Sirocco Kessel, Joseph (Translated From The French By Katherine Woods)

[a good sound copy, lightly shelfworn, stamped "Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Library, Culver City, Calif." on front pastedown and front endpaper; the jacket is edgeworn, with several tiny nicks and tears, and the upper three inches of the spine appear to have been clawed by some animal (a cat, when I wasn't looking?) with a resulting loss of about one inch at the top and several puncture-tears just beneath]. Novel about "two powerful men and the strange conflict that raged between them against the multicolored background of Beirut in Syria"; the background is the Syrians' guerrilla war against their French colonizers. Originally published in France in 1931 under the title "Le coup de grâce," it later served as the basis for the 1951 movie SIROCCO, starring Humphrey Bogart, which attempted (without much success) to channel the vibe of CASABLANCA. (Interesting to note that although this copy was once part of the M-G-M Library, the film was produced by Columbia Pictures.)