by Unknown
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War is the ultimate chaotic event; World War II in particular. While the men fought their enemies overseas, the women had no choice but to transcend their day-to-day lives as homemakers and caregivers and try something else. They worked in munitions factories, nursed wounded soldiers back to health, and wrote and spoke about what they saw and heard.
Seismic changes were also taking place in genre fiction, and help to explain the rise of the domestic suspense story during and after the World War II. Before the war, most working writers made their money producing stories by the word for the pulps or the slicks. The pulps, named for the cheap paper quality, included magazines like Black Mask, Dime Detective, and Argosy. And with very rare exceptions, they almost always published men. The slicks (for higher quality paper) paid writers better, with outlets like Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and The American publishing more mainstream stories for a middlebrow audience. Women fared better in these markets, but the stories published there were less overtly psychological or suspenseful in nature.
That left a void, filled when the most popular mystery writing team of the day—cousins Manfred Lee and Frederic Dannay, aka Ellery Queen—launched their eponymous magazine in 1941. In its early years, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine published works designated as detective stories, featuring the greats like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Margery Allingham, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Agatha Christie during their peak. But they also made room for crime stories, those that didn’t rely on the detective as a plot device, and this is where a number of women found a viable market to explore more domestic-minded subjects. EQMM published tales of wives struggling with poisonous marriages, daughters seeking to escape parental high expectations, elderly women neglected and at the behest of others, and teachers, nurses, and social workers who felt shackled by their work.
When World War II ended and the men came home, the social order of the day was restored, with men returning to their absent lives and jobs as family providers. Or at least that’s what was supposed to happen. Once disrupted, like Humpty Dumpty’s fragments, it’s impossible to put a social order back together again. The 1950s certainly tried, wanting desperately to stick with the prewar status quo in which men provided and women stayed at home. That decade gloried in conspicuous consumption, emphasizing the value of owning cars, kitchen appliances, and large suburban houses. But a growing number of women found themselves questioning their lives, which centered around their husbands, children, and home. Many found comfort in what they could buy, watch on television, or read in magazines. Others found a welcome outlet in the written word, channeling their frustrations of unattainable domestic perfection into suspense stories read by an audience of other women who understood these anxieties all too well.
The mystery magazine business was not immune to disruption, either. The pulps started dying off, but EQMM flourished, as did new magazines like Manhunt, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and The Saint Mystery Magazine. What these women wrote broadened the general short story market, paving the way for writers to start their careers in front of a small but influential and devoted readership, and were particularly good at widening the range of mystery short stories published—especially those by women. Their work, in short form or in novels, could be tough or tender, reflecting contemporary anxiety or finding a way to subvert it. And they were justly rewarded by their peers.
With the genre’s escalating postwar popularity—the “Christie for Christmas” marketing slogan for the annual Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple bestseller by Agatha Christie came about in the mid-1940s—some critics felt the need to knock down crime fiction. Edmund Wilson’s 1944 New Yorker essay “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd,” which took Sayers, Christie, Chandler, and others to task for not measuring up to appropriate literary greatness, remains the most infamous of the genre-snob bunch, and the standard from which most recent literary put-downs deviate from. But essays by Wilson and his ilk had a more positive by-product: the formation of the Mystery Writers of America in 1945. Its slogan: “crime does not pay enough.” Its mission: to better the status, career prospects, and payments for mystery writers. Its crown jewel: the annual Edgar Awards banquet, honoring the best in mystery year after year.
The Edgars proved to be very kind toward works of domestic suspense fiction, and many of the selections in this anthology won or were nominated for the Edgar, or their authors won or were nominated for novels or other stories. The very first winner of the Best Novel Award, in 1952, was female, Australian writer Charlotte Jay. Beat Not the Bones concerned itself with a young woman determined to uncover the truth about her anthropologist husband’s death, which was ruled to be suicide but was, she believed, murder. The novel earned praise for its superior suspense and depiction of its exotic New Guinea setting.
Critics like the writer and editor Anthony Boucher, who wrote the “Criminals at Large” column between 1951 and his death in 1968, were also impressed by domestic suspense tales. Boucher never hesitated to put novels by the likes of Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Celia Fremlin—all included in this anthology—on his best-of-the-year lists, praising their skillful plots, exemplary characterization, and incisive portraits of human behavior. But critical acclaim alone doesn’t sustain writing careers. These women had a steady readership willing to part with their money whenever a new title arrived. Their stories chiefly concerned women, but their audience encompassed both genders. They were published almost exclusively in hardcover format—their work deemed to be more sophisticated than the paperback houses that replaced the pulp magazines en masse and quickly propagated, with great success, in the 1950s and 1960s.
Then the social order changed once more, inch by incremental inch, in the mid-1960s. Women dissatisfied and frustrated by the expectations of domesticity found kinship in the identification of a feminine mystique, which in turn opened the door to a movement looking for equal rights. Those who helped forge that movement took extreme tacks at first, risking accusations of being fringe, crazy, or worse. But without them, more moderate concerns like making room for working women, earning comparable pay to men, and dialing down the sexism could never have been addressed.
