Santa Teresa Press - Chandler (Raymond). Backfire.

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Backfire: Story for the Screen, by Raymond Chandler. Preface by Robert B. Parker. First edition, 8vo, Santa Barbara: Santa Teresa Press, 1984.

One of 126 (200) copies signed by Robert Parker and hand-bound in pictorial cloth at Dragonfly Bindery. This copy not numbered but inscribed 'Katherine Sorley Walker's copy'. Fine condition with original acetate and slipcase.

'Katherine Sorley Walker wrote key books on the Royal Ballet's founder Ninette de Valois and Col Wassily de Basil's Ballet Russe, and had a perhaps surpring secondary expertise on the novelist Raymond Chandler, whose correspondence she co-edited  for publication in the aftermath of a sensational battle between two oof his lovers over his estate. On his death in 1959, Chandler left his $60,000 estate to his literary agent and lover Helga Greene (nee Guiness, the divorced wife of BBC  Director-General Hugh Carleton Greene) in a late codicil to his will. The codicil was challenged in 1960 by his private secretary Jean Fracasse, a rival lover, who accused Mrs Greene of getting the writer drunk and using sex to induce him to alter his intention to favour her instead. A San Diego judge dismissed Fracasse's case, amid huge international press coverage. Following the outcome, Helga Greene hired Katherine Sorley Walker as an editor and commissioned her to work on an edition of Chandler's enormous, extremely colourful correspondence. Though the resulting volume was felt by some to sanitise Chandler's racial and sexual prejudices, Raymond Chandler Speaking (published 1962) became a durable research volume for the copious flow of subsequent biographies of the writer. Katherine Sorley Walker remained an editor at Helga Greene's literary agency for twenty-five years until her death, combing  the day job with her long-established second line as a dance writer. From the early 1960s she reviewed increasingly for the Daily Telegraph whose dance critic A.V.Coton she succeeded after his death in 1969, writing in tandem with Fernau Hall. After Hall's death in 1988, she becam the Telegraph's sole resident dance critic until 1993.' (Daily Telgraph obituary)

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