A Moment on the Edge:100 Years of Crime Stories by women Read online

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  Cover Image

  Title Page

  Contents Introduction by Elizabeth George

  A Jury of Her Peers: Susan Glaspell

  The Man Who Knew How: Dorothy L. Sayers

  I Can Find My Way Out: Ngaio Marsh

  The Summer People: Shirley Jackson

  St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning: Charlotte Armstrong

  The Purple Is Everything: Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Money to Burn: Margery Allingham

  A Nice Place to Stay: Nedra Tyre

  Clever and Quick: Christianna Brand

  Country Lovers: Nadine Gordimer

  The Irony of Hate: Ruth Rendell

  Sweet Baby Jenny: Joyce Harrington

  Wild Mustard: Marcia Muller

  Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave: Antonia Fraser

  The Case of the Pietro Andromache: Sara Paretsky

  Afraid All the Time: Nancy Pickard

  The Young Shall See Visions, and the Old Dream Dreams: Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  A Predatory Woman: Sharyn McCrumb

  Jack Be Quick: Barbara Paul

  Ghost Station: Carolyn Wheat

  New Moon and Rattlesnakes: Wendy Hornsby

  Death of a Snowbird: J. A. Jance

  The River Mouth: Lia Matera

  A Scandal in Winter: Gillian Linscott

  Murder-Two: Joyce Carol Oates

  English Autumn—American Fall: Minette Walters

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Elizabeth George

  Credits

  Copyright Page

  About the Publisher

  A Moment on the Edge

  100 YEARS OF CRIME STORIES BY WOMEN

  Edited by Elizabeth George

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: ELIZABETH GEORGE v A Jury of Her Peers SUSAN GLASPELL 1 The Man Who Knew How DOROTHY L. SAYERS 27 I Can Find My Way Out NGAIO MARSH 45 The Summer People SHIRLEY JACKSON 75 St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning CHARLOTTE ARMSTRONG 93 The Purple Is Everything DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS 119 Money to Burn MARGERY ALLINGHAM 133 A Nice Place to Stay NEDRA TYRE 147 Clever and Quick CHRISTIANNA BRAND 161 Country Lovers NADINE GORDIMER 177 The Irony of Hate RUTH RENDELL 189 Sweet Baby Jenny JOYCE HARRINGTON 207 Wild Mustard MARCIA MULLER 229 Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave ANTONIA FRASER 241 The Case of the Pietro Andromache SARA PARETSKY 279 Afraid All the Time NANCY PICKARD 309 The Young Shall See Visions, and the Old Dream Dreams

  KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH 327 A Predatory Woman SHARYN McCRUMB 349 Jack Be Quick BARBARA PAUL 363 Ghost Station CAROLYN WHEAT 399

  New Moon and Rattlesnakes WENDY HORNSBY 417 Death of a Snowbird J. A. JANCE 437 The River Mouth LIA MATERA 459 A Scandal in Winter GILLIAN LINSCOTT 475 Murder-Two JOYCE CAROL OATES 505 English Autumn—American Fall MINETTE WALTERS 533 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABOUT THE EDITOR OTHER BOOKS BY ELIZABETH GEORGE PRAISE CREDITS COVER COPYRIGHT ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  INTRODUCTION

  by Elizabeth George

  Whether the story is a murder mystery, a tale of suspense, a psychological study of the characters affected by a devastating event, the retelling of a famous criminal act, a courtroom drama, an exposé, a police procedural, or a truthful account of an actual offense, the question remains the same. Why crime? Whether the characters involved are FBI agents, policemen and women, forensic scientists, journalists, military personnel, the man or woman on the street, private detectives, or the little old lady who lives next door, the question remains the same. Why crime? Be it murder (singular, serial, or mass), mayhem, robbery, assault, kidnapping, burglary, extortion, or blackmail, we still want to know: why crime? Why exists this fascination with crime and why, above all, exists this fascination with crime on the part of female writers?

  I think there are several answers to these questions.

