As promised, an entire post
dedicated to 10 more American women who wrote mystery or suspense novels. In
fact, there are several here who, while not necessarily household names, were
quite successful and prolific. And this genre is always good for some wonderful (and occasionally wondrously bad) cover art.
You know how I love authors
with some sort of relationship with one another, and URSULA CURTISS is not only closely related to two other authors
which will appear further down my list, but as it happens all three were
mystery/suspense writers. Curtiss is the daughter of Helen Reilly and the
sister of Mary McMullen, and she published nearly two dozen novels which,
according to the St. James Guide to Crime
and Mystery Writers, "successfully blended elements of the gothic and
the detective genres into popular suspense stories. She was a master at
creating intriguing chapter endings and swiftly paced plots, and the portraits
of even relatively minor characters … are sharply and memorably drawn." Her
titles include Voice Out of Darkness
(1948), The Noonday Devil (1951, aka Catch a Killer), The Iron Cobweb (1954), The
Stairway (1957), So Dies the Dreamer
(1960), The Forbidden Garden (1962,
aka Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice?),
filmed as What Ever Happened to Aunt
Alice? in 1969, Don't Open the Door
(1968), The Birthday Gift (1975, aka Dig a Little Deeper), and Death of a Crow (1983).
Also prolific, and going on
my TBR list, is FRANCES CRANE, who
published around 30 novels, all mysteries except the first and all but four of
the remaining in her hugely popular Pat and Jean Abbott series, about a husband
and wife team. The Abbotts are based in Santa Maria, New Mexico, a
thinly-veiled version of Taos, though the duo frequently travel throughout the
U.S. and internationally. Crane's first book, The Tennessee Poppy (1932), was described by Rue Morgue Press as a
collection of her sketches from The New
Yorker, though the Bookman sums up the plot as "A little Southern
dumbbell sets out to marry into the English aristocracy."
Following her
divorce, and after being expelled from Nazi Germany for a series of anti-Nazi
articles, she turned to mystery writing with The Turquoise Shop (1941). Her Abbott series was popular enough to
inspire a radio show, Abbott Mysteries, which ran 1945-1947. Other titles in
the series (all but the last of which feature colors in their titles) include The Yellow Violet (1942), The Pink Umbrella (1943), The Shocking Pink Hat (1946), The Flying Red Horse (1950), Murder in Bright Red (1953), Horror on the Ruby X (1956), The Man in Gray (1958, aka The Gray Stranger), and Body Beneath a Mandarin Tree (1965).
That last title and her four non-series books were published only in the U.K.
More of a psychological
suspense author than a straightforward mystery writer, VERA CASPARY is particularly well known for Laura (1943), upon which the classic 1944 film was based. Her first
four novels—The White Girl (1929), Ladies and Gents (1929), Music in the Street (1930), and Thicker Than Water (1932)—were mainstream
novels which garnered comparisons to the work of Fannie Hurst. But with Laura she found her niche. Other
successful suspense novels were Bedelia
(1945, filmed in 1946), The Murder in the
Stork Club (1946, aka The Lady in
Mink), Stranger Than Truth
(1946), The Weeping and the Laughter
(1950, aka The Death Wish), Thelma (1952), False Face (1954), The
Husband (1957), Evvie (1960), A Chosen Sparrow (1964), and The Man Who Loved His Wife (1966).
Some
of her late novels shift gears a bit. The
Rosecrest Cell (1967) deals with American communists in Connecticut before
and during World War II. One paperback publisher described The Dreamers (1975) as a "sweeping saga of women's fantasies
and dark passions." And Elizabeth X
(1978, aka The Secret of Elizabeth)
is about a married couple trying to help a young woman with amnesia. Caspary's
memoir was The Secrets of Grown-Ups
(1979). She also wrote or co-wrote several plays and an array of screenplays,
including Easy Living (1937), Claudia and David (1946), based on the
novel by Rose Franken, A Letter to Three
Wives (1949), and I Can Get It for
You Wholesale (1951). Most of Caspary's novels are actually in print!
 |
| A very young Harriet(te) Campbell, circa 1900 |
Then there's HARRIETTE R. CAMPBELL (actually born
Harriet, but she must have liked the flair of the extra "te").
