Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s 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. Their work, influential in its day and still vibrant and extraordinarily riveting today, is long overdue for rediscovery. From the 1940s here are Vera Caspary's famous career girl mystery Laura, Helen Eustis's intricate academic thriller The Horizontal Man, Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place, the terrifyingly intimate portrait of a serial killer, and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall, in which a wife in wartime is forced to take extreme measures when her family is threatened. The 1950s volume includes 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 relen