Women Crime Writers

Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s

By Helen Eustis, Dorothy Hughes, Vera Caspary, and more

2015

First Published

4.15

Average Rating

848

Number of Pages

25H45M

Audio Length

Part of Series

Women Crime Writers: Library of America

Series · 2 books

By Charlotte Armstrong, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Margaret Millar, and more

The Library of America and editor Sarah Weinman redefine the classic era of American crime fiction with a landmark collection of four brilliant novels by the female pioneers of the genre, the women who paved the way for Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and Lisa Scottoline. Though women crime and suspense writers dominate today’s bestseller lists, the extraordinary work of the mid-century pioneers of the genre is largely unknown. Turning in many cases from the mean streets of the hardboiled school to explore the anxieties and terrors lurking in everyday life, these groundbreaking novelists found the roots of fear and violence in a quiet suburban neighborhood, on a college campus, or in a comfortable midtown hotel. Their work, influential in its day and still vibrant and extraordinarily riveting today, is long overdue for rediscovery. This volume, the first of a two-volume collector’s set, gathers four classic works that together reveal the vital and unacknowledged lineage to today’s leading crime writers. From the 1940s here are Vera Caspary’s famous career girl mystery Laura, Helen Eustis’s intricate academic thriller The Horizontal Man, Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, the terrifyingly intimate portrait of a serial killer, and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, in which a wife in wartime is forced to take extreme measures when her family is threatened. From the Hardcover edition.

Avg Rating

4.15

Number of Ratings

310

5 STARS

43%

4 STARS

38%

3 STARS

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Authors

Helen Eustis

Author · 3 books

Helen Eustis (1916-) is an American translator (from French) whose reputation rests on two novels: The Horizontal Man (1946), which received an Edgar, and The Fool Killer (1954). Eustis was born in Cincinnati Ohio and educated at Columbia University New York. She was married to Alfred Young Fisher and later Martin Harris, and worked briefly as a copywriter. She has also written a children's story, Mr Death and the Redheaded Woman. The Fool Killer was made into a horror movie staring Anthony Perkins in a role not unlike that of his Psycho character Norman Bates.

Dorothy Hughes

Author · 17 books

Dorothy B. Hughes (1904–1993) was a mystery author and literary critic. Born in Kansas City, she studied at Columbia University, and won an award from the Yale Series of Younger Poets for her first book, the poetry collection Dark Certainty (1931). After writing several unsuccessful manuscripts, she published The So Blue Marble in 1940. A New York–based mystery, it won praise for its hardboiled prose, which was due, in part, to Hughes’s editor, who demanded she cut 25,000 words from the book. Hughes published thirteen more novels, the best known of which are In a Lonely Place (1947) and Ride the Pink Horse (1946). Both were made into successful films. In the early fifties, Hughes largely stopped writing fiction, preferring to focus on criticism, for which she would go on to win an Edgar Award. In 1978, the Mystery Writers of America presented Hughes with the Grand Master Award for literary achievement.

Vera Caspary

Author · 9 books

Vera Caspary, an acclaimed American writer of novels, plays, short stories and screenplays, was born in Chicago in 1899. Her writing talent shone from a young age and, following the death of her father, her work became the primary source of income for Caspary and her mother. A young woman when the Great Depression hit America, Caspary soon developed a keen interest in Socialist causes, and joined the Communist Party under a pseudonym. Although she soon left the party after becoming disillusioned, Caspary's leftist leanings would later come back to haunt her when she was greylisted from Hollywood in the 1950s for Communist sympathies. Caspary spent this period of self-described 'purgatory' alternately in Europe and America with her husband, Igee Goldsmith, in order to find work. After Igee's death in 1964, Caspary returned permanently to New York, where she wrote a further eight titles. Vera Caspary died in 1987 and is survived by a literary legacy of strong independent female characters.

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Author · 12 books

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (1889-1955) was born and brought up in New York and educated at Miss Whitcombe's and other schools for young ladies. In 1913 she married George Holding, a British diplomat. They had two daughters and lived in various South American countries, and then in Bermuda, where her husband was a government official. Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote six romantic novels in the 1920s but, after the stock market crash, turned to the more profitable genre of detective novels: from 1929-54 she wrote eighteen, as well as numerous short stories for magazines. In 1949 Raymond Chandler chose her as 'the best character and suspense writer (for consistent but not large production)', picking The Blank Wall (1947) as one of his favourites among her books; it was filmed as The Reckless Moment in 1949 (by Max Ophuls) and as The Deep End (with Tilda Swinton) in 2001. After her husband's retirement the Holdings lived in New York City. Her series character was Lieutenant Levy. Holding also wrote numerous short stories for popular magazines of the day.