Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wivesby editor, Sarah Weinman
Publication Date: August 27, 2013
Genre: crime
Pages: 356
ReRead?: No
Project: Project 365
Fourteen chilling tales from the pioneering women who created the domestic suspense genre
Murderous wives, deranged husbands, deceitful children, and vengeful friends. Few know these characters—and their creators—better than Sarah Weinman. One of today’s preeminent authorities on crime fiction, Weinman asks: Where would bestselling authors like Gillian Flynn, Sue Grafton, or Tana French be without the women writers who came before them?
In Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, Weinman brings together fourteen hair-raising tales by women who—from the 1940s through the mid-1970s—took a scalpel to contemporary society and sliced away to reveal its dark essence. Lovers of crime fiction from any era will welcome this deliciously dark tribute to a largely forgotten generation of women writers.
Saturdays in the fall are college football days, and I’m lucky enough to have season tickets to my local college football team. These games are really fun, but also really long. It’s a 2 hour drive each way, tailgate and then the game itself. Start to finish, it’s a 12 hour day.
So, not a lot of reading time.
I decided last week to add some loose scheduling to my reading. Tuesdays are going to be a short book from my Penguin classics box sets. I’m thinking that Thursday will be an NYRB classic. And Saturday is vintage mystery. I haven’t gone beyond that level of scheduling.
So, it’s Saturday – which means I’m going to read vintage crime (something published before 1980), and I had 12 hour day, so it’s definitely going to be short stories from one of my crime anthologies. This one was closest to hand.
I read 3 stories:
- The Splintered Monday by Charlotte Armstrong: this was my least favorite of the three, and is really only very loosely suspenseful.
- The People Across the Canyon by Margaret Millar: this story was extremely creepy and effective. It had some overtones of the supernatural and included one of those chilling children of the corn type child characters.
- A Case of Maximum Need by Celia Fremlin: I recently read my first Celia Fremlin and really liked it. She was a sort of British Patricia Highsmith who wrote psychological domestic noir. This was a short story that ended with a very surprising twist.
And, if you’re wondering, my team won . . .