I admit that I was not always a devotee of crime fiction. My academic training focused on American Modernism, and the fact that this period coincided with the “golden age” of crime fiction and the hard-boiled revolution was well obscured in the literary history I was gathering for myself. There were no explicit prohibitions in my program against delving into genre fiction—in fact, one of my dissertation committee members would go on to write a well-received crime novel—but I had gleaned an implicit message that the way to win respect in academia was to focus on the long-established signifiers of credibility. The closest I came to working on genre fiction was a course on the nineteenth-century gothic novel.

    Yet I also understood the many blind spots of canon formation, as my own focus within American Modernism was on forgotten women writers. My dissertation was about the memoirs of the muses (both written and visual), and the more I read about the interwar period, the more interested I became in the burgeoning body of study on the “middlebrow modern.” Later, a panel on “pulp modernism” at a Modernist Studies Association conference came at a time when I needed my excitement about my scholarship reignited. The more interested in periodical studies I became, the more I realized how much neglected content there was out there, even within my well-trodden time period of choice, to explore. A visit during a pulp studies conference to the periodical repository at James Madison University gave me my first real exposure to the depth of genre writing, and my colleagues at the conference gave me a model for approaching this subject with the same seriousness and respect with which I had been taught to regard high modernism.

    But still I resisted a move toward crime fiction.  Looking back, I think that even more so than my implicit academic bias I was blinded by an assumption that crime fiction was a primarily masculine field somehow, and thus my interest in women writers would not be compatible. Fate intervened in two ways to change my mind: first, I have a respected friend at my institution who has long been a devoted fan of the genre. Though in his era of studies he was explicitly prohibited from pursuing a scholarly interest in the genre, his fandom was as comprehensive, thoughtful, and studied as any scholar I had ever met. It made me want to learn what he saw in these works. The second influence, I can now see, was my decision to pick up a cheap copy of Patricia Highsmith’s novel Edith’s Diary at a used bookstore. I had read The Talented Mr. Ripley during college and had found it intriguing, but I was surprised to see that Highsmith had written a book focused on a female protagonist. 

    Ultimately, I think it is the Edith-esque female characters in crime fiction that kept me coming back again and again. I came of age during the era of popular culture when Bridget Jones reinforced the idea of a loveably-messy fictional woman. The “flaws” these characters exhibited were so mundane that they barely added up to the type of moral and emotional complexity I sought in art. While such characters are certainly relatable, I wondered where the female characters were who had not had their edges sanded off, who would grapple with the same kind of complexities that had been the purview of male characters for millennia. I think that is how I ended up developing a class on the femme fatale figure, where we applied the framework of that archetype to everyone from Eve to Medea to Phyllis Dietrichson to Ivy Lin. To keep the class fresh for myself, I was constantly seeking out new subjects for our reading list. The more crime fiction I read, the more I realized how much variety exists within this single genre. And, even more importantly, I realized how many women writers had been central to the genre going all the way back to the gothic texts which I was already familiar.

    The more I read, the more I realized how much crime fiction tropes had shaped twentieth-century literature. And I began to see these elements in some of my favorite authors, including Shirley Jackson, who I learned was an ardent fan of mysteries herself. When I found out that Jackson had actually met Highsmith early on in both of their careers, I started to imagine a different narrative of mid-twentieth-century American literature, the one that existed all along but which the gender and genre biases of canon formation had kept us from seeing. Both Jackson and Highsmith have been pigeonholed in a single genre—gothic and crime fiction, respectively—each of these writers actually produced a body of work that delved into many different genres, from science fiction to women’s magazines stories. Leigh Brackett provided the final piece of the puzzle for me, the third point of this triangle. Though she is known primarily as the “Queen of the Space Opera,” during her career she also produced a body of crime fiction that ranged from the hard-boiled to domestic suspense. Despite the diversity of their experience and approaches, I realized that all three of these women were writing about the common experiences of pre- and postwar life in original and impactful ways, and thus they offered a counterview of the sanitized version of America that persisted in the rhetoric of this era. Most importantly, their career showed that the version of literary history that I had learned—and that I subsequently was teaching my students—was partial and limited.

    The more crime fiction I have read, of course, the longer my list of “need-to-reads” became. The greatest surprise of my professional life has been discovering just how many women writers maintained thriving careers in the 1940s, -50s, and -60s.  I view this book, then, as a first step, my “in” and the tip of my iceberg. Just as Highsmith’s work has seen new interest each time it has been re-issued by a prominent publishing house, I imagine a future in which mostly-out of print female writers receive the long overdue attention they deserve. Publishers like Otto Penzler, Stark House Press, and the New York Review of Books are making these writers more accessible to modern audiences, and scholarly attention can support that project. Teaching these works in our classrooms would prompt new generations to seek these writers out and thus sustain a legacy to make sure they will not again be forgotten.