Bitter Justice

[good solid copy, light age-toning to edges of text block, faint staining to rear cover; jacket has a short closed tear and some associated creasing at top of front panel, long vertical crease in front panel]. A psychological murder mystery with a lengthy courtroom scene (taking up most of the second half of the book), this was the last published work of this noted playwright and silent-film scenarist, appearing just a few months before her death in July 1943. Best-known for her work with Cecil B. DeMille and several other prominent directors, she had a couple of dozen screen credits between 1919 and 1926, then more or less dropped out of sight for a few years (perhaps distracted by a divorce and then a re-marriage, inconveniently coinciding with the end of the silent era) before returning to the Hollywood writing game, although her credits in the new world of talkies were few and far between. According to one source, she turned primarily to magazine-article writing during the 1930s, and this would appear to have been her only published novel. Interestingly, although the jacket illustration is obviously of a woman lawyer addressing a jury, the jacket blurb doesn't mention this angle of the story at all, and in fact gives nary a hint of the strong feminist strain that runs throughout. Without giving away too much of the rather convoluted plot, I'll just say that for 90% of the book, this "woman lawyer" isn't that at all, but instead the self-effacing and subservient wife of a renowned and brilliant (but also egotistical and domineering) brain surgeon. How she's pushed and ultimately humiliated by him, and finally goaded into throwing off the shackles of her hitherto "happy" marriage, is far too complicated to summarize here. (I cannot help but note that Ms. Cowan's second marriage, in 1929 -- which may have had something to do with her walking away from her screenwriting career, and which ended in divorce the following year -- was to a doctor, described in one newspaper account of the marriage as "one of the leading surgeons" of Los Angeles. Hm.)

Product Info

Publisher: Doubleday, Doran & Co., for the Crime Club

Year: 1943

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

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