The canon of American crime fiction is well established, and largely male, from the hardboiled and noir novels by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis and James M. Cain to the witty detective fiction of Rex Stout. But alongside them, between World War II and the height of the Cold War, there were a number of excellent books written by women such as Dorothy B. Hughes, Margaret Millar, Vera Caspary, and Dorothy Salisbury Davis.
This presentation will introduce and discuss the place of female writers working between the 1940s and the 1970s in the American crime fiction world alongside their male counterparts, why they were left behind by the canon-makers - and how to redress the balance.
Sarah Weinman, the lecturer and a writer in residence in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room, is the editor of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense.
New York City, NY; NYC