  Crime writing is practically as old as writing itself and is consequently very much part of our literary tradition. The earliest crime stories come to us from the Bible: in a jealous rage, Cain kills Abel; in a jealous conspiracy, Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery in Egypt and fake his death for their devastated father; in lustful jealousy, David sends Bathsheba’s husband to the front lines in battle so that he might have the winsome woman for himself; in unrequited lust, two respected elders bear false witness against the virtuous Susanna, condemning her to death for adultery unless someone can come forward and disprove their story; fathers lie with their daughters in criminal acts of incest; brothers kill, fight with, lie about, and otherwise abuse their brothers; women demand the heads of men on platters; Judith decapitates

  Holofernes; Judas betrays Jesus of Nazareth; King Herod slays the newborn male children of the Hebrews…It’s a nasty place in the Old and New Testament, and we feed off this place from our earliest years.

  Crime is mankind on the edge, in extremis, but more than that, crime is mankind stepping outside of the norm. For every Cain, there are a billion brothers who have co-existed throughout the centuries. For every David, there are ten million men who’ve turned away from a woman they want when they learn she is committed to another. But this is what makes crime so interesting. It isn’t what people normally do.

  It would be nice to believe that cars slow down on the freeway when there is an accident because of the drivers’ heightened sense of caution: everyone sees the flashing lights up ahead, the smoke, the flares, the ambulances, the fire trucks, and hits the brakes so as not to end up in the same condition as the unfortunates currently being extricated from mangled metal. But this is not generally why people slow down. They slow down to gawk, their curiosity piqued. Why? Because an accident on the freeway is an anomaly, and anomalies interest us. They always interest us: have done from the beginning of time and will do till the end of it.

  Brutal murders garner front-page space. Kidnappings, disappearances, riots, fatal auto accidents, plane crashes, terrorist bombings, armed robbery, snipers firing on the unsuspecting…all of this cuts into everyday life, awakening us to the fragility of our individual existences as it simultaneously whets our appetite to know. We grind to a halt as a nation to listen to the verdict in the O. J. Simpson case because there are base passions involved in whatever happened on Bundy Drive, and the base passions of that double killer awaken the base passions within ourselves. Blood spilled cries out for more blood to spill in retribution for the act. We seek a punishment to fit each crime. Crime is as old as humanity. But so is sensation. So is vengeance.

  Crime literature gives us a satisfaction that we are often denied in life. In life, we never do know who really killed Nicole and

  Ron; we only suspect there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll; we are left to wonder about Dr. Shepherd’s wife and Jeffrey MacDonald’s capacity for truth or self-delusion. The Green River killer disappears into the primordial slime from which he rose, the Zodiac killer joins him there, and we are left with only the questions themselves: who were these people and why did they murder? But in crime fiction, the killers face justice. It can be real justice, poetic justice, or psychological justice. But face it they do. They are unmasked and normalcy is restored. There is vast satisfaction for the reader in that, certainly more satisfaction than is garnered from the investigation into and punishment for an actual crime.

  For the writer who wishes to explore characters, there is nothing so catastrophically catalytic as the intrusion of a crime into an otherwise peaceful landscape. A crime places everyone into a crucible: the investigators, the perpetrator, the victims, and those in relationship to the investigators, the perpetrator, and the victims. Within t
his crucible of life’s most monstrous acts the mettle of the characters is tested. It is when characters confront the most serious challenges to their beliefs, their peace, their sanity, and their way of life that their pathology is triggered. And it is the pathology of the individual character clashing with the pathology of all the other characters that is the stuff of drama and catharsis.

  Some of our most enduring pieces of literature have a heinous crime as their backdrop. Hamlet’s monumental mental struggle to overcome his conscience and act the part of Nemesis could not occur had the poisoning of his father not happened in a brutal act of fratricide. Oedipus could not fulfill his destiny without first killing King Laius on the road to Thebes. Medea would not be in the position in which she is placed in Corinth—an outcast about to be cast out by a nervous Creon all too aware of her abilities as a sorceress—had her reputation as the mastermind behind King Pelias’s death not preceded her. So it should come as no surprise to anyone who reads that crimes continue

  not only to fascinate writers but also to serve as the backbone for much of their prose.

