers: Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler.
It’s not my favourite cover for this much-reprinted title — I still have a soft spot for the faux-retro covers Ballantine did in the 70s and 80s — and Lord knows Chandler wasn’t always well-served by his book covers. But this Pocket Book edition from the early fifties has a rather nasty, visceral charm to it, even if Chandler himself didn’t much care for it.
In fact, in Raymond Chandler Speaking, a collection of his correspondence that I highly recommend for Chandler-geeks, there’s a great letter, dated May 15, 1951, in which arguably the crankiest man in crime fiction berates Freeman Lewis, then Vice-President of Pocket Books, over  the 1951 paperback edition of Farewell, My Lovely:
Bitch, bitch, bitch…
Granted, I wasn’t kidding about how Chandler wasn’t particularly well-served by his publishers when it came to his covers.
There have been some spectacularly lacklustre, generic covers for his novels over the years, and in fact, after all these years, I’m still trying to make sense of the cover for the very first edition of Farewell My Lovely from way back in 1940.
After all, if Chandler could go off on the thickness of a bed-spring, can you imagine what he thought about this one? I mean, really.
Flying fucking saucers?
Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.