Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense by Sarah Weinman

Author:Sarah Weinman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

DOROTHY B. HUGHES

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1904–1993

DOROTHY B. HUGHES, at the time of the publication of her debut suspense novel, The So Blue Marble in 1940, had worked as a journalist and published a book of poetry, Dark Certainty, nine years earlier. The crime genre gave Hughes her true voice, one mixing a terse, hard-bitten style with a deep understanding of her flawed protagonists, who struggle to stay true to themselves as larger criminal forces threaten to overwhelm them.

The eleven novels Hughes wrote and published from 1940 to 1947 include incomparable classic noirs like The Fallen Sparrow (1942), a spy thriller and keen study of post-traumatic stress in the midst of war; The Blackbirder (1943), featuring a heroine of the Resistance who shows her fear but never lets it define her; Dread Journey (1945), which uses its claustrophobic cross-country train setting to brilliant effect as it dissects the corrosive qualities of Hollywood; Ride the Pink Horse (1946), where a man’s revenge plans and sense of doom play out against the wide-open New Mexico plains; and her greatest masterpiece In a Lonely Place (1947), in which an army veteran’s Los Angeles serial murder spree turns would-be female victims into heroines, and is a masterful look at the psychopathic personality.

Hughes’s writing pace trickled and then stopped completely for over a decade as she found that caring for infirm family members sapped her ability to write fiction, but her final novel, The Expendable Man (1963), brilliantly dissected the burgeoning Civil Rights movement and lingering racial prejudice with a single narrative twist. Hughes later published a biography of Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of the Perry Mason novels, and remained a prolific reviewer of crime fiction for the likes of the Los Angeles Times and the Albuquerque Tribune, but she didn’t abandon fiction altogether, publishing original short fiction as late as 1991, two years before her death.

“Everybody Needs a Mink,” which first appeared in The Saint Mystery Magazine in 1965, at first seems a departure from the customary foreboding dread of Hughes’s best novels. Meg Tashman, a socialite living in a Westchester County town, cultivates an air of frivolity on a day trip to Manhattan as she shops for luxury goods at Randolph’s department store. Lurking beneath the surface, however, is pressing anxiety about living beyond one’s means, and playing the part of one class while feeling like a fraud. When Meg’s desire for the mink coat is unexpectedly and shockingly fulfilled, it’s just the first of a series of surprises for both Meg and the reader.

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