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Boxed set highlights crime writers

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Midcentury female crime writers were doing interesting, groundbreaking work, but it’s largely forgotten, hidden in the huge shadows cast by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Ross Macdonald, the acknowledged early masters of the genre.

“Women Crime Writers,” a splendid new boxed set of eight novels, ushers them back into the sunlight, back to their rightful place as pioneers for the writers – Sue Grafton, Laura Lippman, Sarah Paretsky and others – whose books regularly populate today’s best-seller lists.

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Editor Sarah Weinman (she’ll be at Mysterious Galaxy Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.) has selected the novels, four from the 1940s, four from the 1950s, with a reader’s appreciation for stories that are page-turners and a historian’s understanding of what the pieces say about their time and place.

What they say is that women were far more complicated than the arm decorations or femme fatales that populated the mean-streets noir written by men of the era. These women were writing what Weinman refers to as “domestic suspense,” books that addressed in ways large and small the unease some were feeling about the traditional roles society had cast for them.

“Laura” (1943) is probably the best-known of the bunch. Vera Caspary’s tale is about a female advertising agent, her attractiveness to men, and the difficulties she faces trying to put her career first.

It’s a terrific story, with colorful, vividly vulnerable characters. Some of the story’s details are dated (how many people will know who Hedy Lamarr was?) but the writing remains fresh. Here’s Caspary’s detective describing his first encounter with Laura’s aunt:

“She was small, robed in deepest mourning and carrying under her right arm a Pomeranian whose auburn coat matched her own bright hair… the rigid perfection of her face was almost artificial, as if flesh-pink velvet were drawn over an iron frame.”

“In a Lonely Place,” by Dorothy B. Hughes (1947), was one of the first portrayals of a serial killer. It gets deeply inside the head of the predator, a World War II fighter pilot named Dix Steele, desperate to find something that matches the adrenaline rush he felt in combat.

There was a lot of tension and confusion in postwar America, especially about the role of women at home and in the workplace, and Hughes taps into that.

Margaret Millar’s “Beast in View” (1955) won the Edgar Award for best novel, which means its brilliance was recognized in its time. But it’s still something of an overlooked masterpiece, and Weinman is wise to include it here.

It opens chillingly with a phone call from a stranger – “Do you know who this is?” — and settles into an atmosphere of menace that never lets up.

On the boxed set’s worthwhile companion website (womencrime.loa.org), Lippman writes that she recently asked a crowd at a book signing if anyone had heard of Millar. Almost no one raised a hand.

She then asked if they knew Kenneth Millar, Margaret’s husband. Nothing. But when she asked if anyone had ever heard of Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar’s pseudonym), almost every hand went up.

That’s just wrong, and “Women Crime Writers” should go a long way toward redefining the genre’s early days, and its early masters.

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