Murder Unleashed

New York/Chicago: A.L. Burt Company. Very Good in Fair dj. (c.1935). Reprint. Hardcover. [moderately shelfworn book, binding solid, no markings in text; jacket is well-worn, with numerous small tears and chips (including a quarter-size piece missing at lower right corner of front panel), spine heavily faded, some paper loss at top of spine (taking away part of title), a handful of old internal tape-mends]. Mystery novel about "the curious murder of the 'White Flower' of San Francisco night life." The author's first novel, it was (it sez here) "definitely stamped with her own attractive personality." A native of Berkeley, California, the author had cut her writing teeth in an Oakland newspaper office following her graduation from the University of California in 1925, and had also published a good deal of poetry and magazine fiction in the first decade of her professional life. She opened 1935 in a big way: this mystery yarn was actually one of a pair of "first books," the other being a long narrative poem entitled "How Strange a Thing," described as "a detective novel in verse. The two books were issued simultaneously (by different publishers) in February 1935 -- but as if that wasn't enough, the previous month had seen the Broadway premiere of a play called "Fly Away Home," which she had co-written with Irving White. Of the various career paths suggested by this multi-media blitz, the one that bore the most lucrative fruit was the latter, sort of: the play was bought for the movies, and like so many fledgling writers before her, she headed for Hollywood, where she embarked on a moderately successful screenwriting career. (Her most notable credit was probably the THE BRASHER DOUBLOON, the 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's "The High Window." Her play itself wasn't filmed until 1942, under the title ALWAYS IN MY HEART.) As far as I can discover, she only wrote one addtional mystery novel, "Come and Be Killed," published as a digest-pulp original 1942. (And, by the way, she should not be confused with a British writer bearing the same name, who wrote a handful of mysteries between 1947 and 1972. Or with Dorothy Cheston Bennett, wife of Arnold Bennett.) (She was, however, sometimes known under her married name, Dorothy Hannah .