Women writers have always had a central place in American crime writing, although one wouldn’t know it for all the attention focused on the men of the “hardboiled” school. In place of the mean and violent streets of the novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the pioneering women crime writers of the 1940s and ’50s uncovered the roots of fear and mania in a quiet suburban neighborhood or a comfortable midtown hotel or the insinuating voice of a stranger on the telephone. Anticipating the “domestic suspense” novels of recent years, these writers explored the terrors of the mind and of family life, of split personality and conflicted sexual identity. They are overdue for fresh attention.
This website testifies to the central importance of women writers in the canon of American crime fiction. Built on the occasion of the publication of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s by The Library of America, which gathers eight classic crime novels by Vera Caspary, Helen Eustis, Dorothy B. Hughes, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Charlotte Armstrong, Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Millar, and Dolores Hitchens, this website gathers information on both the books and the writers (some of it previously hard to find), as well as appreciations of each book by today’s leading crime and suspense authors, and an introduction to the history of crime writing by women written by leading authority on crime fiction Sarah Weinman.
Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s
Edited by Sarah Weinman
I. Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s
792 pp. • #268 in the Library of America series
ISBN 978-1-59853-430-6
E-book available for the Kindle, Kobo, Google Books, iBooks, and Nook
II. Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s
720 pp. • #269 in the Library of America series
ISBN 978-1-59853-431-3
E-book available for the Kindle, Kobo, Google Books, iBooks, and Nook
2-VOL. BOXED SET:
Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s
ISBN 978-1-59853-451-1
Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s
- Laura by Vera Caspary (1943)
- The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis (1946)
- In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes (1947)
- The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (1947)
Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s
- Mischief by Charlotte Armstrong (1950)
- The Blunderer by Patricia Highsmith (1954)
- Beast In View by Margaret Millar (1955)
- Fools’ Gold by Dolores Hitchens (1958)
Though women crime and suspense writers dominate today’s best seller lists, the extraordinary creations of the mid-century female pioneers of the genre are largely unknown. Their work, influential in its day and still vibrant and extraordinarily riveting, is long overdue for rediscovery. Now The Library of America makes these classic books available in a deluxe two-volume collector’s edition.
From the 1940s, here are Vera Caspary’s famous career girl mystery Laura; Helen Eustis’s intricate campus thriller The Horizontal Man; Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, the terrifyingly intimate portrait of a serial killer; and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, in which a wife in wartime is forced to take extreme measures when her family is threatened.
The 1950s volume includes Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief, the nightmarish drama of a child entrusted to a psychotic babysitter; Patricia Highsmith’s brilliant The Blunderer, which tracks the perverse parallel lives of two men driven toward murder; Margaret Millar’s Beast in View, a relentless study in madness; and Dolores Hitchens’s Fools’ Gold, a hard-edged tale of robbery and redemption.
Separately Available in E-book and Audiobook Editions
The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis
Helen Eustis’s The Horizontal Man (1946) won an Edgar Award for best first novel and continues to fascinate as a singular mixture of detection, satire, and psychological portraiture. A poet on the faculty of an Ivy League school is found murdered, setting off ripple effects of anxiety, suspicion, and panic in the hothouse atmosphere of an English department rife with talk of Freud and Kafka.
E-book: Available for the Kindle, Kobo, Google Books, iBooks, and Nook
Audiobook: Digital only • 8 hrs and 20 mins • Read by Barbara Rosenblat (Orange is the New Black), winner of eight Audies and one of the most respected and popular narrators of audiobooks in the country. ISBN 978-1-59853-477-1
Listen to a sample of the audiobook edition of The Horizontal Man read by Barbara Rosenblat
Fools’ Gold by Dolores Hitchens
Two teenagers fresh out of stir set their sights on what looks like easy money in Dolores Hitchens’s Fools’ Gold (1958)—and get a painful education in how quickly and drastically a simple plan can spin out of control. The basis for Jean-Luc Godard’s film Band of Outsiders, this sharply told tale is distinguished by its nuanced portrait of a sheltered young woman who becomes a reluctant accomplice and fugitive.
E-book: Available for the Kindle, Kobo, Google Books, iBooks, and Nook
Audiobook: Digital only • 7 hrs • Read by actor and screenwriter Scott Brick, who has won two Audies and over fifty Earphones Awards for his work as a narrator. ISBN 978-1-59853-477-1
Listen to a sample of the audiobook edition of Fools’ Gold read by Scott Brick
Sarah Weinman is widely recognized as a leading authority on crime fiction. She is the editor of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, which the Los Angeles Review of Books called “simply one of the most significant anthologies of crime fiction, ever.” She is the news editor for Publishers Marketplace, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the National Post, and The Washington Post, among other publications.