But are the calls being placed out of jealousy or is it payback for Loren’s indiscretions with John when he was married to someone else?Īlso in a quandary are women in Elisabeth Sanxay Holding’s “The Stranger in the Car” who conspire to preserve their genteel image in the eyes of the family patriarch while simultaneously preventing themselves from being implicated in a murder brought literally to the family’s doorstep.

Helen Nielsen, a successful novelist and television writer for the midcentury “Perry Mason” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” is represented in 1959’s “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” The protagonist in this tense tale is Loren Banion, former secretary and now vice president in a company owned by her husband, John, who’s being taunted with phone calls from an old lover. While independent women are not absent in “Troubled Daughters,” the majority of the stories reflect the lives of women caught between societal expectations of the times and their deeper desires. The story of two cousins who are lifelong rivals for familial and male affections, “Sugar and Spice” is effectively told through flashbacks in a vivid cinematic style that Caspary later perfected in screenplays, most notably “A Letter to Three Wives.” The story also features a strong and independent female character, not unlike Caspary’s iconic career woman in the 1943 novel “Laura” or the author herself.

Yet 1945’s “The Heroine,” Highsmith’s first published work, oozes with the author’s trademark tension in weaving the story of a newly hired au pair whose dedication to her two young charges has an ominous and contemporary edge: “Lucille found herself wishing for some real catastrophe, something dangerous and terrible to befall Heloise, so that she might throw herself between her and the attacker, and prove her great courage and devotion.”Īnother standout is 1943’s “Sugar and Spice” by Caspary, who wrote fiction, stage plays and screenplays. Highsmith, best known among crime readers for her focus on male protagonists in her 1950 debut novel, “Strangers on a Train,” and the Ripley novels, might seem an unusual choice for a domestic-suspense anthology. Weinman’s admiration for contemporary domestic-suspense writers led her to seek out their foremothers, 14 of whom are represented in “Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives.” The anthology spans work published from the 1940s through the 1970s and includes notable short fiction from such recognizable names as Patricia Highsmith, Vera Caspary, Shirley Jackson and Margaret Millar as well as a host of lesser but no less worthy contributors.

Boiled Over by Barbara Ross