Laura (Femmes Fatales) (19 page)

VERA CASPARY is the author of twenty-one books. Her early novels drew on her experience growing up a conservative Jewish family in Chicago. Later works focused on career women who balance work, a love life, and even marriage, with a desire for independence. Caspary is best known for her skillfully-crafted and psychologically-complex murder mysteries. Several of her books were made into films, including
Bedelia
and
Laura
. Enormously popular in her time, she was also a playwright and screenwriter, with such classics as Fritz Lang's
The Blue Gardenia
and Joseph L. Mankiewicz's
Letter to Three Wives
having been adapted from her screen stories. Reviewing her autobiography,
The Secrets of Grown-Ups
,
The Washington Post
called Caspary's life "a Baedeker of the 20th century. An independent woman in an unliberated era, she collided with or was touched by many of its major historical and cultural events: wars, the Depression, the Spanish Civil War . . . Hollywood in its romantic heyday, Hollywood in the grip of McCarthyism, the footloose of the artistic rich, publishing, Broadway."

Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-twentieth century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

SKYSCRAPER

Faith Baldwin

Afterword by Laura Hapke

eISBN: 9781558617872 | ISBN: 9781558614574

Lynn is an ambitious young woman who loves her job in a gleaming new Manhattan skyscraper. Soon, Lynn falls in love with Tom, the young clerk down the hall. They are so in love that if they don’t get married, something improper is bound to happen…. But her company has a strict new policy: Any woman who marries will be immediately fired. First published in 1931 as a serial in
Cosmopolitan
—the same year the Empire State Building opened its doors—
Skyscraper
marks the advent of a new kind of romance, and a new kind of heroine. This
Sex in the City
for its time was made into a pre-Code Hollywood movie starring Maureen O’Sullivan.

“With its sexual bargains and betrayals, insider trades and financial maneuvers,
Skyscraper
is pulp fiction at its best.”

—Maria Dibattista, author of
Fast-Talking Dames

“A captivating and quietly subversive novel, featuring a spunky young working woman struggling to make it on her own.
Skyscraper
declares that despite all challenges, women should insist on their right to have it all.”

—Alicia Daly,
Ms.

FAITH BALDWIN
(1893–1978) was one of the most prolific
mid-twentieth century authors of popular fiction. She published eighty-five books between 1921 and 1977, many of them focused on women juggling family and career, including
White Collar Girl
,
Men Are Such Fools!
, and
An Apartment for Peggy
, which was made into a Hollywood film in 1948.

BEDELIA

Vera Caspary

Afterword by A. B. Emrys

eISBN: 9781558616486 | ISBN: 9781558615076

Long before
Desperate Housewives
, there was Bedelia: beautiful and “adoring as a kitten.” An ideal housekeeper and lover, she wants nothing more than to please her insecure new husband, who can’t believe his luck. But is Bedelia too good to be true? A mysterious new neighbor turns out to be a detective on the trail of a picture-perfect wife with a string of dead husbands in her wake. Caspary builds this story to a peak of psychological suspense when her characters are trapped together in a blizzard. The true Bedelia—the woman who escaped a life on the street—is revealed.

“You must read
Bedelia
to see just how slick Miss Caspary’s technique of soft-shoe terror can be—how frightening she can make the chatter at an innocent dinner party, the lure of a lady’s deshabille, the glimpse of a black pearl in a dresser drawer.”

—
New York Times

“A sinister entertainment, especially for admirers of the psychological horror story.”

—
New Yorker

“Vera Caspary’s gift is perhaps more subtle and deadly than Jim Thompson’s, David Goodis’s, and Charles Willeford’s.”

—Robert Polito, author of
Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson

“A tour de force of psychological suspense,
Desperate Housewives
meets
Double Indemnity
in Caspary’s
Bedelia.
”

—Liahna Armstrong, President Emerita, Popular Culture Association

BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

Evelyn Piper

Afterword by Maria Dibattista

eISBN: 9781558617759 | ISBN: 9781558614741

Blanche Lake, a young mother, arrives to pick up her daughter at nursery school. But Bunny Lake has vanished, and soon everyone suspects that she is merely a figment of her mother’s female imagination. Searching desperately for her daughter, with no help from the police, Blanche needs every trick in the book to navigate a world that distrusts and disowns her. This psychological thriller was made into a classic motion picture in 1965 by Otto Preminger.

“The distraught, gutsy, and hip mother I played in
Bunny Lake Is Missing
is my all-time favorite role.”

—Carol Lynley

“A brilliant tale of psychological suspense,
Bunny Lake is Missing
is a classic thriller—a riveting revisit to the dark side of the 50s, where the tension beneath the calm surface has an undertow that drags the reader into its grip. Prime pulp—pure pleasure.”

—Linda Fairstein, author of
The Bone Vault

“A beautiful job . . . Frantic scenes of action, contagious terror, and near hysteria.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

EVELYN PIPER
was the pseudonym of Merriam Modell (1908–1994), whose novels include
The Lady and Her Doctor
,
Hanno’s Doll
, and
The Nanny
(1965), which was made into a
film starring Bette Davis.

NOW, VOYAGER

Olive Higgins Prouty

Afterword by Judith Mayne

eISBN: 9781558616332 | ISBN: 9781558614765

A soaring romance and one of the greatest makeover stories in literature,
Now, Voyager
, first enthralled readers in 1941 and became a screen phenomenon the following year. Bette Davis triumphantly portrayed heroine Charlotte Vale, the shy, dowdy Boston heiress who blossoms into a defiant, sexually liberated woman. After a nervous breakdown releases her from the tyranny of her mother and blueblood society, Charlotte embarks on an ocean cruise where her fabulous new wardrobe and burgeoning charm lead to a love affair with a married man. Charlotte’s transformation has just begun. . . .