SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION OF THE RETURN OF A.J. RAFFLES, ONE OF ONLY 250 COPIES SIGNED BY GRAHAM GREENE
GREENE, Graham. The Return of A.J. Raffles. An Edwardian Comedy in Three Acts based somewhat loosely on E.W. Hornung's characters in The Amateur Cracksman. London: Bodley Head, (1975). Slim octavo, original russet paper boards, original dust jacket.
Signed limited first edition of Greene's popular comedy, his "last publicly performed three-act play," number 181 of only 250 copies signed by him.
"Greene was an expert on Victorian and Edwardian crime fiction and the idea for the play came to him after seeing a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Sherlock Holmes in 1974" (Hill & Wise, Works:A57). His Return of A.J. Raffles offers up "a sackful of spies, burglars, detectives, princes and other[s]… Raffles, master thief, was actually invented by Conan Doyle's brother-in-law, E. W. Hornung, as a cheeky riposte to the Holmes myth… [Greene's] Raffles allows a notably epicene Lord Alfred Douglas to sweet-talk him into robbing his father, the Marquess of Queensbury, in revenge for the old monster's persecution of Oscar Wilde" (New York Times). "Greene's last publicly performed three-act play" (Hill & Wise, Works II), it "is elegantly written and suggests that Greene got fun out of the whole enterprise" (Gilvary & Middleton, Dangerous Edges, 248). Issued same year as the first trade edition in wrappers, no priority established. Precedes the 1976 first American edition. Miller 56.
A fine signed copy.