Books by Charlotte Armstrong
Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1950s (LOA #269): Mischief / The Blunderer / Beast in View / Fools' Gold (Library of America Women Crime Writers Collection)
by Patricia Highsmith, Charlotte Armstrong, Margaret Millar, Dolores Hitchens
The Real Lolita author Sarah Weinman presents a landmark collection of 4 brilliant novels by the female pioneers of crime fiction—women who paved the way for Gillian Flynn, Tana French, and Lisa Scottoline
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.
LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
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The Chocolate Cobweb (An American Mystery Classic)
A young artist investigates her mysterious origins in search of the truth, but finds only peril therein . . .
When Amanda Garth was born, a nearly-disastrous mix-up caused the hospital to briefly hand her over to the prestigious Garrison family instead of to her birth parents. The error was quickly fixed, Amanda was never told, and the secret was forgotten for twenty-three years . . . until her aunt thoughtlessly revealed it in casual conversation.
But what if the initial switch never actually occurred, and what if the real accident was Amanda’s being “returned” to the wrong parents? After all, her artistic proclivities are far more aligned with painter Tobias, patriarch of the wealthy Garrison clan, than with the uncreative duo that raised her. Determined to discover her true identity within her aunt’s bizarre anecdote, Amanda calls on her almost-family, only to discover that the fantasy life she imagines is not at all like their reality. Instead, she encounters a web of lies and suspicions that ensnares her almost immediately, and, over a murky cup of hot chocolate, realizes something deadly lurks just beneath the surface. . . .
Mixing tense family drama with edge-of-your-seat psychological suspense, The Chocolate Cobweb finds the “mistress of day-lit terror” at the top of her game (New York Times). The book, adapted to film by Claude Chabrol in 2006, remains as fresh today as it was when Armstrong wrote it over seventy years ago.
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The Unsuspected (An American Mystery Classic)
To catch a murderous theater impresario, a young woman takes a deadly new role
The note discovered beside Rosaleen Wright’s hanged body is full of reasons justifying her suicide―but it lacks her trademark vitality and wit, and, most importantly, her signature. So the note alone is far from enough to convince her best friend Jane that Rosaleen was her own murderer, even if the police quickly accept the possibility as fact. Instead, Jane suspects Rosaleen’s boss, New York theater impresario Luther Grandison. To the world at large, he’s powerful and charismatic, but Rosaleen’s letters to Jane described a duplicitous, greedy man who would no doubt kill to protect his secrets. If Rosaleen stumbled upon one such secret, it could have led to an untimely demise―and Jane risks a similar end when she takes a job with Grandison’s company, tangling with one of Broadway’s deadliest actors in a desperate play for the truth.
A playwright before she turned to crime fiction, Charlotte Armstrong drew from her experience in the theater for her fourth novel, The Unsuspected. The book inspired the 1947 film of the same name.
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