Leonard Cline's Third Novel: The Dark Chamber (1927)

The Dark Chamber was published the Viking Press in August 1927, while Cline was in jail in Tolland, Connecticut, bound over for a trial set to begin in September on the charge of first degree murder. In May 1927, during a drunken quarrel Cline had shot a visiting friend, Wilfred Irwin, who died hours later.  The press made much of the fact that one character who dies in The Dark Chamber is also named Wilfred, but the truth is that the book had been written and revised before the May shooting.  The dust-wrapper art was by Clifford [Colton] Pyle (1894-1955), a stylized art-deco image that fits well with the prose of the story.  Pyle also did the dust-wrapper and interior decorations for Donald Douglas's The Black Douglas (1927), and was the author of two books, Leathercraft as a Hobby (1940) and Etching Principles and Methods (1941).

Cline's novel was popular with H.P. Lovecraft's circle, with Lovecraft himself calling it "an absolutely magnificent work of art" and writing of it to Clark Ashton Smith, "God, but I'd give three-fourths of my soul to be able to write a book like that." See the publisher's blurb on the rear of the dust-wrapper below.

Rear of dust-wrapper

The front of the binding

Cover by Clifford Pyle