Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense by Sarah Weinman

Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense Reviews

• 
  Violeta

  Nothing is hard to do unless you get upset or excited about it.
  
  Shirley Jackson, "Louisa, Please Come Home"
• 
  robin friedman

  Sisters In Crime
  
  An interest in noir led me to this anthology "Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense" (2013). Edited and with an introduction by Sarah Weinman, this paperback original consists of 14 stories written by women writers from the 1940s through the mid-1970s. Although most of the stories do not fall within the "noir" genre, they all explore human psychology and involve crime and what Weinman calls "domestic suspense". Weinman has an encyclopedic knowledge of women's crime fiction and is the editor of a two-volume Library of America collection, "Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s". Of the authors in the LOA compilation, Patricia Highsmith, Elizabeth Holding, and Vera Caspara have stories included in "Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives".
  
  In addition to works by well-known writers, including Highsmith and Shirley Jackson, this collection includes stories by women suspense writers who were in danger of being forgotten. Many of the authors wrote prolifically in their day (all but one are deceased), both novels and stories. The stories in this anthology were originally published in detective magazines such as "Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine."
  
  The stories tend to be quiet and subtle and to deal with repressed anger which surfaces in crime. The settings are all "domestic", but domesticity needs to be broadly construed. Besides stories of wives, mothers, and daughters, the collection includes several tales of domestic workers, nurses and caregivers, teachers, women friends, and sisters. Several of the stories focus upon unmarried women, upon feelings of jealousy between women, and upon loneliness. Thus they do not focus entirely on inequities and frustrations in female-male relationships.
  
  The collection includes two extended stories, "Sugar and Spice" by Vera Caspary and "The Stranger in the Car" by Elisabeth Holding with the remaining twelve works relatively short. In general, I found the shorter stories more focused and effective. I enjoyed Barbara Callahan's "Lavender Lady" about a famous country singer whose most famous song tells elliptically of a childhood trauma. Jpyce Harrington's "The Purple Shroud" tells of a long-suffering wife who wrecks revenge at last upon a philandering husband. "A Nice Place to Stay" by Nedra Tyre describes the travails of a poor, uneducated woman as she searches for a home and for security in her life. Other stories I liked include Shirley Jackson's "Louisa Please Come Home", about an errant daughter, "Mortmain" by Miriam Allen Deford, and "A Case of Maximum Need" by Celia Fremlin.
  
  Weinman offers a valuable brief introduction to each author and story together with an introduction to the entire collection. Her overview to the anthology offers a history of women writers in the genre of crime fiction. She describes how at different times women crime writers were known as "Sisters in Crime" or as "Queens of Crime". Weinman's introduction emphasizes and perhaps overplays the feminist aspects of the stories included in this anthology.
  
  It is valuable to have this collection of stories by women writers of domestic suspense stories who deserve to be remembered. This anthology will appeal to readers with a broad interest in crime or noir fiction.
  
  Robin Friedman
• 
  Toby

  An engrossing collection of stories collected by Sarah Weinman, all of which feature strong women in noir fiction and the subgenre "domestic suspense" and pretty much all of which are from obviously talented and previously successful authors who have since been forgotten or written off as "women's writers." Yes there's the standout big guns, Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson, opening the collection but beyond that if you're not a specialist in the field you may be hard pressed to recognise anybody else. In the past couple of years I've had the very real pleasure of discovering Dorothy Hughes, Margaret Millar and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and now to that list I should add Nedra Tyre, Vera Caspary, Joyce Harrington, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Miriam DeFord and Celia Fremlin, all of whom contribute powerfully evocative tales of despair and intrigue, coupled with some interesting biographical notes compiled by Sarah Weinman. These are tightly plotted, interesting and fascinating stories told with unique/different voices and every single one of them are worth your investment in time, every single author worth investigating further. Plus Megan Abbott says so too.
• 
  Carla Remy

  The introduction is terrific, with interesting facts and connections about mystery and pulp and who gets remembered. Highsmith and Shirley Jackson stories are, not surprisingly, amazing, but there are many good ones here. My favorite was The Stranger in the Car by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. It's the longest one in the collection, and I've come to feel that novella length stories are ideal.
• 
  Alafair Burke

