Atomic Renaissance: Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s and 1950s [Hardcover]

This book contains biographies of seven women whose writing careers reached their heights in the 40's and 50's.
The writers included are: Margaret Millar, Leslie Ford, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Dorothy B. Hughes, Charlotte Armstrong, Patricia Highsmith, and Mignon G. Eberhart.
The lives are all interesting if you enjoy reading biography. The author has done a credible job of analysing the work of these women, summarizing the plots of their best work and also pointing out the shortcomings of the books that were not up to each woman's best effort. And, of course, he has included the usual biographical data, date and place of birth, family, education and awards. He has included a bibliography of each writer's work in their section, and a short list of the names of writers currently in publication who write in a similar style. Also, the book is fully indexed.
While I have read some work of at least five of the seven women, my favorite is Phoebe Atwood Taylor and her inclusion is the reason I bought the book. I have read and sometimes re-read all of her books. Her life had none of the drama of Millar's, for example, whose life had elements of tragedy and periods of anguish, or Highsmith, who was angry, usually lonely and who acknowledged being lesbian at the age of 69. I was saddened to read that of all these writers who garnered such awards as Mystery Writer's of America Grand Master (Millar) and two Edgars (Hughes) and the Malice Domestic Lifetime Acheivement (Eberhard) plus numerous others, Atwood Taylor received none, not even a nomination.
But then I was comforted by an imagined "tea" in the corner of heaven reserved for mystery writers. The ladies are reminising about their earthly success and PAT has the last word because her amusing, regional mysteries are still being printed, read and enjoyed thirty years after her death.
It is unfortunate that amazon.com did not include in their book description a list of the authors covered in this book. I think if they had, search engines would lead fans of any of these women to this volume.

Jeffrey Marks' thesis might have been developed a little bit more, but in general you get the feeling his instincts are wholly on target, and that the explosion of the atom bomb is a potent analogue for the explosion of female thriller talent around the time of Second World War. Though several, in fact nearly all, of his seven chosen subjects began writing somewhat earlier. However, the seven women are so distinctive that I have trouble finding enough similarities to each other to prove any point one way or the other. Marks, whose biography of Craig Rice is one of the shining achievements of biography within the past 15 years, has worked up his research into a solid grab bag of amusing profiles, and he respects his readers enough to leave us wanting more, for each of the writers he surveys deserves a full length "life of her own."

He admits defeat in a few cases, and we never really get to know either Leslie Ford nor Phoebe Atwood Taylor very well--there just doesn't seem to be much of an "in" in either case. Readers have long wondered why Atwood Taylor abandoned writing right at the peak of her career and, even though she lived another 20 plus years, never touched a pen after her middle-aged marriage. Was she just tired of writing? Did she give up her career to please her husband? Did her husband provide her with enough money so she did not need to continue? Marks doesn't really know and neither do we. With Dorothy Hughes, and a similar career twist, Marks is on firmer ground--the demands of her family, and a subtle sort of "graylisting" connected to her left wing political affiliations, prevented her from writing fiction for years at a stretch.

Patricia Highsmith and Mignon Eberhart have both been written about at full length by rival biographers, of course, but Marks is able to give their familiar--and very sad--stories a new angle or two. (Rick Cypert's biography is persuasive in its reading of Eberhart as an American modernist, like Gertrude Stein, while Marks takes up the postwar, post-modernist innovator with equal aplomb.)

The two most talented writers he surveys (in my own opinion, of course, for many would cite Highsmith as the best) are Margaret Millar and Charlotte Armstrong, both shamefully underrated elsewhere. Marks treats Millar as the tragic figure she was--nearly a Medea in her devotion to her husband, and an enigma to her suffering daughter. Marks could have even upped the tragedy angle if he had written about the Eudora Welty-Ross Macdonald-Millar triangle, in which Macdonald's and Welty's different biographers have uniformly cast her as the villain. This was Marks' chance to let us see the affair from her own point of view. But, we get enough skilled literary criticism to forgive him this one omission. As for Armstrong, she of all US novelists deserves her own biography--indeed she should have gotten the Nobel Prize--or perhaps that's too strong.

Who else would you have included in this book? For me, I have always wondered about Mabel Seeley, and Mildred Davis? Or what's her name who wrote the best spy thriller of WWII, The Seventeenth Letter?

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