Books by Dolores Hitchens
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 Alarm of the Black Cat (An American Mystery Classic)
This classic mystery features a family feud, feline intervention, and the spirited septuagenarian sleuth from The Cat Saw Murder.
A strange encounter with a little girl named Claudia and a dead toad sparks elderly detective fiction fan Rachel Murdock’s obsessive curiosity, and she winds up renting the house next door just to see how things play out. But soon after she and her cat Samantha move in, Rachel realizes they’ve landed right in the middle of a deadly love triangle that’s created animosity among the three families who now surround her.
When Rachel finds Claudia’s great-grandmother dead in her basement, she reaches out to a friend in the LAPD to solve the crime. They soon learn the three households have been torn apart by one husband’s infidelity and a complicated will that could lead to a fortune. In a house plagued by forbidden love, regret, and greed, Rachel will have to trust her intuition, as well as Samantha’s instincts, to survive―and keep Claudia out of the hands of a killer whose work has just begun.…
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The Cat Wears a Noose: A Rachel Murdock Mystery
A drunken man is shot dead on his doorstep in this classic mystery starring the “observant [and] appealing” seventy-year-old sleuth (Publishers Weekly). Walking home wearily from an evening spent poring over the books of the Parchly Heights Methodist Ladies’ Aid searching for a fifty-eight-cent error, Miss Jennifer Murdock becomes witness to a terrible scene: A man, stumbling drunk, arrives home―and just as he fumbles with his keys, gunfire erupts and kills him on the spot.
Jennifer is determined not to tell her sister, Rachel, anything about it. After all, Rachel considers herself a sleuth, or as Jennifer views it, a busybody who pokes her nose in places it doesn’t belong. What she doesn’t know is Rachel has just had a visit from a member of that same household, a meek eighteen-year-old taken in after she was orphaned and treated like a servant. Young Shirley has been alarmed by a series of nasty pranks―and now she’s heartbroken, and even more frightened, after finding her pet bird dead. There’s something awful going on in the house on Chestnut Street, and neither her prim and proper sister nor Det. Lt. Stephen Mayhew can stop Rachel from finding out what it is.…
The Cat Wears a Noose was previously published under the pseudonym D.B. Olsen.
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Fools' Gold
Two teenagers fresh out of stir set their sights on what looks like easy money in this classic thriller from 1958, only to get a painful education in how quickly and drastically a simple plan can spin out of control.
Dolores Hitchens wrote crime novels that were both tough and compassionate, with a sharp eye for the emotional scars that violence leaves. The basis for Jean-Luc Godard's film Band of Outsiders, Fools' Gold is a swift and unadorned tale of three young people--two boys just released after being incarcerated for a juvenile offense, and an orphaned girl living in a house full of secrets--whose lives are rapidly torn apart by what starts as a simple plan of robbery. It echoes other classic American narratives of youth astray and on the run, and with its headlong pace catches the rhythm of adolescent crisis, as Hitchens's protagonists find themselves caught up in a situation spiraling beyond their control.
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Cats Don't Need Coffins
Elderly cat fancier Rachel Murdock, “an appealing Jessica Fletcher antecedent” (Publishers Weekly), tackles a puzzling case in this cozy mystery from a master of domestic suspense.
When sisters Rachel and Jennifer Murdock receive a letter from Miriam Hamilton, the daughter of the man who, decades earlier, swindled their father, inviting them to her luxurious home and offering financial amends, the sisters accept and head off with their beloved cat, Samantha, in tow. Shortly after they arrive, they meet their host—or rather, her body. Miriam has been murdered in her bed, and two things become clear: their invitation came with strings attached, and around the many corners of Miriam’s capacious home, strange things are afoot.
There is no shortage of possible motives for Miriam’s murder, given her ruthless business practices and greedy nature. The appearance and subsequent disappearance of a bloodstained doll, which Miriam’s two grown stepchildren from previous marriages seem to know more about than they want to let on, raises Rachel’s suspicion, but the involvement of the local sheriff investigating the case is what ultimately throws Rachel for a loop. No matter—together with the reluctant Jennifer and curious kitty Samanatha, amateur sleuth Rachel is going to make sense of this befuddling case, even if things aren’t what they seem.
A delightful Golden Age cozy from a master of mid-century domestic suspense, Cats Don’t Need Coffins engages playfully with genre conventions to entertaining and often humorous effect. It is the seventh novel in Hitchens’ long-running Rachel Murdock series (originally published under the name D.B. Olsen), which can be read in any order.
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