If I Die Before I Awake paperback

[Tony]

It seems to me that someone wrote in a book that Welles couldn't have seen "If I Die..." in a shop window in 1946 when he was talking to Harry Cohen on the phone, and thus immediatley suggested it as a basis for a movie, because no paperback had been released yet...

Well here's an ad for the paperback: a 1940 pressing:

If I Die Before I Wake
King, Sherwood
Bookseller: Nightingale Books
(Stoughton, MA, U.S.A.) Price: US$ 275.00
[Convert Currency] Shipping within U.S.A.:
US$ 3.50
[Rates & Speeds]
Book Description: Mystery Novel Of The Month NN (#16), New York, 1940. 1st Paperback Ed. Near Fine in red pictorial wraps with black & orange lettering & cover photo of a convict in stripes looking out of prison bars. Mystery novel about an Irish adventurer who joins a seductive woman & her husband on a Pacific cruise. Basis for the 1948 classic film 'The Lady From Shanghai' starring Orson Welles & Rita

[mteal]

$275? For that price I think I can live without it.

Peter Conrad's book makes mention of Sherwood King's novel, and proposes that, in the book, Bannister seems to have a latent homosexual attraction to O'Hara:

"The crippled lawyer Bannister ogles the strapping young sailor he has hired: 'I'm forty-three. Forty-three! Do you know what I'd give to be twenty-six again, with a build like yours?' The film ignored this homosexual subtext."