Women crime writers. Four suspense novels of the 1940s /

BOOKS, LIKE MUSIC, are a kind of time machine. They have the ability to summon moments of our past with sharp-edged clarity. For me, the Library of America's handsome two-volume set "Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 1950s" has done just that. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I used to haunt a secondhand book store a few minutes' walk from my college. It had an entire wall of paperback crime fiction at such rock-bottom prices I could afford to indulge my growing love for the genre even on a meager student income. I wasn't a very discriminating reader; all I knew was that I wanted to devour mysteries, to make them give up their secrets to me. I wanted to be baffled, to be thrilled, to be unnerved. And so I read everything I could get my hands on, from decorous English country house mysteries of the Golden Age to American pulp fiction with its vamps, vixens and victims. Along the way, I stumbled across a bunch of writers whose work grabbed my attention because they seemed to be outliers. Their work didn't fit any neat categories. Not whodunits. Not police procedurals. Not hard-boiled gumshoes. Instead these were stories imbued with a kind of shimmering suspense that became almost unbearable as they unfolded. They were all written by women, and they evoked images familiar from old black-and-white movies - lipstick on a cigarette butt, tailored dresses, immaculately confected coiffures, sideways glances and lives gone inexorably askew. I knew instinctively that these books were a key element in my education as an aspiring writer. They were absorbing and page-turning, but that wasn't unusual in the mystery genre. What was unusual was their methods. They kept me on the edge of my seat neither because of constant fast-moving action nor because of the judicious scattering of puzzling clues. Often there was little action, fewer clues and not so much a case of "whodunit" as "Oh my God, what's going to happen next?" This excellent new collection, curated by Sarah Weinman, brings us eight of these novels, each one still riveting in its own way. Four were already part of my own collection, having survived every winnowing in the intervening years - Vera Caspary's "Laura," Helen Eustis's "The Horizontal Man," Dorothy B. Hughes's "In a Lonely Place" and Margaret Millar's "Beast in View." The other four - Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's "The Blank Wall," Charlotte Armstrong's "Mischief," Patricia Highsmith's "The Blunderer" and Dolores Hitchens's "Fools' Gold" - were new to me, but they gripped me with the same sense of impending and inevitable doom. It's no surprise Hollywood fell on them so eagerly. Caspary's "Laura" uses the multiple viewpoints of several narrators whose reliability varies drastically, forcing us to pick our way through a series of smoke screens. Not to mention a shocking revelation along the way that packs a sucker punch. It's a riveting collision between the elegant and sophisticated world of New York journalism and the pressure cooker of homicide investigation, complete with a heroine who goes beyond the conventions of the femme fatale to take charge of her own life. Malice and mental instability lie at the heart of Helen Eustis's "The Horizontal Man," a dark and disconcerting satire of academic life. Where there should be cool detachment there is hysteria; where there should be sympathy there is hostility. And repressed sexuality runs through campus life like a twisted rope. It's postmodern, it's feminist, and when we laugh, it's with an edge of unease. The creepy resolution is quite unlike anything that came before it and precious little since. The serial killer thriller has become a common format over the past quarter-century. But long before Hannibal and Dexter, there was Dorothy B. Hughes. "In a Lonely Place" created the trend of taking us inside the head of a compulsive killer. Dix Steele, the protagonist, has left behind the glamour of flying fighter planes but not the sense of entitlement it gave him. But in the process of revealing his alienation, Hughes shows us the anxiety and perturbation of postwar America, a society shifting gears without a clear sense of direction. The depth of the changes in America is mirrored by the fact that it's the women who bring him down in the end, not the hard-bitten cops. Elisabeth Sanxay Holding was described by Raymond Chandler as "the top suspense writer of them all," and "The Blank Wall" surprised me with delight more than any other story in this collection. Lucia Holley is struggling to keep her family on an even keel while her husband is away in the Navy. Hard enough at the best of times but unimaginable when there's a corpse in the family rowboat. Maternal love, the subtle interplay of family relationships, the blending of terrible events with the everyday; it's as if Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway had strayed into a crime novel. Charlotte Armstrong's "Mischief" was my least favorite of the eight. So much about it is good - many of the characters and their reactions, the details of the hotel setting, the sense of time and place, the acute observation of social standing. But this Trojan horse tale of a babysitter gone rogue failed for me because of its series of unlikely coincidences coupled with the entrances and exits better suited to farce than serious suspense. No such disappointment in Patricia Highsmith's "The Blunderer," an early exploration of the themes she returned to again and again in later work. It throws together a man who has committed murder and another who wants to. As the tension between them and a dogged detective grows more unbearable, we find ourselves confronted with Highsmith's perpetual questions. How far will you go for love? What happens when events conspire against you? And how do we readers deal with the way Highsmith makes us feel sympathy for the Devil? Margaret Millar's stunningly original "Beast in View" offers a series of enigmatic encounters whose weight gradually builds until the pressure is almost intolerable. Who is the mysterious persecutor at the heart of the story, and how can we make sense of what seems an impenetrable mystery? The ending shocked readers at the time; it's less shocking now only because so many other writers have worked their own variations on the theme. Dolores Hitchens's "Fools' Gold" starts out with three young delinquents who think they're smart, coming up with the kind of caper so stupid only the young could have dreamed it up. Then they make the mistake of letting a really bad man in on the action. Horrible possibilities unfold and the pace picks up, leaving us breathless and horrified as we desperately flick the pages to discover just how bad it's going to get. It's a great finale to the collection. All writers are shaped by what they read, and there is a clear line of descent from this style of storytelling to the current crop of best-selling novels labeled by the book trade as "domestic suspense" or "suburban noir." I can't help thinking that authors like Gillian Flynn, Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott and Paula Hawkins have learned a thing or two from such foremothers. Like their predecessors, these contemporary writers are all the more unsettling because they hit just close enough to home to infect us with personal anxiety. The question is whether their works will stand the test of time as well as Sarah Weinman's irresistible octet of suspense and surprise. A clear line of descent to the current crop of 'domestic suspense' best sellers. VAL McDERMID'S most recent novel is "Splinter the Silence."