Let It Come Down was published by Random House in 1952. The title comes from Macbeth (Banquo’s “Let it come down” as he is murdered) — and murder is indeed where the novel arrives, though by a path so indirect and so suffused with languor that the violence, when it comes, feels less like dramatic climax than like the last stage of a slow chemical reaction.
Nelson Dyar is a bank clerk from New York — thirty, unmarried, dissatisfied, empty of purpose but vaguely convinced that his life should contain more than it does. He takes a job with a small bank in Tangier’s International Zone, the lawless enclave where every nationality operated under its own laws and the primary industries were smuggling, espionage, and currency manipulation.
Tangier does not transform Dyar — it reveals him. Stripped of the routines and social expectations that organized his New York existence, he discovers that he has no self underneath: no desires beyond immediate gratification, no values, no capacity for connection. He drifts into a currency-smuggling scheme, into kif smoking, into an affair with a European woman who despises him, and finally into a murder that is less an act of will than a spasm — the final meaningless gesture of a man who has nothing left to do.
Bowles’s Tangier is rendered with the specificity of long residence: the medina’s narrow streets, the cafés where expatriates gather, the uneasy relationships between European colonizers, American drifters, and Moroccan inhabitants. Unlike the Sahara of The Sheltering Sky, Tangier is not a void but a labyrinth — a place where the absence of enforceable rules produces not freedom but paralysis.
Collecting Let It Come Down
First edition (Random House, New York, 1952): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
First UK edition (John Lehmann, London, 1952): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- Random House first edition in dust jacket: $75–$200
- Signed first edition: $200–$500
- Without jacket: $15–$30
- John Lehmann UK first in jacket: $60–$150
Less famous than The Sheltering Sky but considered by some critics (including the author himself) to be the more accomplished novel. Its Tangier setting makes it particularly sought by collectors of Beat Generation and expatriate literature.