Good afternoon everyone,

I was listening to a podcast about American Noir, and it had a really good section on women noir writers, including some that I had not heard of! Maybe you would like to meet them as well, or maybe you'd like to be reminded of them.

One of the earliest women to write noir thrillers was Dorothy B. Hughes, who fairly cranked then out in the 1940s/early 50s. I say "cranked out" but that understates that some of them were genuine classics and genre changers, as here:

Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place (1947) set up a template for hundreds to come, anticipating even Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me (1952) by bringing the reader inside the killer’s fevered head. But, unlike Thompson and many later writers, Hughes directs her gaze inward only to then direct our gaze outward. She has in mind something larger […] about the complicated, freighted environment of America just after World War II.

https://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=89

Vera Caspary's big novel was Laura, which was made into a very successful film as well. I was also extremely taken with this fun and slightly grifty detail in her biography:

Caspary also created two successful mail order campaigns. One offered dancing lessons with a fictitious authoritarian dance master–a Russian refugee from the Communist Revolution, no less–named Sergei Marinoff, proprietor of the equally fictitious Sergei Marinoff School of Classic Dancing. Marinoff’s letters to his students–typed on gold embossed letterhead Caspary had found in the company’s basement–began with an admonishment to recalcitrant students: “Why have you not sent me your examination on lesson one? What is the matter?” Sergei Marinoff proved so popular that “Pupils fell in love with Marinoff, baked cakes, knitted mufflers, autographed photographs and wrote love letters to a man who did not exist,”

https://broadcast41.uoregon.edu/biography/caspary-vera

Have a lovely weekend, everyone :)

Alex.