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The queens of crime

September 14, 2015 by Terry Teachout

51lByJQGV1L._SX315_BO1,204,203,200_I reviewed Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 1950s, edited by Sarah Weinman, in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt.

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The Library of America, which specialized once upon a time in reprinting what its dust jackets continue to describe as “America’s best and most significant writing,” has long since succumbed to mission creep. These days it’s as likely to publish Kurt Vonnegut as Edith Wharton, and a fast-growing chunk of its catalog consists of mystery novels and other crime fiction by writers both familiar (Dashiell Hammett) and obscure ( David Goodis). Now comes “Women Crime Writers,” a two-volume anthology edited by Sarah Weinman, a respected critic of the sanguinary genre, that contains eight novels by seven obscure authors and a ringer, Patricia Highsmith, who is still widely remembered for having written “Strangers on a Train” and created Tom Ripley, the sociopath you love to hate,

So are these novels good, significant, neither, or both?

The fact that they were written by women is of no great consequence in and of itself. Women have been writing successful crime novels since the 19th century. Indeed, most of the books in “Women Crime Writers” were popular when they first came out, and Vera Caspary’s “Laura” (1943), Dorothy B. Hughes’s “In a Lonely Place” (1947), Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s “The Blank Wall” (1947, filmed as “The Reckless Moment”), and Charlotte Armstrong’s “Mischief” (1950, filmed as “Don’t Bother to Knock”) were later turned into movies that starred such A-list actors as Humphrey Bogart, James Mason, Marilyn Monroe and Gene Tierney. Yet none of them, not even Highsmith’s “The Blunderer” (1954), managed to make posterity’s cut. What, then, makes them worthy of revival now?

The answer is that they are all exceptionally fine, as much so as any of the crime novels written by men that were published in this country in the 1940s and 1950s. In particular, I wouldn’t hesitate to stack “The Blunderer,” “In a Lonely Place” and Margaret Millar’s “Beast in View” (1955) up against the best work of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald (who was Millar’s husband), both of whom have already been declared significant by the Library of America.

But the other books in “Women Crime Writers,” very much including Helen Eustis’s “The Horizontal Man” (1946) and Dolores Hitchens’s “Fool’s Gold” (1958), are closely comparable in quality to their companions: Each of them is smartly plotted, tautly written, sharply characterized and not at all dated….

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Read the whole thing here.

The opening sequence of The Reckless Moment, Max Ophüls’ 1949 film version of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, starring Joan Bennett and James Mason:

Just because: Arthur Conan Doyle talks about Sherlock Holmes

September 14, 2015 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERA“The Passing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” a 1930 British Movietone newsreel sequence in which the creator of Sherlock Holmes talks about his most famous literary creation:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)

Almanac: Arthur Conan Doyle on reputations

September 14, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“‘What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,’ returned my companion, bitterly. ‘The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done.’”

Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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