"Glitter"

London: Collins. Poor. 1934. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [heavily worn, front hinge cracked, rear hinge starting, spine turned, spine cloth very brown, etc. and etc. -- this one has had its share of abuse, for sure, but I'll dress it up in a nice new clear mylar jacket, if you'll give it a new loving home]. (line drawings) By far the rarest of MacDonald's works, and an anomaly within his oeuvre in several respects: it's not a detective or mystery novel in any way; unlike almost any other novel of his, it was published only in England, not in America (even though he himself had permanently moved to the U.S. in 1931); and it's illustrated throughout with numerous somewhat whimsical drawings by one Ann Stafford. (It also seems to be somewhat "unknown," in the sense of having been omitted from MacDonald's entry in Reilly's "Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers," although a 1978 radio play by that name -- presumably an adaptation of the book -- is noted.) MacDonald had been cranking out novels since the mid-1920s -- including several under two pseudonyms (Anthony Lawless and Martin Porlock) and his series of popular detective novels featuring Colonel Anthony Gethryn -- but within a few years of moving to Hollywood he had largely abandoned his novelistic efforts in favor of screenwriting. (Between 1938 and 1962, he wrote or co-wrote just nine books, as opposed to 22 between 1924 and 1934.) "'Glitter'" (and the quotation marks are important) seems to have been the novel that rang the curtain down on his early period: it was his only book to be issued in 1934 (he had averaged three or four a year since 1930), and it preceded a novelistic "dry spell" of four years' duration. (His next book, "The Nursemaid Who Disappeared" (aka "Warrant for X"), another Gethryn mystery, didn't appear until 1938.) Not only that, but the book is also stylistically unusual, kind of a mashup between an epistolary novel and a play with no stage directions: the story is told almost entirely through reproduced correspondence or other documents (letters, telegrams, postcards, invoices, dunning notices, etc.), interspersed with passages of pure dialogue -- and I do mean PURE dialogue. Not only are there no "he said" or "she said" indicators, there is never ANY direct identification of who is speaking; every conversation just starts, and the reader is left to work out the who and what of it from the context and content. (Oh, the characters do have names, which are revealed mostly in little one-page interstitials that appear every so often, in which the omniscent novelist-narrator summarizes the current state of affairs and urges the reader onward.) I don't want to ruin the somewhat screwball-comedy-ish experience of reading the book, so about the plot I will only say that it has to do with the efforts of "a young, handsome and impecunious Novelist who has only been successful as a Soldier" to hold his numerous creditors at bay as he desperately tries to get his latest novel (entitled -- you'll never guess -- "Glitter") published and promoted. In the midst of his gallivanting about London, he cute-meets a girl on the street; they fall instantly and madly in love and agree to meet up later in the evening, but neglect to properly introduce themselves -- an oversight that complicates matters in the extreme as the plot unfolds. By way of further elucidation with regard to the book's rarity, consider that there are (as of February 2025) no copies whatsoever offered for sale online, and OCLC records a mere eight copies, five of which are in the U.K., and none at all in America -- plus, weirdly, two copies of a Spanish translation ("Chispazo"), published in Barcelona in 1947. All of which is by way of saying that while this might not be the prettiest copy of this book in the world, it might well be the *last* one you'll ever see. Don't let it be the one that got away. . (Inventory #: 29323)