{"id":91015,"date":"2015-10-19T15:00:24","date_gmt":"2015-10-19T19:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=91015"},"modified":"2015-10-23T17:43:44","modified_gmt":"2015-10-23T21:43:44","slug":"women-in-crime-an-interview-with-sarah-weinman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/10\/19\/women-in-crime-an-interview-with-sarah-weinman\/","title":{"rendered":"Women in Crime: An Interview with Sarah Weinman"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

From the first-edition cover of Mischief<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Sarah Weinman\u2019s two-volume <\/em>Women Crime Writers<\/a> challenges and redefines our notions of American crime fiction. Broken into two decades<\/a>, the 1940s and the 1950s, her collection comprises eight novels\u2014with Vera Caspary\u2019s<\/em> Laura, Helen Eustis\u2019s<\/em> The Horizontal Man, Dorothy B. Hughes\u2019s<\/em> In a Lonely Place, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding\u2019s<\/em> The Blank Wall in the first volume, and Patricia Highsmith\u2019s <\/em>The Blunderer, Charlotte Armstrong\u2019s <\/em>Mischief, Margaret Millar\u2019s<\/em> Beast in View, and Dolores Hitchens\u2019s <\/em>Fools\u2019 Gold in the second. Together, these books reveal an unjustly forgotten feminist tradition by writers who were, in their day, respected as the best in their field<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Diverging from the pulp action tradition embodied by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler\u2014and from the cozier school of British whodunits by Agatha Christie\u2014these authors pioneered a new trend in mystery fiction: psychological suspense. The stereotypical mysteries of the day featured hard-boiled masculine heroes battling femme fatales. These works, by contrast, presented a variety of innovative plots and perceptive commentary on the gender and class issues of their time. The women in these novels\u2014the titular, savvy careerist in <\/em>Laura; the psychotic babysitter in <\/em>Mischief; the struggling mother who covers up the murder of a blackmailer in<\/em> The Blank Wall\u2014consistently defy what were then conventional notions of womanhood.\u00a0<\/em>As the\u00a0mother in <\/em>The Blank Wall acknowledges, \u201c[Her husband and children] would give her love,\u00a0protection, even a sort of homage, but in return for that she must be what they wanted and\u00a0needed her to be\u201d; ultimately, hers is a quest not only to protect the family name but also to\u00a0exercise personal agency.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sometimes the hero<\/em>\u00a0(<\/em>In a Lonely Place), the villain<\/em> (<\/em>The Blunderer and <\/em>Beast in View), or a more ambiguous but still integral role<\/em> (<\/em>The Horizontal Man and<\/em> Fools\u2019 Gold), they\u2019re all refreshingly realistic, relatable, and archetype-breaking female characters<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"casparylaura\"<\/a>Before Women Crime Writers<\/em>, you edited an anthology of stories, Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense<\/em>. How did your interest in these overlooked mystery writers begin?<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2011, I contributed an essay to Tin House<\/em>, \u201cThe Dark Side of Dinner Dishes, Laundry, and Child Care,\u201d talking about women writers I felt had fallen off the map. I wrote about Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Celia Fremlin\u2019s Hours Before Dawn<\/em>, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, who I think of as one of the founding mothers of domestic suspense. Lowndes\u2019s\u00a0The Lodger<\/em>, which was published in 1914, is about this destitute, middle-aged couple who didn\u2019t have children and who take in a boarder. In the background there\u2019s a serial murderer, a Jack the Ripper\u2013style guy running amok, and the tension of the book is as much about killer as the crippling debt and destitution that this couple is fighting against and not necessarily winning.<\/p>\n

But even then, in the essay, I was really interested in this whole group of women who were writing stories that didn\u2019t quite fit into the British mystery tradition of Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers, and who didn\u2019t fit into detective fiction of the American style of Hammett or Chandler, either, or the noir of James M. Cain, Paul Cain, and Horace McCoy. There seemed to be this third path. That essay was the germ for Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Did readers or critics recognize these authors as experimental or groundbreaking in their day?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Most reviews of the time regarded the books as very good, but not necessarily innovative.<\/p>\n

