Beast in View by Margaret Millar won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1956. Helen Clarvoe is a 30-year-old shut-in. She lives alone and starts to feel that her life and fortune are threatened after receiving a frightening phone call. Helen recruits her family’s attorney, Paul Blackshear, to help her solve the mystery of…
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…
In the vast criminal menagerie that Margaret Millar created over the course of her long career, there is a special place for the “woman in distress” plot. She wrote many different kinds of stories — and her novels were as likely to feature male protagonists as female — but one of the things that she…
Note: This post kicks off a series celebrating the career of one of mystery fiction’s true giants, beginning with the novel Do Evil in Return. This month marks the centennial of the great Margaret Millar. At her peak, Millar was about as successful as a mystery writer could be. She published 27 books, won the…
Thrillers and mysteries have long been seen as split along gender lines, and for the first seventy years or so of the twentieth century, they actually were. But things have been changing. Thrillers were originally written by, for, and about men. The earliest thriller, The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers published in 1903,…
Back in May, I introduced a few dames of noir that are worthy of top spots on your reading list. Well, I’m back with more, so here we go! I believe I mentioned Cathi Unsworth in my last post, so we’ll start with her, shall we? Ms. Unsworth, a London noir dame, is the author…
