THE GREEN SHADOW

New York: The Hartney Press, 1935. Very good plus in very good minus jacket.. First edition of this crime story with panache in the spectacular original dust jacket, the only novel by Chicago racketeering journalist James Edward Grant, now best known as the screenwriter for twelve John Wayne films. Grant's hard-drinking, hard-boiled novel, narrated by "a sloppy, slouchy egg," is set in crime-raddled post-Prohibition Lakeside (an "industrial city" not unlike his native Chicago), amid a teeming mass of blackmailers, coarse yeggs, screwy clowns, and tough customers. Written with great gusto - too much gusto for some critics: "Out-hams Hammett," said the SATURDAY REVIEW; "completely uninhibited," said THE NEW YORK TIMES. THE GREEN SHADOW was adapted into a film the following year entitled MUSS 'EM UP, directed by Charles Vidor. Grant devoted much of his subsequent career to writing for the movies, where he found great success with Westerns in particular, as John Wayne noted: "He had great talent as a writer." Quite scarce in the original dust jacket. 7.5'' x 5''. Original black and grey pictorial cloth. In original unclipped ($2.00) pictorial dust jacket by Charles B. Gilbert. 311, [1] pages. Light edgewear and fraying to boards, front hinge cracked with webbing showing (still somewhat holding). Jacket with moderate creasing and wear, reinforced in a few places on verso; some soil to rear panel and jacket flaps.