  What I said: "TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES proves that women were writing smart, dark, twisty tales long before anyone thought to label their work a sub-genre, and often by subverting gendered cultural expectations. Sarah Weinman serves as an expert curator to this wonderful collection, providing a coherent narrative tying these trailblazing stories to one another and to a new wave of female-led psychological suspense. This is a must-read for crime fiction fans."
• 
  Tom

  For my money, one of the hardest things to write is a mystery / crime short story that combines a measure of literary quality and a suspenseful plot. I like my genre fiction to make entertaining use of the conventions and to do it with an engaging style and nuanced vision of the world. Is that asking too much? In my reading experience, the answer too often is, yes. But I'm happy to report that these stories, for the most part, fulfilled my (overly demanding?) expectations, and then some. Aside from Shirley Jackson and Dorothy Hughes, I'd never heard of any of these writers, all women. And this was a perfect introduction to them. They all do a fine job of blending character and plot. No wry or haunted PI's, just lots of damaged but sympathetic and, in some cases, strong-willed, independent women. Even the weirdest and wackiest of them are still rich characters, not just simplistic plot devices. High quality of writing. Found myself marking passages for purely stylistic reasons, as I typically do with more obviously "literary" fiction. At end of each story, I found myself returning to Weinman's helpful author bios at beginning to make note of the writer's novels, several of which now I'm eager to check out. My favorite stories were "The People Across the Canyon," by Margaret Millar (wife of Ross MacDonald -- must've made for crackling dinner conversation; wonder who influenced whom more?) and "A Case of Maximum Need," by Celia Fremlin, the best of the collection, now that I think back on it. The most disturbing part of many stories was not so much the crime but the family circumstances, past and present, and the isolation and vulnerability of characters, economic and emotional, especially the elderly, that led to them. Fremlin's story, set in a nursing home, is a good example. Weinman's general introduction, in which she surveys the history of American female crime writers and argues that their work often explores underlying social tensions in 20th c. family life and in gender roles, is quite good. These are suspenseful entertaining stories that, to varying degrees, transcend the genre. One needn't necessarily be a fan of the genre of enjoy these stories. But they just might convert you to become a fan, especially if your standards are as picky as mine.
• 
  John

  A very good anthology of classic crime stories -- there's only one weak item in the bunch -- marred by somewhat sloppy preparation of the editorial apparatus.
  
  The great joys here are the two novellas by two favorite authors of mine, Vera Caspary and the nowadays woefully neglected Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. The former is a beautifully constructed mystery piece and the latter one of those domestic satires/crime stories at which Holding so excelled, complete with that delicious trademark wryness. Another favorite author, Dorothy B. Hughes, is alas accorded one of the shortest stories in the book, but it's a gem, while another highlight is the Margaret Millar tale, which passes over the boundary of the psychological thriller to become a fantasy.
  
  Greater care could have been taken in the preparation of the text. There are occasional -- too many -- signs that OCR was involved in the process ("For the rest of mat season" [p103], "She had only her nightgown under the negligee" [p130], "She carefully threaded the eye of each heddle" [p182], etc), and in the introduction to the Caspary story (p78) it seems that Weinman is remembering a different but similar tale, because in summarizing it she gets the details quite startlingly wrong. And I bridled on reading this in the introduction to the Millar story (p313):
  

  Margaret Millar is best known as the wife of Kenneth Millar, better known to the reading public under his pseudonym Ross Macdonald.

  
  To crime-fiction aficionados, Ms Weinman, Margaret Millar is best known as the great crime writer Margaret Millar, not as anyone's appendage.
  
  Despite these carps this is, as noted, a very good collection of tales: recommended, if with reservations.
• 
  Lotte

  4.5/5. You should definitely pick up this collection if...
  ... you're a fan of the short fiction of authors such as Roald Dahl, Shirley Jackson or Patricia Highsmith (the latter two both contributed stories to this collection).
  ... you like eerie domestic suspense stories (many of them with a feminist twist) from the 1940s to 1970s.
  ... women plotting their husband's murder or nannies becoming a bit too devoted to the children they care for sound like interesting premises to you.
  I had such a great time reading this collection! It was not only a fun, creepy and surprising read, but also worked as a great introduction to a range of female suspense writers I had never even heard of. I added lots of new titles to my to-be-read list and I'm super excited to read more from this genre and time period.
  My favourite stories were: The Heroine by Patricia Highsmith, Louisa, Please Come Home by Shirley Jackson (this was actually a reread for me, but I didn't mind, because it's one of my favourite Jackson stories ever), Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree by Helen Nielsen, The Splintered Monday by Charlotte Armstrong and The People Across the Canyon by Margaret Millar.
• 
  Betsy Ashton

  Some of the stories in this collection will keep you awake at night. From the golden age of noir and pulp fiction, these stories are often written by writers you would expect to be writing pulp, but they did.
  
