It's Cleaner on the Inside [*SIGNED*]

London: Neville Spearman. Very Good in Very Good+ dj. 1961. First Edition. Hardcover. [spine a little turned, boards a little bowed, shallow dent at top of front cover, light age-toning to page edges; jacket just a bit edgeworn, one tiny tear at top of spine, another tiny closed tear at top of front panel, light soiling to rear panel]. INSCRIBED and SIGNED by the author on the ffep (see addtional note below). The second of only two books published by this noted screenwriter during his lifetime (and his only novel to see print), this Dostoyevskian tale of a rebellious young man who works his way up in the San Francisco underworld until "tragedy, horror and disintegration" land him in San Quentin was published only in England. This was not unrelated to the fact that the author -- one of the founding fathers of the Hollywood chapter of the Communist Party USA -- had essentially gone into self-imposed exile in Mexico not long after having been interrogated by HUAC investigators in 1950. (Although he had broken with the Party some years before, his radical sympathies were undiminished, and he wanted to avoid being subpoenaed for public testimony before the Committee and thus being placed in a "naming names" situation.) As interviewer par excellence Patrick McGilligan discusses in his introduction to Bright's posthumously-published memoir, "Worms in the Winecup," the book was a fictionalized version of the life of his friend and one-time screenwriting partner Robert Tasker, whose five-year stretch in San Quentin had been the springboard for his own writing career. (Among the pair's shared credits were the 1937 Warner Bros. picture SAN QUENTIN.) The book is inscribed "For Davey -- who knew Pete Jameson too -- " ("Jameson" being the Tasker surrogate in the novel); the identity of the inscribee is unknown, and no likely suspect appears in the index to Bright's memoir. [PLEASE NOTE that the middle four pages of the last signature in the book have become detached, although this will not be in any way apparent unless the book is opened to those pages.] Signed by Author .