As the feminist movement grew in prominence, and female writers made bold strides into what was formerly thought of as “male” territory, a funny thing happened in the crime genre: readers turned away from the domestic suspense story, and the pioneering writers seemed to fall off the map. Their work struggled to remain in print, their champions fewer than the men of the paperback pulps. Domestic suspense writers did not have their versions of Barry Gifford, whose Black Lizard paperback reprint project throughout the 1980s helped restore the reputations of a great many male writers from that era, or Geoffrey O’Brien, who helped define their importance in the first place in Hardboiled America (1981) while playing down, or in many instances leaving out entirely, their female counterparts.
Writers like Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Charles Willeford may have been published initially with the lackadaisical indifference given to lesser peers, but their reputations have since been restored and polished to high gloss, with Thompson and Goodis novels now part of the Library of America (overseen by O’Brien). Writers like Fremlin, Hughes, and Millar, heralded while they lived, did not have the same institutional backing as their male peers. Worse off were those women writers who wrote domestic suspense short fiction exclusively.
Once a pendulum swings one way, it’s only natural it begins to swing back in the other direction. And now the balance that’s worked against the proper recognition of domestic suspense can be recalibrated.
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Who, then, are these women, the fourteen authors represented in this collection? Most of them were mothers and wives, writing fiction in brief moments of respite from raising children and keeping the house in order. Some never married at all or married late i
n life, spending their wartime youth (First or Second, depending on the woman) working in army factories, passing out rudimentary birth control, or helping out with the Nazi resistance. A fair number went to college; a couple earned graduate degrees. Some traveled the world, alone or with their husbands. Some stuck close to their hometowns or original states of birth, telling stories that reflect their deep regional roots. Others settled in California, siphoning off money from the Hollywood spigot. All of them understood uniquely, absolutely, and bravely what it was like to be a woman, to be trapped in situations, and to summon up the fortitude to overcome them, expressed in novels and stories.
The collection includes a number of women who published short stories only, or predominantly, during their careers. This meant they didn’t attract as wide a reputation or critical acclaim as those who spent the bulk of their careers on novels. Rediscovering writers like Joyce Harrington, Barbara Callahan, and Miriam Allen deFord—all of whom excelled at the mystery short story—has been a welcome delight, one I’m glad to share with readers here.
I’ve included Patricia Highsmith’s first published short story, “The Heroine,” as an intriguing “path not taken” choice. The story fits the domestic suspense bill by featuring a young nanny who must reckon with her increasingly morbid fascinations. But Highsmith, though her body of work is clearly oriented around human psychology, found her footing writing about the male sociopath. By her own estimation, she didn’t relate as well to women as leading characters, with the exception of The Price of Salt (1952), the excellent lesbian novel she published under a pseudonym, and Edith’s Diary (1977), a more jarringly uneven epistolary suspense novel.
As with any anthology, there are notable omissions, the three key ones being Joyce Carol Oates, Ruth Rendell, and Mary Higgins Clark. Oates certainly concerned herself with the terror of the domestic, but her crime-writing self did not emerge in full until the early 1980s, with the books she wrote as Rosamond Smith (after that, it was as if Oates opened a vein and crime stories came rushing out). Rendell began her career in the early 1960s, but did not commit herself fully to psychological suspense territory until she published with a pseudonym of her own, Barbara Vine, with 1987’s A Dark-Adapted Eye. Higgins Clark, too, frequently published suspense stories in the 1960s, and was both a peer and influence upon several writers included here, such as Dorothy Salisbury Davis and Joyce Harrington. But her career in domestic suspense only began in earnest with the 1975 publication of Where Are the Children?, and Higgins Clark spent the bulk of her time thereafter on novels.
The fourteen stories that made the cut come from voices so bursting with life that domestic matters were a subversive way of showcasing large ambitions. These tales may concern themselves with the everyday, the mundane, those pesky “women’s issues” that are really human issues. But they deal with matters of great import to females of all ages, which is why I’ve presented these stories in a loose chronological order by the age of the protagonists, starting with adolescents to single young adults to married women with young children to the elderly.
These stories may be subtle, even quiet, but don’t let that fool you. The women who ruled over the domestic suspense genre during the mid-twentieth century turn our most deep-seated worries into narrative gold, delving into the dark side of human behavior that threatens to come out with the dinner dishes, the laundry, or taking care of a child. Their stories of domestic suspense frighten precisely because in depicting ordinary, everyday life—especially in the context of larger anxieties about rapid societal change—the nerves they hit are really fault lines that, despite tremendous progress, show no signs of going away anytime soon.
