Well done if you know who Margaret Millar, Vera Caspary, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Olive Higgins Prouty and Dorothy B Hughes are; some of the names are deliciously improbable.
At Heathrow T4 waiting for a flight to Valletta I browsed the books in W H Smith. A large number were by Lee Child, an author I have not read. I plumped for a fat paperback by Richard Osman in the Thursday Murder Club series. It reminds me of when I continued reading Enid Blyton when I was too old for that genre – a guilty pleasure. Then I saw a table of classic lit, much of which I had read, and picked In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B Hughes. She and the others are all female crime writers of the 1940s and 1950s.
In a Lonely Place is a terrifying, unputdownable psychological thriller; very noir. It was published in 1947. The Talented Mr Ripley, 1955, is remarkably similar. Hughes’s characters drink improbably copious glasses of whisky and smoke cigarettes constantly. Her anti-hero doesn’t have the charm and sophistication of Ripley. I reckon Highsmith was in love with him and Hughes was not too fond of Dix Steele.
It was made into a major motion picture, as they say, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Graham and directed by Gloria’s husband, Nicholas Ray. The film was a success but its plot deviates substantially from the book.