  What a crime does in a piece of literature is two-fold. First, it serves as a throughline for the story to follow: the crime must be investigated and solved within the twists and turns of the plot. But secondly and perhaps more importantly, the crime also acts as a skeleton for the body of the tale that the writer wishes to tell. On this skeleton, the writer can hang as much or as little as she likes. She can keep the skeleton down to the bones alone and tell a story that moves smoothly, concisely, and without deviation or decoration to its revelation and conclusion. Or she can hang upon the skeleton the muscles, tissues, veins, organs, and blood of such diverse elements of storytelling as theme, exploration of character, life and literary symbols, subplots, etc., as well as the specific crime-oriented story elements of clues, red herrings, suspense, and a list of time-honored motifs peculiar to mysteries: the hermetically sealed death chamber (or locked room), the most obvious place, the trail of false clues left by the real killer, the fixed idea, and on and on. Thus, her characters can march hand-in-hand in the direction of an ineluctable conclusion, or they can become sidetracked by the myriad possibilities offered to them through means of an expanded storyline and a more complicated structure.

  Why, then, would a writer ever consider dabbling in anything else? There is no reason that I can see. For as long as a writer adheres to the notion that the only rule is there are no rules, the sky’s the limit within this field.

  This still doesn’t answer the question about female writers’ attraction to crime literature, and it is indeed a question I’ve been asked over and over again by journalists, with a rather tedious regularity.

  The Golden Age of Mystery in Great Britain and the Common-wealth—which I would consider spanning the years from the twenties through the fifties—is dominated by women. Indeed, their names comprise a pantheon into whose company every

  modern writer aspires to join. Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham…It’s not terribly difficult to sort out why women writers throughout the twentieth century endeavored to join this distinguished company: once one woman made an inroad into an area of literature, other women were quick to follow. The fascination with crime writing on the part of females can thus be explained with ease: women chose to write crime stories because they were successful at it. Success on the part of one woman breeds the desire for success on the part of another.

  In the United States, this also holds true. But the difference in the United States is that the Golden Age of Mystery is dominated by men and that women are Janet-come-latelies to it. When we think of the Golden Age in America, we think of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, of first-person narratives with tough-guy private eyes who smoke, drink bourbon, live in seedy apartments, and dismissively refer to women as “dames.” They use guns and their fists, and they’ve got ’tude to spare. They’re loners, and they like it that way.

  Breaking into this male-dominated world required guts and tenacity on the part of women writers. Some of them opted to write kinder, gentler mysteries in order to offer something more in keeping with the delicate sensibilities of the female readers they were hoping to attract. Others decided to barge right in and join the men, creating female private eyes who were as hard-bitten as the men they sought to replace. Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky proved irrefutably that a female p.i. would be accepted by an audience of both men and women readers, and a score of other female writers began to follow in Grafton and Paretsky’s footsteps. Thus, the arena widened in the United States as well, offering women another outlet for their creative energies.

  Creating crime fiction offers writers a vast landscape as broad and as varied as crime itself. Because there are no hard-and-fast rules and because those few rules that exist exist to be broken (witness the uproar over The Murder of Roger Ackroyd when it

  was first published in 1926), the writer can choose any setting on earth which she can then people with: teenagers as sleuths, children as sleuths, old ladies as sleuths, animals as sleuths, shut-ins and agoraphobics as sleuths, teachers as sleuths, doctors as sleuths, astronauts as sleuths, and on and on as far as the imagination can carry her. With this as a basic tenet of crime writing, the real question should be not why do so many women write crime stories? but why doesn’t everyone write crime stories?