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH
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1921–1995
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH may well be the most famous and unusual choice for this anthology. Highsmith largely wrote about, and was more comfortable with, men. When she wrote about domestic situations in her novels and stories, they were largely to do with male perception, misunderstanding, and delusion. One of her story collections was even titled Little Tales of Misogyny. The two key exceptions are The Price of Salt (1952), the lesbian novel she published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, and Edith’s Diary (1977), an epistolary account of a woman’s slow descent into madness, taking a male loved one with her.
As I state in the introduction, I regard Highsmith’s first published short story, “The Heroine,” as a “path not taken” tale. The story, which Highsmith wrote as a student at Barnard College, concerns itself with a young woman, Lucille, hired as a nanny for the well-to-do Christiansen family’s two children, nine-year-old Nicky and five-year-old Heloise. Every gesture, from pouring coffee to tidying rooms to making beds, appears innocent on the surface but masks layers of increasing dread. “The Heroine,” first published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1945 and awarded an O. Henry Prize, holds up masterfully on its own while also demonstrating why Highsmith was so good so early in her career.
Highsmith’s twenty-two novels and eight short story collections include some of the greatest psychological suspense novels ever written, including her debut, Strangers on a Train (1950), The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), and four follow-up books, The Blunderer (1954), Those Who Walk Away (1967), and The Tremor of Forgery (1969). Her depictions of disordered, sociopathic minds resonated with disturbing force largely because her narrators descended into aberrant, even murderous behavior with ample justification—even if they were ultimately fooling themselves first. Her characters were outsiders, like Highsmith, who was born in Fort Worth, grew up and spent early adulthood in New York, and then decamped for Europe, which showered critical acclaim on her during her lifetime. She wouldn’t get proper American due until after her death, from aplastic anemia, in 1995.
THE HEROINE
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THE GIRL was so sure she would get the job, she had unabashedly come out to Westchester with her suitcase. She sat in a comfortable chair in the living room of the Christiansens’ house, looking in her navy blue coat and beret even younger than 21, and replied earnestly to their question.
“Have you worked as a governess before?” Mr. Christiansen asked. He sat beside his wife on the sofa, his elbows on the knees of his gray flannel slacks and his hands clasped. “Any references, I mean?”
“I was a maid at Mrs. Dwight Howell’s home in New York for the last seven months.” Lucille looked at him with suddenly wide gray eyes. “I could get a reference from there if you like . . . But when I saw your advertisement this morning I didn’t want to wait. I’ve always wanted a place where there were children.”
Mrs. Christiansen smiled, but mainly to herself, at the girl’s enthusiasm. She took a silver box from the coffee table before her, stood up, and offered it to the girl. “Will you have one?”
“No, thank you. I don’t smoke.”
“Well,” she said, lighting her own cigarette, “we might call them, of course, but my husband and I set more store by appearances than references . . . What do you say, Ronald? You told me you wanted someone who really liked children.”
And fifteen minutes later Lucille Smith was standing in her room in the servants’ quarters back of the house, buttoning the belt of a new white uniform. She touched her mouth lightly with lipstick.
“You’re starting all over again, Lucille,” she told herself in the mirror. “You’re going to have a happy, useful life from now on, and forget everything that was before.”
But there went her eyes too wide again, as though to deny her words. Her eyes looked much like her mother’s when they opened like that, and her mother was part of what she must forget. She must overcome that habit of stretching her eyes. It made her look surprised and uncertain, too, which was not at all the way to look around children. Her hand trembled as she set the lipstick down. She recomposed her face in the mirror, smoothed the starched front of her uniform.
There were only a few things like the eyes t
o remember, a few silly habits, really, like burning little bits of paper in ashtrays, forgetting time sometimes—little things that many people did, but that she must remember not to do. With practice the remembering would come automatically. Because she was just like other people (had the psychiatrist not told her so?), and other people never thought of them at all.
She crossed the room, sank onto the window seat under the blue curtains, and looked out on the garden and lawn that lay between the servants’ house and the big house. The yard was longer than it was wide, with a round fountain in the center and two flagstone walks lying like a crooked cross in the grass. There were benches here and there, against a tree, under an arbor, that seemed to be made of white lace. A beautiful yard!
And the house was the house of her dreams! A white, two-story house with dark-red shutters, with oaken doors and brass knockers and latches that opened with a press of the thumb . . . and broad lawns and poplar trees so dense and high one could not see through, so that one did not have to admit or believe that there was another house somewhere beyond . . . The rain-streaked Howell house in New York, granite pillared and heavi-
ly ornamented, had looked, Lucille thought, like a stale wedding cake in a row of other stale wedding cakes.
She rose suddenly from her seat. The Christiansen house was blooming, friendly, and alive! There were children in it. Thank God for the children! But she had not even met them yet.
She hurried downstairs, crossed the yard on the path that ran from the door, lingered a few seconds to watch the plump faun blowing water from his reeds into the rock pond . . . What was it the Christiansens had agreed to pay her? She did not remember and she did not care. She would have worked for nothing just to live in such a place.