How did you decide on which works would be anthologized in Women Crime Writers<\/em>?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some were obvious from the get-go, like Vera Caspary\u2019s Laura<\/em>, Dorothy B. Hughes\u2019s\u00a0In a Lonely Place<\/em>, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding\u2019s The Blank Wall<\/em>. Charlotte Armstrong we knew had to be in there. We talked about a few of her books, like A Dram of Poison<\/em>, since it had won the Edgar, but Mischief<\/em> had a better anchoring with what was going on in society at the time. To the best of my knowledge, it is also the first of the \u201cpsychotic babysitter\u201d books. The Highsmith was a late addition. The Blunderer<\/em> is an important book in the Highsmith oeuvre because it\u2019s the first one she wrote after The Price of Salt <\/em>under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, so she\u2019s trying to get back into mystery field, but she\u2019s developing ideas that would later come into play with the Ripley books, so it\u2019s a transitional book. Her novel\u00a0The Talented Mr. Ripley<\/em>\u00a0had previously been included in the Library of America\u2019s Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s<\/em>, so The Blunderer<\/em> provided good continuity.<\/p>\n

\"fools_gold_cover\"<\/a>Who were some of the other writers you considered?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One book I was really hoping would make the cut for The 1950s<\/em> was A Gentle Murderer<\/em> by Dorothy Salisbury Davis. She wrote domestic suspense, mainstream fiction, historical fiction, detective books, all sorts, but I really liked A Gentle Murderer<\/em> because it had a dose of horror and religion\u2014she was a Catholic.<\/p>\n

Another author I was stumping for was Nedra Tyre. Her story \u201cA Nice Place to Stay\u201d was in Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives<\/em>. Tyre was a social worker from the South, so she really knew what made people tick. She has a novel from the fifties called Death of an Intruder<\/em>, which I think of as a passive aggressive battle of the wits between two spinsters. The opening is just two women sitting at a table, telling each other to pass the salt, one passes the salt and the other is like, Maybe this is the day when I finally kill her. She was so cold! But she ultimately didn\u2019t fit in because, as much as I adore the novel, she was a stronger short-story writer. Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s Mystery Magazine<\/em> asked me to write an introduction to another Tyre short story, \u201cKilled By Kindness.\u201d I adore the story. It\u2019s kind of a forerunner to Gone Girl<\/em>, though I\u2019m not sure Gillian Flynn even knew about it.<\/p>\n

\"the_blunderer_cover\"<\/a>More than just a great story, what were you looking for when you chose these novels?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Crime fiction that reflected society, but also that\u2019s also startlingly fresh for today. We still have so many of the same fears about marriage, motherhood, even being alone in the house, being an outsider, not fitting in, and these books represent that incredibly well. These authors tapped that vein. Crime fiction as literature in the best possible way.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s refreshing to me is how these books lack the typical genre trappings present in so many of their male counterparts\u2014the femme fatale, for instance.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The femme fatale is the other. Those male writers weren\u2019t evaluating a woman as a woman. They were evaluating woman as an object. These women crime writers weren\u2019t going to do that, because they had to live in female skins. Did Hammett understand women? Did Chandler? My joke about The Maltese Falcon<\/em> is that the best character is Effie Perine.<\/p>\n

She was Sam Spade\u2019s secretary\u2014another stereotypical female role in crime fiction of the time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hammett had no idea what he had with her and probably didn\u2019t care. I just felt she held the key to everything. Assistants often know all and yet they are overlooked and neglected and disrespected. But Hammett knew enough, I suppose, to have Effie in that critical end-scene chastising Spade.<\/p>\n

One of the threads of the anthologies is how, beneath a conventional exterior, the women are decidedly unconventional. Was this quality appreciated in their day, or is it only now that we appreciate how bold and stereotype-breaking they are?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The word I would see a lot in reviews of the time was clever<\/em>, and I think those qualities were appreciated, in part. But there also wasn\u2019t, say, a proper \u201cliterary\u201d figure stumping for them. Genre was well-regarded in circles, but you didn\u2019t get five-thousand-word treatises.<\/p>\n

These books were written between first- and second-wave feminism, and they all touch on, in some form, gender roles at the time. Do you consider them political books, to some extent?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The Blank Wall<\/em> certainly has overtones, but I\u2019m not sure how overt Holding meant to be. I think she was just a tellingly good social observer. Laura<\/em> was overtly political for sure. Caspary was trying to make a point about women and independence and how men viewed them, with derision or condescension or on a pedestal, when the real person was ignored.<\/p>\n

\"beast_in_view_cover2\"<\/a>Do you think there is an element of literary criticism within the books? Laura<\/em>\u2019s multi-perspective structure seems to highlight how the male characters misunderstand her and see her through their own desire.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vera Caspary came out and said she didn\u2019t read mystery short stories.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s Hitchens\u2019s description of one of the thugs in Fools\u2019 Gold<\/em>\u2014\u201cMarvitch lived on rare steaks and bourbon whiskey and eighteen-year-old brunettes.\u201d That seems like she\u2019s skewering the typical hard-boiled male image.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, and also it wouldn\u2019t surprise me if In a Lonely Place<\/em> was tweaking Chandler. How could it not? It\u2019s postwar Los Angeles, and we have a guy who we quickly learn is a psychopathic serial killer, but he could be viewed as a Philip Marlowe\u2013type guy, which is why casting Humphrey Bogart in the movie becomes meta-commentary. But remember that Hughes was also a critic and often admired many male crime writers.<\/p>\n

