Out Now: WOMEN CRIME WRITERS: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s

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Welcome to the official home of Sarah Weinman, writer, editor, and Crime Lady.

I’m the editor of WOMEN CRIME WRITERS: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America, 2015); and TROUBLED DAUGHTERS, TWISTED WIVES: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense (Penguin Books, 2013).  You can learn much more about the eight books included in the two LoA volumes at the companion website, which includes specially commissioned appreciations by some of the world’s most renowned crime writers in the country. TROUBLED DAUGHTERS was nominated for an Anthony Award and garnered tremendous critical praise, with the <a href=“http://lareviewofbooks.org/review/criminal-kind-noir-women/" target=”self”>Los Angeles Review of Books _deeming it “simply one of the most significant anthologies of crime fiction, ever.” 

Lately I’ve been concentrating my efforts on narrative feature journalism, focusing on stories at the intersection of crime and culture (and books & publishing.) Most recently I wrote about a mass shooting that happened at an outdoor concert in Winfield, Kansas in 1903 for Buzzfeed as well as the influence of the 1973 murder of Iowa nursing student Sarah Ottens upon key works by Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta — who herself died in mysterious circumstances a decade later — for the Guardian. Other recent and favorite features include:

  • “The Hollywood Ladies of Serie Noire” (Los Angeles Review of Books, April 2016) — a dual look at two needlessly obscure 1940s noir novelists and screenwriters, Gertrude Walker and Marty Holland, among the first women published by Gallimard’s famed Serie Noire imprint
  • “The Case of the Disappearing Black Detective Novel” (New Republic, Jan/Feb 2016) — reviving the lost career of Hughes Allison, the first black writer to appear in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine
  • “Why Can’t You Behave?” (Hazlitt, July 2015) — on revisiting the Alice Crimmins case on its 50th anniversary by sifting through the actual evidence
  • “The Real Lolita” (Hazlitt, November 2014) — on the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner and its inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov’s iconic 1955 novel
  • “The Brand is My Business” (The Nation, April 2014) — on John Banville’s Philip Marlowe novel and the curious case of literary brand management
  • “The Murderer and the Manuscript” (New York Times Magazine, January 2014) — on a debut private detective novelist currently serving a life sentence for murder

The best way to keep track of what I’m up to is to subscribe to The Crime Lady, my weekly-ish newsletter of what I’m reading, watching, listening to, and linking. It generally goes out on Wednesdays.

You can also find me frequently on Twitter,  regularly Facebook,  and (though it’s private, deliberately) Instagram. Thanks so much for dropping by! Someday I hope to have a real website here. Truly I do.