The Scarf was published by Dial Press in 1947 — Bloch’s first novel, written at thirty, after a decade of pulp short stories. It is narrated in first person by Daniel Morley, a writer traveling across America who murders women using a maroon silk scarf that belonged to his mother. The innovation — twelve years before Psycho — is the sustained first-person perspective of a serial killer who is articulate, charming, and completely unreliable.
Morley tells us he is a good man, a sensitive artist, that these women provoked him, that each murder was somehow their fault or an accident or a necessary act. The reader gradually recognizes the gaps in his narration — the ellipses where violence occurs, the rationalizations that contradict earlier statements, the creeping awareness that his “relationships” with women are entirely constructed within his own psychopathology.
The novel was ahead of its time: literary serial killer fiction (Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Harris’s Red Dragon) would not become a recognized genre for decades. Bloch’s contribution was to understand that horror is most effective from the inside — that the reader’s complicity in a murderer’s self-justification is more frightening than any external description of violence.
Bloch revised the novel significantly for its 1966 Fawcett reissue, tightening the prose and sharpening the psychological portrait in light of what he had learned writing Psycho. Both versions have their advocates.
Collecting The Scarf
First edition (Dial Press, New York, 1947): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition (1947) in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Without dust jacket: $20–$50
- 1966 revised Fawcett paperback: $5–$15
- Signed copies (rare): $150–$400
The 1947 first edition is genuinely scarce — small print run, most copies read to destruction in the paperback era. Fine copies in intact jackets appear at auction perhaps twice a year.