Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s: Laura / The Horizontal Man / In a Lonely Place / The Blank Wall (Women Crime Writers: Library of America #1)

Vera Caspary, Helen Eustis, Dorothy B. Hughes, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Rated: 4.00 of 5 stars
4.00 · 6 ratings · 848 pages · Published: 01 Sep 2015
Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s: Laura / The Horizontal Man / In a Lonely Place / The Blank Wall by Vera Caspary, Helen Eustis, Dorothy B. Hughes, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
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. This collection, the first of a two-volume omnibus, presents four classics of the 1940s overdue for fresh attention. Anticipating the “domestic suspense” novels of recent years, these four gripping tales explore the terrors of the mind and of family life, of split personality and conflicted sexual identity.

Vera Caspary’s Laura (1943) begins with the investigation into a young woman’s murder and blossoms into a complex study, told from multiple viewpoints, of the pressures confronted by a career woman seeking to lead an independent life. Source of the celebrated film by Otto Preminger, Caspary’s novel has depths and surprises of its own. As much a novel of manners as of mystery, it remains a superb evocation of a vanished Manhattan.

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 (modeled on Eustis’s alma mater, Smith College) 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.

With In a Lonely Place (1947), Dorothy B. Hughes created one of the first full-scale literary portraits of a serial murderer. The streets of Los Angeles become a setting for random killings, and Hughes ventures, with unblinking exactness, into the mind of the killer. In the process she conjures up a potent mood of postwar dread and lingering trauma.

Raymond Chandler called Elisabeth Sanxay Holding “the top suspense writer of them all.” In The Blank Wall (1947) she constructs a ferociously taut drama around the plight of a wartime housewife forced beyond the limits of her sheltered domestic world in order to protect her family. The barely perceptible constraints of an ordinary suburban life become a course of obstacles that she must dodge with the determination of a spy or criminal.

Psychologically subtle, socially observant, and breathlessly suspenseful, these four spellbinding novels recapture a crucial strain of American crime writing.
Amazon Other stores
As an Amazon Associate thebooknaut.com earns from qualifying purchases

Tagged as:

    romance tags

    crime tags

    literary-fiction tags

    historical-fiction tags

    fantasy tags

    sci-fi tags

    action-adventure tags

    thriller tags

    horror tags

    Collections/Custom tags

    Report duplicate books, missing or wrong information

    The 'Women Crime Writers: Library of America' series

    4.00 · 6 ratings
    psychological · murder · suspense · young-adult · serial-killers · historical · noir · 20th-century · female-author · thriller · crime · literary-fiction · anthologies · classics · literary · fiction · mystery
    Women Crime Writers: Library of America reading order and complete book list  ❯

    Reviews

    Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s: Laura / The Horizontal Man / In a Lonely Place / The Blank Wall by Vera Caspary, Helen Eustis, Dorothy B. Hughes, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

    Report duplicate books, missing or wrong information