Did the Black Dahlia murder influence In a Lonely Place<\/em>? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Everything coalesced in 1947. You had the Black Dahlia murder and In a Lonely Place<\/em>, The Blank Wall<\/em>, and Mickey Spillane\u2019s I, the Jury<\/em> were published\u2014even though I, the Jury<\/em> didn\u2019t become a success until 1948 with the paperback edition. All those writers were reckoning with postwar stuff in different ways. I think of an alternate universe where In a Lonely Place<\/em> became wildly popular and I, the Jury<\/em> did not, but it makes perfect sense that Spillane became the more popular one. What does Mike Hammer do? He shoots people, chases women, he \u201ccares\u201d but really doesn\u2019t. He\u2019s a bully, and after the war male readers needed affirmation of their masculinity, and here is a book that not only affirms it but is the gorilla of masculinity. Whereas In a Lonely Place<\/em>, on the other hand, is the antithesis of that. It skewers masculinity and says to the soldiers who came back, Here\u2019s one of you.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the comment in Beast in View<\/em> about pulp magazines\u2014\u201cMy youngest kid reads them all the time. It drives me crazy trying to stop her. Stuff like that gives kids the wrong idea about the world\u2014they get to thinking all secretaries get bussed by the boss and all Sunday school teachers are assaulted in choir lofts. Which isn\u2019t true.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

All Millar had to do was go in the room next door and see what Kenneth Millar [Ross Macdonald] was working on!<\/p>\n

\"blank_wall_cover\"<\/a>They were writing fiction contemporaneously, but his celebrity has eclipsed hers over the years.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But she had started her career before he did, and she was more successful first. He didn\u2019t really become the \u201cRoss Macdonald\u201d that we understand him to be for another two, three years after Beast in View <\/em>when he published The Doomsters<\/em> and The Galton Case<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Many women crime writers of this era were published under male pseudonyms. We\u2019ve already mentioned Craig Rice, Vin Packer, and Leigh Brackett. Are there others whose reputations are still obscured by their ambiguous pen names? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, and they weren\u2019t always American, either. There were British women writers, like Dail Ambler. The Lady Holds A Gun: The Story of Dail Ambler<\/em> by Steve Holland was recently reissued, which goes through how prolific she really was. There was also Mary Violet Heberden, who published as M. V. Heberden. I\u2019d like to write about her, because before she started writing mysteries\u2014her detective was Desmond Shannon\u2014she also wrote spy novels as Charles L. Leonard. Doubleday Crime Club published everything. She was writing sometimes two to three books a year. Before that, she was an actress. Also there\u2019s Holly Roth, who published in the fifties and sixties, mainly espionage fiction under the names K. G. Ballard and P. J. Merrill. She left the United States with her younger husband and traveled the world by yacht, and then she fell off her yacht in 1964 and they never found her body. It\u2019s a real mystery!<\/p>\n

All of the works anthologized were adapted for film or television.<\/strong> The Hollywood films, particularly, seem to have eclipsed their source material in reputation. <\/strong><\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s inevitable because more people see movies than read books. That was true in the forties and it\u2019s true now. And there were also such significant changes with some adaptations. The film version of In a Lonely Place<\/em> is a complementary work of art, but they\u2019re very different. Hughes didn\u2019t like many of the adaptations of her work. Same thing with Laura<\/em>. Vera Caspary wrote an essay called \u201cMy \u2018Laura\u2019 and Otto\u2019s\u201d where she talks about the arguments she had with Preminger. She felt that not only did he misunderstand the character but that he couldn\u2019t help but be misogynist. Then she watched the movie and said, It was a great movie, so what do I know? And with Fools\u2019 Gold<\/em>, Jean-Luc Godard is going to be Godard regardless of his source material. Hitchens hated the movie. Her son told me they went to see it at the Thalia and Hitchens wanted to walk out, that\u2019s how much she loathed it.<\/p>\n

How does the success these authors found compare to the names we now associate with crime fiction from that era? Chandler, Cain, Jim Thompson, David Goodis …<\/strong><\/p>\n

The women writers were often equal or even more successful, but in a different way, if they were in hardcover first. But their paperbacks sold rather well\u2014especially if the covers were pulp-lurid.<\/p>\n

