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Though women crime and suspense writers dominate today’s bestseller lists, the extraordinary work of the mid-century pioneers of the genre is largely unknown. Turning in many cases from the mean streets of the hardboiled school to explore the anxieties and terrors lurking in everyday life, these groundbreaking novelists found the roots of fear and violence in a quiet suburban neighborhood, on a college campus, or in a comfortable midtown hotel. Their work, influential in its day and still vibrant and extraordinarily riveting today, is long overdue for rediscovery. This volume, the second of a two-volume collector’s set, gathers four classic works that together reveal the vital and unacknowledged lineage to today’s leading crime writers. From the 1950s here are Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief, the nightmarish drama of a child entrusted to a psychotic babysitter, Patricia Highsmith’s The Blunderer, brilliantly tracking the perverse parallel lives of two men driven toward murder, Margaret Millar’s Beast in View, a relentless study in madness, and Dolores Hitchens’s Fools' Gold, a hard-edged tale of robbery and redemption.

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Click here to view Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940's

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