THE STORY: When Mark McPherson first falls in love with Laura, he knows he's in love with a phantom--for Laura is dead, and he's in charge of her murder investigation. From her portrait, her letters, her personal effects and from his contacts with the thre
Agnes receives few compliments, and Henry Preble is not so bad-looking even if he does have a reputation for cornering girls at work. In the eyes of the world, knowing that you're on the shelf at twenty-four can do strange things to a girl. So strange that you might wake up one morning with almost no recollection of the previous night's events . . . Published for the first time in the UK, The Gardenia, the basis for Fritz Lang's 1953 classic Hollywood noir film The Blue Gardenia, is a gripping story of suspense and a brilliant exposé of the press sensationalism of 1950s America. This volume also contains Out of the Blue, which was made into a comedy film in 1947 starring George Brent and Carole Landis.
A husband falls into a psychological spiral in a novel by the author of Laura, “an expert at suspense and suspicion” (The New York Times). When Fletcher marries Elaine, his second wife, nineteen years his junior, he can't imagine a more passionate union. Then an illness destroys his confidence, and all he can picture is her next affair. He keeps a secret diary of his fantasized suspicions, making his impending suicide look like murder... With what Graham Greene once called her “devilish cunning,” Vera Caspary reveals, with sure psychological insight, the strange desires that hide in the hearts of seemingly respectable people. Out of a web of love, jealousy, guilt, and hate, she has woven one of her most suspenseful thrillers. “Caspary writes emotive entertainments, part romance, part suspense, about women destined to kill or doomed to die.”—Kirkus Reviews “A beautiful job.”—The Boston Herald The Man Who Loved His Wife is part of the Femmes Fatales series, featuring the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era with such titles as Now, Voyager; Stella Dallas; Bunny Lake is Missing; The Girls in 3-B; and more.
Kate and Allan Royce are driving home from a party in Westport, Connecticut one night when they see a girl in a beautiful but muddied dress wandering in the road and stop to pick her up. She is suffering from amnesia, so they name her Elizabeth X and take her into their home while the police try to establish her identity. They are left in peace, until first a couple claim her as their daughter and then a psychiatrist arrives to say that she has escaped from his clinic. What does seem certain is that she is the child of wealthy parents. But who really is Elizabeth X, and what has happened to her?
Out in the Rolls-Royce, Emmy Arkwright nearly collides with Nat Volck in Beverly Hills. Emmy and Nat are neighbours, yet belong to separate worlds: she is a wealthy, successful fashion designer; he is a doctor who trained during World War Two. But when Nat gets a call one night telling him Emmy has attempted suicide, they become inexorably linked. Nat - bitter and uncomfortable in his California Cadillac practice - attends Emmy, and watches over her return to memory and to her old life, offering her the stability and security she badly needs. But was it really attempted suicide - or is someone trying to kill Emmy?
It's 1920s Chicago, and Louise and Evvie, who have known each other since school, share an apartment. Worldly Evvie, a painter and dancer - supposedly married at seventeen and then divorced - is living on her alimony. Louise is a successful advertising copywriter and in love with her boss. Flouting the Prohibition, they party and enjoy a drink, and like the company of men. They're independent, making their own way in the world, beyond the confines of marriage and motherhood. But Louise's life is rudely interrupted by the brutal murder of Evvie - a crime that involves family, friends and Chicago itself.
“You must read Bedelia”, the seductive black-widow thriller by the author of the classic film noir, Laura (The New York Times). Charlie Horst has returned with his new bride, Bedelia, to his family home in Connecticut. Indulgently infatuated, Charlie is the luckiest man alive. What’s not to love about Bedelia? She’s gorgeous and complacent. She’s also a gracious and ideal party host—luscious and decorative in blue velvet. And in public, she plays the part of worshipful wife to perfection. In private, even more so. Who can blame Charlie for overlooking her little deceptions? Or for not paying any mind to her contradictory claims about her past? When Charlie falls ill due to a freak poisoning, Charlie knows that Bedelia will be right his side, watching him closely. But who’s watching Bedelia? “Vera Caspary wrote thrillers—but not like any other author of her time, male or female. Her specialty was a specific type that she pioneered—the psycho thriller” (Huffington Post) and this “sinister entertainment” (The New Yorker), is Caspary at “her most chilling” (SistersinCrime.com). Filmed in 1946, and starring Margaret Lockwood, it’s “a tour de force of psychological suspense . . . Desperate Housewives meets Double Indemnity in Bedelia” (Liahna Armstrong, President Emeritus, Popular Culture Association).
Stuart Howell is a promoter with a million-dollar proposition on the line. Jean McVeigh is young, wealthy and lonely. Very lonely. With Jean's self-loathing making her prone to suicide attempts, Stuart sees a neat way to make a lot of money. After a whirlwind courtship, they marry, and Jean is at first ecstatic to have landed herself such a catch. Jean starts to doubt Stuart's real intentions - doubt that goes into overdrive as he tests her accident-proneness on a balcony and forges her signature on a $100,000 note. And when confronted, exposed and humiliated, Stuart becomes a more desperate, and deadly, opponent. But Jean starts to wise up to his treachery . . .
It was the party of a lifetime - but she never arrived... 'Vera Caspary is an expert at suspense and suspicion' New York Times When popular young schoolteacher Nina Redfield reports to police the whereabouts of Bushie Neal, a criminal on the run, she sets off a chain of events over which she has no control. Nina is about to leave for a Hallowe'en party at a friend's house. An escort is sent to collect her, so it's no surprise to Nina when a masked man in a Harlequin costume calls for her. But Nina and her escort never reach the party . . . Could her past association with Bushie's sworn enemy Nick Brazza have any connection to her disappearance? And has she been spirited to safety - or further into danger?
Vera Caspary and others were the forerunners of Gillian Flynn, Megan Abbott, Laura Lippmann and of course, Paula Hawkins' Irish Times Renowned painter Henry Leveret is found shot dead in his downtown studio, and his estranged son, Michael, returns to his family and his father's circle of friends in order to try to find out who killed him. There are plenty of suspects: his gallery manager, Chandler Sprague, who is in love with Henry's widow; his wealthy heiress assistant Janet Altheim, who was in love with him; and her lover Bruno, who resented Henry are just a few on Michael's list. But Leveret was writing a biography of sorts, his own confession, when he was shot. Was he about to reveal something, a secret that cost him his life?
Vera Caspary, the celebrated author of Laura, tells her own story in this captivating autobiography. With a career that spanned from the 1920s through 1970s, one that produced over twenty novels, in addition to her many credits for film and theater, Caspary centered her life around a passion for writing. From her early experiences at an advertisement agency--where she developed a correspondence school and invented its "famed" instructor--to the struggles of being gray-listed in the McCarthy Era, Caspary constantly found a way to turn her creative needs into viable work. Caspary recalls the rest of a full life, too, including her flirtation with communism, travels across Europe, and a marriage. Caspary's skillful writing makes her incredible depictions of people, and the times in which they lived, jump off the page.
Contains four novellas: Stranger in the House; Sugar and Spice; The Murder in the Stork Club; Ruth. In these deftly woven noir novellas, Vera Caspary draws on her own rich, independent life as a woman at a time of great social change, including her own experience of Manhattan's Stork Club, which, from 1929 to 1965, was one of the most prestigious nightclubs in the world. The title novella The Murder in the Stork Club features working-class detective Joe Collins, who is married to Sara Haworth, a writer of radio mysteries who belongs in Stork Club café society. Joe has to try to clear Sara's name when an ex-lover is murdered shortly after she has dinner with him.
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