Books by Helen Eustis
Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s (LOA #268): Laura / The Horizontal Man / In a Lonely Place / The Blank Wall (Library of America Women Crime Writers Collection)
by Dorothy B. Hughes, Vera Caspary, Helen Eustis, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding
A landmark collection of four 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 their mid-century predecessors is largely unknown. Turning from the mean streets of the hardboiled school, these groundbreaking female 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 today—is long overdue for discovery.
Edited by The Real Lolita author Sarah Weinman, this collection gathers four classic crime novels from the 1940s: Vera Caspary’s famous career girl mystery, Laura; Helen Eustis’s intricate academic thriller, The Horizontal Man; Dorothy B. Hughes’s terrifyingly intimate portrait of a serial killer, In a Lonely Place; and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s The Blank Wall, in which a wartime wife is forced to take extreme measures when her family is threatened. Together, these underappreciated works reveal the vital and unacknowledged lineage of today’s leading crime writers.
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 Horizontal Man
by Helen Eustis
A philandering professor on the faculty of an Ivy League school is found murdered, setting off ripple effects of anxiety, suspicion, and panic in this Edgar Award-winning classic from 1946.
The Horizontal Man was Helen Eustis's only crime novel, and she won an Edgar Award for it, combining a wildly disparate set of elements into an enduringly fascinating work. In its way it is a classical whodunit that stands comparison with old-school practitioners such as Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. This mystery transpires in the rarefied precincts of the English department of a venerable New England college, one very much of the restless postwar moment, echoing with references to Freud and Kafka. Eustis finds comedy high and low in a cavalcade of characters bursting at the seams with repressed sexual longings and simmering malice. Beyond the satire, she stirs up--with a narrative whose multiple viewpoints give the book a striking modernistic edge--a troubling sense of the mental chaos lurking just beneath the civilized surfaces of her academic setting.
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