JAMES, Henry.

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Notes of a Son & Brother. True first edition, presentation copy, inscribed by the author in the month of publication, "To Marie Belloc Lowndes, her all-faithful old Henry James. March 1914". Lowndes was a sensational author and a long acquaintance of James before becoming "suddenly, strangely, unexpectedly, on terms of affectionate friendship" (Lowndes, p. 183).Lowndes (1868-1947) dedicates a chapter to James in her autobiography The Merry Wives of Westminster (1946), in which she discusses their tastes in French literature and "the queerer ways and byways of... uncommon humanity" (Lowndes, p. 186). After her observation that she was the only writer he knew who did not trouble him about her own books, James gratefully acknowledged that "You are the only human who has ever guessed [what] those kind, those generous, those gracious gifts mean to their grateful, their often embarrassed, their sometimes perplexed, recipient" (cited in Lowndes, p. 187). Lowndes was later among the subscribers who presented James a gift on his 70th birthday in April 1913, being credited in James's response "Dear Friends All".Lowndes's most famous work, an early fictionalization of the Jack the Ripper murders titled The Lodger (1913), has been filmed five times, including by Hitchcock. Among the first writers of detective fiction to use real historical cases, she created suspense by focusing "not on the crime but on the underlying motives and, above all, on the reactions of those affected by its cons

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