Miker,
Re your comments below:
> I realized then that although revisions
> usually don't amount to a large percentage of
a
> work, the fact that the author chose to change
them
> magnifies their significance.
That (the author's choosing to make changes) is probably the
reason Donald Lam's war service was changed to a vacation in
later reprint editions.
I don't know that for sure, but Gardner was known to be very
proprietary about all editions of his books. He was also
known to eschew topical references because he wanted his
books to appear timeless, not dated by surface details.
He may have regretted sending Lam off to war specifically
because of this, because it locked Lam into a specific age.
Consequently, he changed his military service into a vacation
in later editions, so Lam could still appear as a man vaguely
in his 30's, in books from the '60's and '70's.
Gardner's most prominent character, Perry Mason, didn't go to
war at all, though he was young enough to, and his small-town
DA, Doug Selby, only did a short stint of military service
between books that was referred to briefly (and, anyway, the
DA books were never reprinted after the early '60's, at least
to the best of my knowledge).
> To be honest I don't think revisions have a
big
> impact on a casual reading, but if you're
digging
> deeper you need high-topped boots. Answers to
the
> simplest questions become murky, such as
when
> Marlowe first appear in Chandler's work.
Another good example of an author revising his own work. In
the first version of "Finger Man," the hero is nameless. He
is later revealed to be Carmady by the time he reappears in
"Goldfish."
The series character Chandler created for DIME DETECTIVE is a
similar, indeed virtually identical, character named John
Dalmas. Dalmas appears in, among other stories, "Red Wind"
and "Trouble Is My Business."
Later, in THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER, Chandler revised all four
of those stories. Among other changes, he makes Philip
Marlowe the name of the hero in all four stories.
So is Marlowe's first appearance in 1939's THE BIG SLEEP or
several years earlier in "Finger Man?"
JIM DOHERTY
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 21 Jan 2005 EST