  Like noir everywhere and everywhen, these stories have twists that delight and frighten, often in the same story. "Everybody Needs A Mink" by Dorothy B. Hughes is the story of a housewife and mother out shopping when she passes a fur salon (yes, high end stores still have fur salons). She's asked in to try on a mink coat by a little old man. Later, the mink arrives boxed as a present. She never knows who the man was, but she wears the milk to her PTA, saying it's a gift from her Australian uncle.
  
  On the flip side, "Mortmain" tells the story of a nurse who sees only one way out of her dull life. She cares for an elderly patient in his home. She learns he has a lot of money in a safe and plans to steal it. No, I won't spoil the story, except to say you will NOT forget it.
  
  Other tales border on the supernatural. Some are incredibly mundane. All take the reader on rides neither foreseen nor forgotten.
  
  Read it at your own risk.
• 
  Lauren

  Such an interesting short story compilation. I have to say though that out of 14 stories I really only loved 6, that doesn't mean however, that it wasn't worth reading. I enjoy short stories because they make you stop an think, which is something I did a lot of, and anything that makes me think is worth the read.
  
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  12/30/13
  OK, months after I've finished this short story collection I'm still thinking about it. I'm also looking into reading more short stories and novels by these authors. I think it's safe to say that this deserves 5 stars!
• 
  Naomi Young

  This is a marvelous little collection of short works, ranging from near-novella to quite short, written by women, and published from the 1940s to the mid1970s, before the foundation of Sisters in Crime about a decade later.
  
  Editor Sarah Weinman has selected primarily writers whose reputation has not endured, and especially those who worked mostly or wholly in short fiction. The two exception to this rule are Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson; but their works here are significantly different from the works by which you likely best know them. Each story is preceded by a brief biography and selected bibliography, and if you are like me, and borrowed this book from the library, you'll be avidly copying and compiling these for yet another to-read project.
  
  I also want to note Weinman's organizing principle for the stories, one I don't remember seeing used anywhere else; the stories are arranged by the approximate age of the protagonist, from youngest to oldest. That this happens to result in the collection's being bookended by two of the creepiest stories in the anthology is a grand side effect.
  
  AD FOR LIBRARY SERVICES: Thanks to a program at my library, when I requested this title through InterLibrary loan, the library system bought a copy instead. The gender studies and 20th-century-literature students and faculty who will be thrilled to find this book won't know to thank me. But they will be very happy indeed.
  
  
• 
  Kaion

  Natsuo Kirino, Vera Caspary, and films like the delightfully sordid Leave Her to Heaven have converted me to the genre of female noir, so I had to have the anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives when it came out. In her introduction, Sarah Weinman makes a good enough case for these foremothers of what she calls "domestic suspense" paved the way for contemporary thriller writers, such as Gillian Flynn.
  
  I did wonder if "domestic" has to mean so white and middle-class, and would've have appreciated more on how this subgenre fit more largely into the landscape of women's midcentury crime writing. However, the tight focus does allow Troubled Daughters within a small volume to offer many finer shadings of its central premise-- though it leads to at least one needle-scratch moment in Dorothy B. Hughes's "Everybody Needs a Mink".
  
  Other reviews have gone more into the collection as a whole, so I'll focus on a few of the highlights:
  - In "A Nice Place to Stay", Nedra Tyre shows how poverty and lack of social support are all the more cruel for holding out the promise of otherwise. The sense that the story's childlike, uneducated protagonist is all the more uncorrupted for finally lashing out at society gives the story a bent of black humor.
  
  - Vera Caspary's "Sugar and Spice" details the combative friendship of two female cousins, from the perspective of male narrator who has been sometimes friend and sometimes love interest to them both. Caspary's always been interested in deconstructing the good-woman/bad-woman dichotomy suggested by the title; in her portrayal of a lifelong frenemy-ship, she proves indeed "All women are vipresses" but also that it doesn't exclude frenemies from sympathy or even mutual empathy.
  
