Inscribed first edition of Forbes's only novel, a remarkable noir with an ambitious psychological backstory underpinning the anti-hero's internal battles with narcissistic injury, morphine, and the glittering lure of crime.
Near fine in near fine jacket.
Price: $3,500.00
"You are a self-centered, cowardly vulture, living off the flesh of wealthy neurotics who pay you big fees to tell them in honeyed words what they want to hear."
Murray Forbes was a Chicago native, veteran broadcast announcer, and longtime actor in radio dramas whose single foray into novel-writing, his cover biography reports, grew out of his "interest in psychiatry, plus a bad case of insomnia." Evidently well-researched, HOLLOW TRIUMPH takes great care to build up the psychoanalytic case for scheming imposter Henry Mueller's seething resentment and "first-class persecution complex" – though who among us could easily turn down the opportunity to impersonate a wealthy and distinguished Nobel Prize-winning European psychiatrist? Some temptations are very great. HOLLOW TRIUMPH was also the basis for a 1948 film starring Joan Bennett and Paul Henreid, deprecated as "adequate" (Pryor) upon its release but later judged a "terrific, fatalistic noir" (Schwartz) with a gloomy ending faithful to its source. Scarce in jacket and rare signed.
Read more: Ronald Schwartz, Houses of Noir: Dark Visions from Thirteen Film Studios; Thomas Pryor, "A Study of a Criminal Type," The New York Times.
First printing. Chicago: Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, (1946). 8'' x 5.25''. Original dark green cloth with gilt-lettered spine. In price-clipped pictorial dust jacket. Inscribed by Forbes on front free endpaper. Very faint dampstain to lower edge. Minor scuffing to boards and jacket; small closed tear to rear jacket panel.
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