  This volume doesn’t attempt to answer that question. What it does, however, is present for your entertainment a century’s collection of crime and suspense stories by women. What you’ll notice about this collection is that it includes names closely associated with crime writing—Dorothy L. Sayers, Minette Walters, Sue Grafton, and others—but it also includes some names one doesn’t normally associate with crime writing at all: names like Nadine Gordimer and Joyce Carol Oates. I’ve tried to come up with as wide a range of female authors as possible because a wide range reflects my primary belief about crime writing and that is this: crime writing does not have to be considered genre writing. It is not confined to a few moderately talented practitioners. And most importantly, it is indeed something that can stand, will stand, and has already stood the test of time.

  One of the greatest sources of irritation to me as a writer is the number of people who stubbornly consider crime writing a lesser form of literary endeavor. Throughout the years that I’ve written crime fiction, I’ve had numerous conversations with people that reflect this very strange point of view. One man at a writing conference told me that he was going to write crime fiction as practice and then, later on, he would write a “real novel.” (“Like making tacos until you can graduate to chocolate cake from scratch?” I asked him innocently.) A journalist in Germany once asked me what I thought of the fact that my novels weren’t reviewed in a highbrow newspaper that I had never heard of. (“Gosh. I don’t know. I guess that paper doesn’t have much impact

  on sales,” I told her.) Several times people have stood up during Q&A at the end of speeches I’ve given and asked me why “a writer like you doesn’t write serious novels.” (“I consider crime fiction serious,” I tell them.) But always there is this underlying belief on the part of some readers and some critics: crime fiction isn’t something that should be taken seriously.

  This is an unfortunate point of view. While it’s true that some crime fiction is lowbrow, formulaic, and without much merit, the same can be said of anything else that’s published. Some books are good, some are indifferent, and some are downright bad. But the reality is that a great deal of crime fiction has done what mainstream “literary” fiction only dreams of doing: it has successfully stood the test of time. For every Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes still inspires devotion and enthusiasm over one hundred years after his creation, there are thousands of writers whose work of ostensible literature has faded into complete obscurity. Given the choice between being labeled a “literary” writer and disappearing ten years after I hang up my spurs or being labeled “only a crime writer” and ha
ving my stories and novels read one hundred years from now, I know which choice I would make and I can only assume any writer of sense would make the same one.

  For my money, literature is whatever lasts. During his lifetime, no one would have accused William Shakespeare of writing great literature. He was a popular playwright who peopled his productions with characters who satisfied every possible level of education and experience in his audience. Charles Dickens wrote serials for the newspaper, penning them as quickly as he could in order to support his ever-burgeoning family. And the aforementioned Arthur Conan Doyle, a young ophthalmologist building a practice, wrote mysteries to while away the time as he waited for patients to show up in his surgery. None of these writers was worried about immortality. None of them wrote while wondering whether their work would be considered literature, commercial fiction, or trash. They were each concerned about telling a great

  story, telling it well, and placing it before an audience. The rest they placed—as wise men and women do—into the hands of time.

  This collection of authors represents that same philosophy of writing what you want to write and writing it well. Some of them have done that, died, and achieved a modicum of immortality. The rest of them remain earthbound, still writing, and waiting to see how time will deal with them. All of them share in common a desire to explore mankind in a moment on the edge. The edge equates to the crime committed. How the characters deal with the edge is the story.

  A Jury of Her Peers

  SUSAN GLASPELL

  Susan Keating Glaspell (1876-1948) was born in Davenport, Iowa, attended Drake University and the University of Chicago, and worked as a journalist before turning to full-time fiction-writing in 1901. Her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, appeared in 1909 and her first story collection, Lifted Masks, in 1912, but she would achieve her greatest fame as a playwright, culminating in a controversial Pulitzer Prize for Alison’s House (1930), inspired by the life of Emily Dickinson. From 1914 to 1921, she was a member of the Provincetown Players, a bohemian theatre-based community founded by her idealist husband George Cram Cook. Among the other members were Edna St. Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, Edna Ferber, John Reed, and the writer who would become the greatest American playwright of the time, Eugene O’Neill.