  - "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree", by Helen Nielsen, is one of the more traditional crime story that builds its suspense through meticulous detail. That the protagonist's increasing desperation to hold on her hardwon position of businesswoman and wife is completely justified is a scathing commentary on the precarious social position of even the seemingly liberated woman.
  
  - Margaret Millar taps into suburban unease with her eerie "The People Across the Canyon". Like something out of The Twilight Zone, Millar's intensely psychological story is a bit of cautionary tale-- the unreal arising out of an understanding of the crushing pressures of perfect conformity or "keeping up with Joneses".
  
  HM: "Lavender Lady" b. Barbara Callahan; "The Purple Shroud" b. Joyce Harrington
  
  Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives has definitely given me names to follow up on (Millar!), and for the names I was familiar with (Caspary, Hughes, Highsmith), a deeper understanding of the background of pulp/magazine writing that they came from. Outside of Shirley Jackson and Highsmith, none of the contributors is particularly high-profile-- some should be better remembered, but seem to have been locked out of the "boy's club" of noir-- so it's likely to introduce new writers to most readers, as well as the context for their work. Rating: 3.5 stars
  
  
  *Note: This does appear to be another new publication that has cut corners on copy-editing. What, Penguin can't afford copy-editors?
• 
  Mark Stevens

  “The Heroine” rocks. It’s a Patricia Highsmith gem—dark and warped. There’s a genuine shudder at the end. It’s pure Highsmith, so matter-of fact. An odd au pair with her own odd ideas about how best to demonstrate her worth. “No lights shone at any of the windows, but if they had, Lucille would not have been deterred. She would not have been deterred had Mr. Christiansen himself been standing there by the fountain, for probably she would not have seen him. And if she had, was she not about to do a noble thing?”
  
  As the anthology starter for “Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives,” the Highsmith entry is a perfect choice. It’s sharp and efficient, a classic of psychological suspense.
  
  The stories is this anthology are a mix (of course), with “domestic suspense” the unifying theme. These tales don’t lurk in dark urban alleys, they are the stuff of families and friends and fractures below the surface, of women stepping out or stepping up or breaking the mold of traditional expectations—a great idea for an anthology.
  
  I’m such a Patricia Highsmith fan that I don’t think anything else quite comes close to the level of wickedness in the opening piece, but Joyce Harrington’s “The Purple Shroud” comes darn close. I love a story where the protagonist steps up to take charge of the situation and okay, it never hurts when the protagonist has to drag a dead body around for a few minutes, hours, days. In this story, “Mrs. Moon” takes care of business—and then some—but I still didn’t imagine what she planned to do next. I should have seen it coming, of course, and that’s the beauty of a great short story.
  
  Other stand-outs for me are “Lost Generation” by Dorothy Salisbury Davis (chilling, indeed), “The Splintered Monday” by Charlotte Armstrong and “A Case of Maximum Need,” by Celia Fremlin (again, tough women who rise up—at any age). And “Mortmain,” by Mariam Allen deFord, is a gem—a nifty crime story with a dollop of horror.
  
  Some stories are more low-key and not designed to jolt (at least, not on the Highsmith scale) but all in all, a fine compilation of mostly overlooked writers who deserve a brighter spotlight. If you don't think female writers are every bit as dark or tough as any male writer out there, this anthology offers ample evidence that you need to think again.
  
• 
  Erika Robuck

  I generally refuse books from publishers if they are not historical fiction, but I was intrigued by this collection for a number of reasons. First, I’m falling in love again with short stories. To paraphrase Edgar Allan Poe, it is best to read a story in a single sitting. In my increasingly busy life, I have a new appreciation for fiction that allows me to do this. Also, each story is selected and introduced by editor Sarah Weinman, who has an excellent Twitter account (@SarahW) dealing mostly with publishing and current events.
  
  In Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, Weinman introduces each story with a brief bio and historical context. The biographies of the women featured in the collection are every bit as interesting as their chilling tales, and will inspire the reader to want to learn more about them and read more from them. They are arranged loosely by age of subject, and from the terrifying teen in the opening story to the home-bound elderly woman in the last, each tale explores a different dimension of madness and crime.
  
