Vera Caspary

Basis for the famous film noir: a woman who kept men spellbound--even after her death.

Laura

Dorothy B. Hughes

Helen Eustis

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Though women crime and suspense writers dominate today's bestseller lists, the extraordinary work of the mid-century pioneers is largely unknown. Their work, influential in its day and still vibrant and extraordinarily riveting today, is long overdue for rediscovery. This volume, the first of a two-volume collector's set, gathers four classic works that together reveal the vital and unacknowledged lineage that leads to today's leading crime writers. From the 1940s here are Vera Caspary, Helen Eustis and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding.

Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s: Laura / the Horizontal Man / in a Lonely Place / the Blank Wall

Women Crime Writers

Laura Hunt was the ideal modern woman: beautiful, elegant, highly ambitious, and utterly mysterious. No man could resist her charms—not even the hardboiled NYPD detective sent to find out who turned her into a faceless corpse. As this tough cop probes the mystery of Laura’s death, he becomes obsessed with her strange power. Soon he realizes he’s been seduced by a dead woman—or has he? Laura won lasting renown as an Academy Award-nominated 1944 film, the greatest noir romance of all time. Vera Caspary’s equally haunting novel is remarkable for its stylish, hardboiled writing, its electrifying plot twists, and its darkly complex characters—including a woman who stands as the ultimate femme fatale. Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. Enjoy the series: Bedelia; Bunny Lake Is Missing; By Cecile; The G-String Murders; The Girls in 3-B; Laura; The Man Who Loved His Wife; Mother Finds a Body; Now, Voyager; Return to Lesbos; Skyscraper; Stranger on Lesbos; Stella Dallas; Women's Barracks.

Complete Novel

The Husband

The White Girl

Agnes receives few compliments, and Henry Preble is not so bad-looking even if he does have a reputation for cornering girls at work. In the eyes of the world, knowing that you're on the shelf at twenty-four can do strange things to a girl. So strange that you might wake up one morning with almost no recollection of the previous night's events . . . Published for the first time in the UK, The Gardenia, the basis for Fritz Lang's 1953 classic Hollywood noir film The Blue Gardenia, is a gripping story of suspense and a brilliant exposé of the press sensationalism of 1950s America. This volume also contains Out of the Blue, which was made into a comedy film in 1947 starring George Brent and Carole Landis.

The Gardenia and Out of the Blue

Out in the Rolls-Royce, Emmy Arkwright nearly collides with Nat Volck in Beverly Hills. Emmy and Nat are neighbours, yet belong to separate worlds: she is a wealthy, successful fashion designer; he is a doctor who trained during World War Two. But when Nat gets a call one night telling him Emmy has attempted suicide, they become inexorably linked. Nat - bitter and uncomfortable in his California Cadillac practice - attends Emmy, and watches over her return to memory and to her old life, offering her the stability and security she badly needs. But was it really attempted suicide - or is someone trying to kill Emmy?

The Weeping and The Laughter

John Ansell, the new editor of Truth and Crime magazine, takes his appointment, and the title of the magazine, at face value. Until his boss, President of Barclay-Truth Inc., Noble Barclay, rejects his 'Unsolved Mystery of the Month' article, an investigation into the death of Warren G. Wilson, household name in correspondence courses, who was found dead in his hotel room with a bullet in his back. Noble Barclay, it turns out, is anything but noble, and a dangerous man to boot. But how will his employee face the dilemma of exposing the father of the woman he loves? And at what cost?

Stranger Than Truth

George Sklar

Laura by Vera Caspery and George Sklar

Evvie, by the author of Laura “Caspary is an expert at suspense and suspicion…She is also expert at evoking the flavor of a decade when martinis were drunk in coffee cups and rumbles were car seats.”—The New York Times Fanny Butcher, the literary critic for the Chicago Tribune, “came out of retirement to declare it obscene—ironic judgment from today's point of view, since there are no graphic descriptions and the most explicit allusions are in a scene in which two naked girls discuss sex.” (Caspary’s The Secrets of Grown-ups, p. 265) It was a time when skirts were short and hair was shingled. A time of speakeasies, hipflasks and bathtub gin. A time when Evvie Ashton, the beautiful society girl who modeled, danced, painted and loved promiscuously had come of age—knowing all the right people, doing all the wrong things, and sharing all of it with her roommate and confidante, Louise.

Evvie

Ethel Lina White

Two titles in one "The lady vanishes" by Ethel White and "Laura" by Vera Caspary.

Lethal ladies

Laura, Bedelia, Evvie

A Novel

Play in Three Acts

S. D. Houtsma-van Schaik

Mysterie om Laura

Laura. (A Play in Three Acts.) Based on the Novel by Vera Caspary

Long before Desperate Housewives, there was Bedelia: pretty, ultra femme, and "adoring as a kitten." A perfect housekeeper and lover, she wants nothing more than to please her insecure new husband, who can't believe his luck. But is Bedelia too good to be true?A mysterious new neighbor turns out to be a detective on the trail of a "kitten with claws of steel"a picture-perfect wife with a string of dead husbands in her wake. Caspary builds this tale to a peak of psychological suspense as her characters are trapped together by a blizzard. The true Bedelia, the woman who chose murder over a life on the street, reveals how she turns male fantasies of superiority into a deadly con.Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of womens writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era. Enjoy the series: Bedelia; Bunny Lake Is Missing; By Cecile; The G-String Murders; The Girls in 3-B; Laura; The Man Who Loved His Wife; Mother Finds a Body; Now, Voyager; Return to Lesbos; Skyscraper; Stranger on Lesbos; Stella Dallas; Women's Barracks.

Vera Caspary

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