\"in-a-lonely-place-1947\"<\/a>Their male contemporaries, like Goodis and Thompson, have been reappraised and are now more popular than they were in their lifetimes. Why were these women writers left out of that wave of interest in older crime fiction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some of it had to do with who was the big cheerleader, putting work into context at the right time. In the eighties that was Barry Gifford with his Black Lizard imprint and Geoffrey O\u2019Brien with Hardboiled America<\/em>, and then later on nobody came along to be interested in these women writers. Black Lizard was reprinting according to Gifford\u2019s taste and to what was then out of print\u2014authors such as Jim Thompson, Paul Cain, and David Goodis. Many of these women writers were actually still in print during the eighties. You had Dell paperbacks of Dorothy B. Hughes, you had IPL editions of Charlotte Armstrong and Margaret Millar, Academy Chicago had the Elisabeth Sanxay Holding books, and The Horizontal Man <\/em>had an Avon paperback in the 1970s. Gifford just wasn\u2019t interested in those types of books. He didn\u2019t publish many women, just Sin Soracco\u2019s Low Bite<\/em>, Gertrude Stein\u2019s Blood on the Dining-Room Floor<\/em>, Victoria Nichols and Susan Thompson\u2019s reference book, Silk Stalkings: When Women Write of Murder<\/em>\u2014which I have, and which was very helpful\u2014and Helen Nielsen\u2019s Detour <\/em>and Sing Me a Murder<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"eustishorizontalman\"<\/a>If you continued the series into the sixties and seventies, who might you include?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A lot of the major players in the 1960s were the same as the 1940s and 1950s\u2014Hitchen\u2019s Sleep with Slander<\/em>. Armstong\u2019s Lemon in the Basket<\/em>, which is a fusion of the political assassination thriller and a family drama. And Hughes\u2019s\u00a0The Expendable Man<\/em>. For new voices, perhaps Amanda Cross, Mildred B. Davis, and Dorothy Salisbury Davis, too.<\/p>\n

Marcia Muller\u2019s Edwin of the Iron Shoes<\/em> was published in 1977.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, but before Edwin<\/em> you have Where Are the Children? <\/em>by Mary Higgins Clark, which I view as the dawn of modern suspense. When I interviewed Clark earlier his year, she mentioned Armstong and Millar as influences, but mostly Daphne du Maurier and the Gothics, and also Gone with the Wind<\/em> and Jane Erye<\/em>. She was also writing in the tradition of Mary Roberts Rinehart, fusing her \u201cHad-I-but-known\u201d plot with a more ripped-from-the-headlines feel. Rinehart funded Farrar & Rinehart, which later became Farrar, Straus and Giroux. David Foster Wallace taught Mary Higgins Clark. Over and over again, he would tell his students to read Where Are the Children?<\/em> You can learn a lot by reading Mary Higgins Clark.<\/p>\n

Cullen Gallagher is a writer and musician living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in the<\/em>\u00a0Los Angeles Review of Books, <\/em>The Brooklyn Rail, and <\/em>Not Coming to a Theater Near You,\u00a0among others.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Weinman\u2019s two-volume Women Crime Writers challenges and redefines our notions of American crime fiction. Broken into two decades, the 1940s and the 1950s, her collection comprises eight novels\u2014with Vera Caspary\u2019s Laura, Helen Eustis\u2019s The Horizontal Man, Dorothy B. Hughes\u2019s In a Lonely Place, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding\u2019s The Blank Wall in the first volume, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":881,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[19853,14073,8987,154,19852,19851,19856,19849,19850,337,12834,19848,19857,2969,17706,12919,747,1825,4769,19529,19846,19854,19855,19496,19847],"class_list":["post-91015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-charlotte-armstrong","tag-crime-fiction","tag-dashiell-hammett","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-dolores-hitchens","tag-dorothy-b-hughes","tag-effie-perine","tag-elisabeth-sanxay-holding","tag-helen-eustis","tag-jean-luc-godard","tag-library-of-america","tag-margaret-millar","tag-mary-higgins-clark","tag-mickey-spillane","tag-midcentury-literature","tag-mysteries","tag-novels","tag-patricia-highsmith","tag-raymond-chandler","tag-ross-macdonald","tag-sarah-weinman","tag-suspense","tag-troubled-daughters-twisted-wives","tag-vera-caspary","tag-women-crime-writers"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWomen in Crime: An Interview with Sarah Weinman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 19, 2015 \u2013 Sarah Weinman\u2019s two-volume Women Crime Writers challenges and redefines our notions of American crime fiction. 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