  One does not need to love the suspense genre to enjoy Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives. If you have an appreciation for stories of psychological terror or are interested in women writers from the past who opened doors for their contemporary counterparts, you must read this collection.
• 
  Selaine Henriksen

  Love this title. A wonderful title for a wonderful collection of stories. Reading them felt like a home-coming for me. Not that I had read any of them before (except “The People Across The Canyon”. Pretty sure I’d read that before.) — but because these are the kind of short stories I grew up reading. The kind I want to write.
  
  You read for the story but you know the characters completely; the way they speak, think, how much money they have, live. It’s all there, right away, without lots of back story. Most importantly, to me, is the stories are terrific and, mostly, have unexpected twists. I’m partial to a punch-line type ending, a la O’Henry.
  
  That’s not to say all these stories are like that. There’s something for everyone here.
  
• 
  Lyndsay Faye

  Outstanding collection.
• 
  BJ

  I don't read much horror and suspense, for no other reason than that the things I do read take up more space in my life than I really have to give as it is. But this fall, back in the Northeast after a year of Southern-California seasonlessness, I found myself craving pumpkin bread and hot cider and, naturally, spooky stories, like never before. Enter a whole bunch of Shirley Jackson, and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, which I pulled on a whim from a Little Free Library in Brooklyn a few years ago, and which has been waiting patiently near the bottom of a tottering pile of books ever since. These stories hit the spot, each story a new excursion into an endlessly familiar and unfamiliar time (postwar America, rapidly supplanting the pioneer days as the ur-nostalgia of American memory), and an equally familiar and unfamiliar genre (one can't exactly have grown up in America and avoided the crime story, and yet I find that its conventions are only half-familiar). Most of the stories are a little too breezy to lodge into the subconscious very deeply, and yet each one offers its own little ball of pleasure and horror. Like the best old movies, age has only deepened these stories' delights, lending them an elegiac edge in pleasing contrast to their tight plots and twisty endings. And all of this means that when a story does twist the knife into one of our culture's many tender spots around gendered violence and domestic labor, the impact is only heightened. Organizing the stories by the age of the protagonist was a master-stroke. Five stars because it delivers precisely what it promises with style.
• 
  Judy

  
  This post is dedicated to readers and writers of mystery and crime fiction, of which I know a few. Sarah Weinman, queen of mystery and crime fiction reviews, has done a great thing. In this collection of stories, subtitled Stories From the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, she has revived female writers of such stories from the middle third of the 20th century. These women laid the groundwork for Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Tana French, and many more.
  
  I do not generally enjoy short fiction. I am a novel reader. Short stories just seem too short and don't give me enough time to sink into them before they are over. But back in my teen years when mainstream magazines still published shorts, I read every one I could find in my mom's mags (Better Homes and Gardens, Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal) as well as my own (Seventeen, Mademoiselle.) After reading this collection, I think I have been trying to read the wrong short stories lately.
  
  These fourteen selections feature daughters, wives, and mothers who are either frustrated with the roles available to them or simply refuse to stay within those roles. I don't mean Rosie the Riveter types or even fast, promiscuous types. These are girls and women, entrenched in domestic life, who go a little nuts and take matters into their own hands.
  
  Each author gets a short bio and career overview before the selected story. A couple of them have already been "rediscovered" in the past decade: Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson in particular.
  
  In "The Heroine," an early story by Highsmith, a young woman whose insane mother has recently died, takes a job as a nanny to convince herself that she is not crazy like her mom. The results are what you would expect from Highsmith. Shirley Jackson's tale of a runaway daughter ends with a psychological plot twist reminiscent of her novel The Road Through the Wall. "Louisa Please Come Home" was first published in Ladies Home Journal in 1960 and I very well may have read it then!
  
  Several stories feature women who resort to murder. The planning, the attention to detail, the multitasking involved, show women whose domestic skills come in quite handy when they put their minds to murder. "The Purple Shroud" by Joyce Harrington takes place at a summer art colony where her serially unfaithful husband teaches painting. Mrs Moon is a weaver and spends the summer weaving the shroud of the title, in which she wraps Mr Moon after she murders him on the last day of that summer session. She is so successful that she sets off in her VW bug to commit another crime.
  
  The calm and deliberate building of suspense interwoven with the motives and inner lives of women are what make reading these stories thrilling, even juicy. You know those days when a man in your life has made you so angry you could just kill him? Well, some women go ahead and do it!
  
