Readers who have already enjoyed Flynn’s Gone Girl or Harrison’s The Silent Wife would do well to check out Sarah Weinman’s new anthology of female crime writers, detailing the roots of what’s being called ‘domestic suspense’: Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives. And yes, you could be looking forward to Gillian Flynn’s next novel (whatever that may be), or Emma Chapman’s How To Be A Good Wife – but not looking backwards to the roots of this subgenre would indeed be a shame. Weinman’s collection contains well-known names as well as under the radar authors - and is well worth checking out. Sarah Weinman knows her stuff – and she’s written a blog we’re happy to share today that proves it.
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The Inspiration for Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives
By Sarah Weinman
In university, when I started reading the mystery genre seriously, I chose what was current. Between recommendations from friends and the Internet, I amassed a list of authors, from Dennis Lehane to Robert Crais to Laura Lippman to Michael Connelly to Val McDermid to SJ Rozan, whose new novels remain auto-buys. Fifteen years ago these authors were current or emerging; now they are established on the star spectrum of crime fiction.
My mystery reading became more professionalized over that time frame, too, and my relentless, increasingly picky search for the best of the new was matched by growing curiosity about the genre's past. I knew my Agatha Christie, but it was a delight to delve into the work of her fellow Queens of Crime, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Dorothy L. Sayers. I learned I was more attuned to Dashiell Hammett's crisp prose than Raymond Chandler's soaring metaphors, but also thrilled to the equally dark fare of James M. Cain, David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Richard Stark, and Charles Willeford, to offer a small sample.
The critical and cultural conversation about 20th century crime fiction, then, seemed to cement around two distinct general pathways: the genteel cozy and the hardboiled detective. But as I continued searching out more excellent vintage crime fiction, I found myself traveling a more nebulous, shadowy, subtle third way, somewhere in between those two well-trodden, much-imitated paths. These stories and novels featured ordinary people, often women, be they young spinsters, newly married or middle-aged wives, mutinous children, or the elderly, alone and neglected by society. The trouble they found themselves in began at home, or within a small community, or involved people they loved deeply – or hated with equal depth. There were crimes to solve, but detectives were peripheral, if present at all. More important was the general sense of terror and dread, the creeping feeling of something not being right growing stronger with ever-building suspense.
I first wrote about stories like these for an essay commissioned by the literary magazine Tin House for its March 2011 “The Mysterious” issue, using the term “domestic suspense” for the first time (I thought I'd made it up, but have since learned that wasn't the case. Great minds thought alike!) I wondered why books by the likes of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, whom Chandler thought so highly as to rate her “the top suspense writer of them all”, or Celia Fremlin, who pinpointed the root anxiety of post-partum depression in her debut novel The Hours Before Dawn without explicitly saying so, hadn't gained the same critical traction as their male counterparts. I wondered why my own favorite crime novel, In A Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes, wasn't taught in schools like The Big Sleep or The Postman Rings Twice or The Maltese Falcon.
But it wasn't until a few months later, while in the midst of a passionate rant to a publishing executive I knew during an unrelated business lunch, that the prospect of doing something more – in the form of an anthology – emerged. From there it was a matter of finding the right mix of well-known authors like Patricia Highsmith and Shirley Jackson, once-critically acclaimed and commercially successful authors like Hughes, Holding, Fremlin, Margaret Millar, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Charlotte Armstrong, Helen Nielsen and Vera Caspary, and true undiscovered treasures, like Joyce Harrington, Nedra Tyre, Barbara Callahan, and Miriam Allen deFord. There were many other practitioners of domestic suspense who could have been included. But fourteen seemed a good number of representative writers. To my amazement, these decades-old stories still pack a potent punch that is relevant today. What was past remains current, and I hope readers of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives will find much to enjoy here.