An unpublished work by the legendary crime novelist Raymond Chandler has been discovered in The Library of Congress.
The brains behind the Philip Marlowe private detective novel also wrote a 48-page opera called The Princess and the Pedlar, with music by Julian Pascal. The copyright for the work was registered on August 29, 1917.
Los Angeles-based novelist Kim Cooper discovered the work by accident back in March which doing research on Pascal. The Guardian has the scoop:
While looking for more information about Pascal, Cooper discovered a missing link between Chandler’s English boyhood and his detective fiction: a witty, Gilbert-and-Sullivan-inflected libretto for a fantasy-tinged romance between Porphyria, daughter to the King and Queen of the Arcadians, and Beautiful Jim, a “strolling Pedlar.”