  For over a decade I have been carrying out a self-created project of reading 20 to 40 novels for each of the years I have lived, in chronological order, including best sellers, award winners, genre and literary fiction. The Edgar Awards, created by the Mystery Writers of America, began awarding a best novel each year in 1954. In making my way through those winners I was introduced to excellent novels by Charlotte Armstrong, Celia Freeman, and Margaret Millar, all three of whom are featured in Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives.
  
  These authors made a living writing mystery and crime novels and short stories. In my opinion they did as much for women as all the stages of feminism have, by counteracting the straightjacket women of the 1950s and early 1960s were expected to wear. Want to know what those women really felt, what they really wanted? Take a look at some of these stories.
• 
  Jade

  This book just screamed at me when I saw it at the library--from the cover to the authors inside it was hollerin' my name from the second I saw it. I was so overeager grabbing it from my library's shelf I was a bit embarrassed. I was a bit put off when I started to read the back as I don't read a lot of modern female mystery writers--it was the female noir concept that grabbed me and the amazing authors. I am so glad I grabbed it! This is a book worth owning. So many amazing stories and the idea that these women's stories were shuffled to the side is quite amazing considering the quality here. "The Purple Shroud" by Joyce Harrington is an incredibly satisfying and stylish revenge tale, and several of the stories contained some nasty shocks (I say that as a compliment) that no Twilight Zone episode or Alfred Hitchcock Presents could hope to best (Lost Generation by Dorothy Salisbury Davis and A Case of Maximum Need by Celia Fremlin are 2 of the best for that) and then some genuinely creepy stories that sort of ease up on you and you find yourself thinking of them later with a shiver (The People Across the Canyon by Margaret Millar and The Heroine by Patricia Highsmith). I have to say my favorite new gem was The Stranger in the Car by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding--a gorgeous and twisty story that had me by the guts very quickly. Another great aspect of the book is the little bio of each author before the story--I just learned so much in a small space and found so many new authors to track down. I have nothing but praise for the editor's choices here--if she was picking lottery numbers, you'd want to be related to her--every story is fantastic and some I will never forget. I hated to return this to the library.
• 
  Lisa

  Great collection! Just what the doctor ordered :)
• 
  Carmen

  A wonderful, chilling anthology of the unsung women (both characters and authors) of domestic suspense fiction. Almost every story is a gem. I tore through it in one sitting. Highly recommended!
• 
  Jess

  My favorites are A Nice Place to Stay, The Stranger in the Car, and Mortmain.
• 
  Darcie Wilde

  Fantastic anthology. Discovered a bunch of new-to-me writers who have turned into favorites.
• 
  Jenny McPhee

  TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES: DOMESTIC SUSPENSE REDUX My September Column at Bookslut
  
  Sarah Weinman, crime fiction connoisseur and editor of the essential new anthology Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, is admirably doing her utmost to revive, restore, and reinvent the once highly-popular thriller subgenre of Domestic Suspense.
  
  
  
  Primarily written by women, this fiction penetrates the veneer of familial serenity to the dark side of homelife, exposing the creepy conundrums inherent in what are perceived as “women’s issues” and the female domain. During the genre’s heydey, from the post-war years until the early seventies, the concept of the nuclear family and the idea that “a woman’s place is in the home” had a stranglehold on the American psyche. The doyennes of Domestic Suspense strove to subvert the idealized family in their fiction and disturb their readers out of complacency.
  
  
  
  
  
  Ironically, these widely-read authors began to disappear with the rise of second-wave feminism when women, ostensibly gaining entry into male bastions and professions, came to reject the domestic sphere. Ultimately, Domestic Suspense writers fell into oblivion mostly because, as Weinman notes in her excellent introduction, there was no institutional backing for them as there was for their male counterparts. Women writers were practically excluded from renowned reprint lines such as Black Lizard and Library of America that kept the work of male crime writers alive.
  
  Weinman, who writes about contemporary crime fiction, became increasingly drawn to women writers in the field. She searched for the antecedents of authors such as Gillian Flynn, Megan Abbott, Laura Lippman, Attica Locke, and just before them, Liza Cody, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Joyce Carol Oates. The early 20th-century “Queens of Crime” — Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh — were women who managed to break into and flourish within the more “male” crime genre in which good inevitably triumphs over evil, but Weinman’s research led her to other women writers whose fiction featured “ordinary people, particularly women, trying to make sense of a disordered world with small stakes, where the most important worry is whether a person takes good care of her children, stands up to a recalcitrant spouse or contends with how best to fit — or subvert — social mores.”
  