Campbell's first published work was a novel, Is It Enough?: A Romance of Musical Life (1913). After World War I,
she published several children's titles, including The Little Great Lady (1925), Patsy's
Brother (1926), included in Sims & Clare's list of school stories, The Mystery of Saint's Island (1927), The New Curiosity Shop (1929), Red Coats and Blue: A Story of a British
Girl in the American Revolution (1930), and The Piper's Lad (1931), as well as 1934's A Royal Cinderella, a retelling for children of Margaret Irwin's
novel Royal Flush. Thereafter she
turned to writing mysteries, publishing eight of them in all, which have been
reprinted in e-book and print-on-demand paperback in recent years. Those titles
are The String Glove Mystery (1936), The Porcelain Fish Mystery (1937), The Moor Fires Mystery (1938), Three Names for Murder (1940), Murder Set to Music (1941), Magic Makes Murder (1943), Crime in Crystal (1946, reviewed here), and Three Lost Ladies (1949). Some sources
have her born c1883, but she appears on the 1880 U.S. census, so I believe the
1879 date given in some Ancestry family trees is correct.
As with several other authors
on this list, ALICE CAMPBELL might
be looked for on my British list, as many of her works are set in England. But
she was in fact born and raised in the U.S., but moved to Paris in 1910 and
then, with her husband, to England where she remained for the rest of her life.
She was the author of 20 volumes of crime fiction and apparently a single
earlier romantic novel, The Rugmaker's
Daughter (1916). Her crime novels include Juggernaut (1928), Spiderweb
(1930, aka Murder in Paris), Desire to Kill (1934), Keep Away from Water (1935), A Door Closed Softly (1939), No Murder of Mine (1941), Ringed with Fire (1943), set during the
Blitz, The Cockroach Sings (1946),
and The Corpse Had Red Hair (1950).
Several sources mention that she used the pseudonym Martin Ingram, but I
haven't been able to locate any titles published under that name. Perhaps only
periodical fiction?
MARY COLLINS
was the author of six mysteries set in California, where she spent most of her
life. If the books themselves are as enticing as the cover art I found, they
are certainly promising. Titles are The
Fog Comes (1941), Only the Good
(1942), Dead Center (1942), Sister of Cain (1943), Death Warmed Over (1947), and Dog Eat Dog (1949).
Only two of NELLISE CHILD's four novels were
mysteries—the first two, Murder Comes
Home (1933) and The Diamond Ransom
Murders (1935). The latter two—Wolf
on the Fold (1941) and …If I Come
Home (1943)—are more serious and, judging from reviews, tend toward
melodrama. A French Wikipedia page for Child also credits her with five plays—Weep for the Virgins (1935), After the Gleaners (1938), Sister Oakes (1940), Bird of Time (1959), and The Happy Ending (1960)—but I haven't
been able to confirm. She clearly seems to have been born Lillian Lieberman,
but some records do show her first name as Nellise (as does her New York Times
obituary), so perhaps it's a middle or family name? You can read some
interesting tidbits from her press coverage coverage here.
MARJORIE CARLETON is best known for her later suspense novels, which garnered critical
praise, including Cry Wolf (1945, aka
The Demarest Inheritance), The Swan Sang Once (1947), The Bride Regrets (1950), Vanished (1955), The Night of the Good Children (1957, aka One Night of Terror), and Dread
the Sunset (1962, aka Shadows on the
Hill). Her three earlier novels may have been lighter in tone. I've found
no details of her debut, Their Dusty
Hands (1924), but according to Saturday
Review, her second, The Swinging
Goddess (1926), is about a trapeze artist trying to achieve respectability:
"It is all very simple, lively, and not the least bit real, but spiritedly
written and generously supplied with conventional theatricals." Lorinda (1939) appears to be a romantic
novel set on the Titanic, though details are sparse.
And the last two authors on
this list both saw film adaptations of their novels featuring glamorous stars
(though neither of the films seem to be exactly immortal classics). MARGARET CARPENTER published only a
single novel, a successful thriller called Experiment
Perilous (1943), made into a film of the same name starring Hedy Lamarr in
1944.
CLARISSA FAIRCHILD CUSHMAN was the author of nine novels, many of them
serialized in major American magazines. This
Side of Regret (1937) is about a married designer who falls for an army
officer. The Other Brother (1939) is
a college story (Cushman's husband was a professor at Cornell) which the Ithaca Journal called
"heartwarming". All the more surprising, perhaps, that her next novel
was I Wanted to Murder (1940), a well
received mystery. It was Cushman's next novel, Young Widow (1942), which was turned into a film of the same name
in 1946, starring no less bodacious a figure than Jane Russell's. Cushman's other
novels were The New Poor (1927), But for Her Garden (1935), Bright Hill (1936), Glass Barracks (1950), and Fatal
Step (1953).
And that's that for this
post. Some real potential here for mystery fans, I think. And next time, I have
nine children's authors (including one of the biggest-selling American authors
of all time—I bet some of you will know immediately who that is) and, rather randomly, two pairs of intriguing fiction-writing sisters.
