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Raymond Chandler's Copy of The Just and the Unjust

 

COZZENS, JAMES GOULD. The Just and The Unjust. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, [1942]. 1st ed. 8vo. Orig. cloth, dust jacket. Unpriced jacket and seal of the Book of the Month Club. Minor wear to jacket. $500.00

 

On the free front endpaper is the ink stamp of Raymond Chandler, 6005 Camino de la Costa, La Jolla, California, where he moved in 1946. Above the stamp is signature and 1944 date of the previous owner, P.R. Radcliff, a neighbor of Chandler's in San Diego.

The book is an intensely dramatic view of all characters involved in a murder trial--police, victim, lawyers and judge. It received front page treatment in the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune Sunday book sections, and was featured by the Book of the Month Club.

One displeased reader, however, was J. Edgar Hoover, whom both Cozzens and Chandler disliked strongly. Hoover wrote Cozzens, calling him a "son of a bitch" for portraying a heavy-handed FBI. Hoover even pressured the Book of the Month Club for an apology in its newsletter. Later, when Hoover invited Chandler to visit his table while they were both in the same restaurant, Chandler sent back word telling him to "go to hell."

Cozzens was the husband of Bernice Baumgarten, Chandler's literary agent for several years. Cozzens won the Pulitzer Price in 1949 for Guard of Honor, which Chandler wrote "makes all other war novels look like amateurish exercises." On December 29, 1948, Chandler wrote to Baumgarten, "Of Jim's books I have Guard of Honor, The Just and the Unjust and S.S. San Pedro. What others should I get?"