  
  Weinman’s eclectic sampling pulls together unknown, better known, and well-known writers of the genre. Distinct stylistically, they all delight in unsettling the settled. Patricia Highsmith has pride of place with “The Heroine,” a deeply disconcerting story — especially for parents — about a nanny who so severely loves her job she’ll do anything to keep it.
  
  In Highsmith’s novels the protagonists are mostly male but Weinman mentions two exceptions: Edith’s Diary, widely considered to be her masterpiece, about a woman who invents a happy family as she descends into madness; and The Price of Salt, a two-woman road trip novel that Terry Castle claims inspired Nabokov’s Lolita.
  Another author here of similarly enduring fame is Shirley Jackson, best known for her much anthologized short story “The Lottery,”
  
  though a number of her superb novels, such as We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) about a greedy relative who dares to disturb the macabre ménage of two weird sisters and their uncle, are exemplars of Domestic Suspense. Her story “Louisa, Please Come Home” reveals how our fantasy of home and family can be dangerously more compelling than the reality.
  
  Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, whom Raymond Chandler called “the top suspense writer of them all,” is represented by the story “The Stranger in the Car” reminiscent of her most famous novel The Blank Wall (1947) in that it sharply contrasts the perceived weakness and passivity of women with their fierce determination to protect their family and sphere. Charlotte Armstrong was a prominent suspense writer in the 1950s and 1960s, her work often used by Claude Chabrol for his films — La Rupture (1970); Merci pour le chocolat (2000) — and her novel Mischief was the basis for the Marilyn Monroe film Don’t Bother to Knock (1952). Her classic novel Lemon in the Basket (1967) slowly and relentlessly disassembles all appearances of a normal, talented, wealthy family. Armstrong’s story here, “The Splintered Monday,” revolves around an elderly aunt who refuses to be cowed by the condescension and invisibility society affords people of her age and gender. Margaret Millar, one of crime fictions very best practitioners, never received the recognition granted her husband Ross MacDonald. Beast in View, Stranger in My Grave, The Fiend, Banshee, Fire Will Freeze, Rose’s Last Summer — so many of her twenty-five novels are simply great. Two of her finest, The Listening Walls, about a brother obsessed with his sister, and Beyond This Point Are Monsters, a tantalizing depiction of a clashing mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, explore family dynamics gone terribly awry. Her story “The People Across the Canyon” is about a girl who expresses her disappointment in her parents by inventing another set.
  
  The remainder (half) of the writers included in Troubled Daughters were new discoveries for me… READ THE REST OF THE COLUMN HERE AT BOOKSLUT
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  Kat Cui

  Some good stories! I love seeing how Women Writing Thrillers has such a history. I hope to look into the work of some of these less famous authors. But honestly i will also prob read a bunch of Patricia Highsmith stories after this.. evil lesbian though she was.. she could write
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  Alexis

  Truly a fabulous short story collection— my favorite ever, I think! Worth’s read for anyone interested in 20th century womens lit!
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  Creolecat

  When I read anthologies, I never read in the order the stories are presented; it is usually those stories that made me pick up the book in the first place that are read first, then I start picking out titles/authors (and, to be honest, the number of pages if I’m short on time/really bored). When I began reading these, I was not impressed at all. I was familiar with a few of the authors, but it wasn’t until I started reading the ones I hadn’t been familiar with that the book got a bit more interesting. I think an author/book is good when you want to pursue their other work. And that’s what I would like to do eventually with a handful of these. In the end, I’m glad I stuck with the book. Otherwise, I would have missed out on a few good stories; The Lavender Lady and Lost Generation are both disturbing because of their subject matter, the latter dealing with integration, and The Purple Shroud by Joyce Harrington - which I read last - turned out to be a suspenseful read and the best.
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  Casey Koester

  This extraordinary collection of mystery and suspense tales written by women left me dying for a sequel. Every single story is unexpected and beautifully crafted with real human emotions and reactions. Most were originally published in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, which makes me think I should hunt a few down.