Any mystery lover knows how significant Agatha Christie is to the crime-fiction genre. But she wasn’t the only woman on the scene—nor the first. Women crime writers have always been influential in the world of mysteries, and here are a few who may be less familiar to even a dedicated reader. If you were investigating the case of…
Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s is a box set of work by Dorothy B. Hughes, Vera Caspary, Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, Dolores Hitchens, Helen Eustis, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. The website for the collection is worth exploring, with galleries, also essays from Sarah Weinman, the editor, and…
Noir is like a disease. Its symptoms are moodiness, despair, guilt, and paranoia. There were early strains of it in German Expressionism; in the crime fiction of Woolrich, Holding, and Cain; in the prewar American cinema of Welles, Ingster, and Huston. The first full-fledged outbreak started somewhere in the war years. Some say Street Of…
Which is better, the movie or the book? This is a hard question when the both the movie and book under discussion are masterpieces. Think The Maltese Falcon or The Blank Wall/The Reckless Moment—great books made into great movies that also happen to be faithful adaptations. But what about when both the movie and…
If you trace the roots of literary noir back far enough, eventually you’ll run into the unlikely figure of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Though in recent years she has been overlooked in the rush to canonize folks such as James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich, Holding was just as pivotal in the development of noir as…
The classic femme fatale had many attributes. She was always sexy. She was usually greedy. And she was never ever to be trifled with. All of that is bound up in our basic idea of the femme fatale, the beautiful dame with death at her back. What is perhaps less readily apparent is the reality…
