JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Back in 2003, before YouTube, before Twitter and Instagram and Pinterest, young Sarah Weinman was a crime fiction lover who decided to start a "weblog," as they were then known. Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, with its book reviews, author interviews, tales of true crime and news of the publishing world became a daily must-read for writers, readers and publishing insiders. Its success boosted Sarah to national visibility: she became a columnist for the LA Times and the Baltimore Sun, an editor at the publishing industry news blog GalleyCat, and eventually led to her current job as an editor at Publishers Marketplace.
Along the way, she became the go-to historian and literary scholar for all things crime fiction, appearing in publications such as the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Her short stories have been anthologized in several books, including Dublin Noir and Damn Near Dead, and have appeared online as well as in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.
You can see why we're excited to have Sarah here at Jungle Red Writers. In fact, we think she has so much to say of interest to our readers that we've taken the unusual step of inviting her as our guest for two days running. Today, she talks about a particular kind of sleuthing: that of bringing forgotten women writers back from obscurity.
In the book world there are dreams so
many writers dream they almost feel like cliché. Publishing a novel
before the age of thirty. Cracking a major bestseller list. Seeing
hundreds or thousands of fans at a book signing. Winning a
prestigious award. Finding that signature character that will be read
and remembered years after leaving the mortal coil.
Having indulged in a few of these
reveries myself – and hey, some of them are still within the realm
of possibility – I'm no stranger to grand writerly fantasies. But I
know that when I look back on whatever further career develops, I'll
be glad my first book was an anthology. Especially this anthology.
Here's why:
It's not about me. Yes,
my name's on the book, I wrote the introduction and selected the
stories. And, aside from Dorothy Salisbury Davis, still sharp and
spry at the age of 97, I'm the only living representative readers and
media can contact. But what would make me utterly giddy is if
Troubled Daughters,Twisted Wives
spurred current readers to go out looking for what else the authors
in the anthology wrote. Which leads to...
If
reissues happen as a result, the anthology is already a success. In
some instances, backlists are readily available. Patricia
Highsmith's, thanks to W.W. Norton and Grove/Atantic, and Shirley
Jackson's thanks to Penguin and FSG. Helen Nielsen's, thanks to
Prologue Books. Open Road filled in the gaps for Dorothy B. Hughes
that NYRB Classics and The Feminist Press hadn't, and also sell much
of Charlotte Armstrong's ouevre,
too. Stark House Press has been doing yeoman's work with many books
by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, and Vera Caspary's greatest suspense
novels are also under The Feminist Press's watch.
But Margaret Millar's work remains, for the most part, shamefully out
of print. The same goes for Davis, Celia Fremlin, Nedra Tyre, Joyce
Harrington, and Miriam Allen deFord. The greater the awareness of
these excellent writers off of single stories, the better chance of
more permanent fixing in the literary and crime fiction canon.
I
learned some valuable skills.
The key reason I began work on TroubledDaughters
was to give proper due to 20th
century domestic suspense fiction, and the female writers who found
their voice within this category. But I also wanted to learn about
aspects of book publishing I wasn't exposed to as a reporter, critic,
and occasional pundit.
People
in the book business speak of permissions with grumbling impatience,
and there were certainly times – luckily, not that many – when
negotiating with an agency or author estate spiked my blood pressure.
But those moments were easily counteracted by the satisfaction o
f
being able to tell the child or grandchild of one of the authors that
yes, their work would be discovered by a new audience. And yes, I
thought the work was good and still held up well and resonated
further in the 21st
century.
f
being able to tell the child or grandchild of one of the authors that
yes, their work would be discovered by a new audience. And yes, I
thought the work was good and still held up well and resonated
further in the 21st
century.
An
anthology requires old-fashioned detective work. There
were mean streets and blind alleys and wild goose chases and lots and
lots and lots
of waiting, the same as any detective, working for a police
department or a private firm, knows. Some estates or rightsholders
were so readily available it took less than an hour to track down.
Others took weeks or months. And, in the case of Miriam Allen deFord,
the matter of who controls her literary rights is such a mystery that
even the daughter of the Bay Area-based ACLU lawyer who was deFord's
executor until his death in 1998 didn't have an answer. That's a
whole other story I'd like to tell someday – hopefully with a
gratifying resolution.
The
stories are terrific.
These fourteen women, along with dozens of their contemporaries, knew
how to tell a chilling suspense tale that is impossible to put down
until the reader is done. I still recall my own vivid sense of horror
or wonder or voiced-out-loud amazement at these stories, wondering
how so many of them had all but been consigned to the dust pile. Now,
I hope, they won't ever be again.
Please join us tomorrow for our group interview with Sarah! You can find out more about Sarah Weinman at her website (currently undergoing renovation) and at Domestic Suspense. You can friend her on Facebook, follow her on Twitter as @sarahw, and check out her Tumblr.
BREAKING NEWS: And we are DEAD ON THE LEVEL (see above)--a signed copy of Sarah's new book to one lucky commenter today..and one tomorrow! Hurray! (And hurry..it could VANISH IN AN INSTANT.)
BREAKING NEWS: And we are DEAD ON THE LEVEL (see above)--a signed copy of Sarah's new book to one lucky commenter today..and one tomorrow! Hurray! (And hurry..it could VANISH IN AN INSTANT.)
