The State Vs Elinor Norton

Though a woman has confessed to murder, her friend tries to piece together what really happened in a mystery from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author. The state has accused beautiful young Elinor Norton of murder, and she refuses to mount a defense. Guilt is written all over her elegant features, but her childhood best friend refuses to believe it when Elinor confesses to the crime. Forced into a dull marriage against her will, Elinor is just beginning to adjust to life with Lloyd when she meets the man who will tear her world apart. Blair Leighton is her husband’s best friend and was his companion in the war, and he has a charm that makes Elinor quiver from the inside out. At first, her husband is oblivious to this illicit attraction, but when the two men go into business together, the tension threatens to rip the triangle apart. Soon, Elinor is forced to make a chilling decision. One of these men must die—but which?

The mystery stories and other popular fiction of Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) brought her wealth and fame, but she was much more than a writer. She was a well-known American, respected and loved during a time when few women achieved national influence.Her early life was conventional enough. Trained as a nurse, she met and married a physician, with whom she had three sons. She was living the stereotypical life of a young matron in Allegheny (now part of Pittsburgh), when her husband's investments evaporated during a stock market crash. She began writing as a means to supplement the family income. Rinehart became a prolific writer. In addition to her mysteries, she wrote serious fiction, plays, poems, magazine articles, and editorials. Her regular contributions to the Saturday Evening Post were immensely popular and helped the magazine mold middle-class taste and manners.In this fascinating account of a woman ahead of her time, Cohn illuminates the tensions that pervaded Rinehart's life. Rinehart's commercial success conflicted with her domestic roles of wife and mother; she often endured periods of illness and depression but also pursued adventure, including a job as the first woman war correspondent at the Belgian front during World War I. Throughout, Cohn presents Rinehart as a woman of many complexities whose zest for life always prevailed.

In contrast to most studies of literature from the Great Depression which focus on representations of poverty, labor, and radicalism, this project analyzes popular representations of middle class life.

In this remarkable book, Martha Hailey DuBose has given those multitudes of readers who love the mystery novel an indispensable addition to their libraries. Unlike other works on the subject, Women of Mystery is not merely a directory of the novelists and their publications with a few biographical details. DuBose combines extensive research into the lives of significant women mystery writers from Anna Katherine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart with critical essays on their work, anecdotes, contemporary reviews and opinions and some of the women's own comments. She takes us through the Golden Age of the British women mystery writers, Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Allingham and Tey, to the leading crime novelists of today, focused on the women who have become legends of the genre. And though she laments, "so many mysteries, so little time," she makes a good effort a mentioning "some of the best of the rest." When DuBose writes of the lives of her principal players, she relates them to their times, their families, their personal situations and above all to their books. She subtly points out that Sayers, whose experience with the men in her life was inevitably disastrous, created in Lord Peter the ideal lover -- one who is all that a woman desires and needs. DuBose gives us the curriculum vitae that Dorothy Sayers created to help her bring Peter Wimsey to a virtual actuality. Ngaio Marsh would give up an active presence in the theatrical world she loved, but she recreated it for herself as well as her readers in many of her novels. The biographies of these woman are as engrossing as the stories they wrote, and Martha DuBose has shined a different, intimate and intriguing light on them, their works, and the lives that informed those works. This book is so full of treasure it's hard to see how any mystery enthusiast will be able to do without it. And what a gift it would make for anyone on your list who has been heard to announce "I love a mystery." Some of the treats inside: In the Beginning: The Mothers of Detection Anna Katherine Green Mary Roberts Rinehart A Golden Era: The Genteel Puzzlers Agatha Christie Dorothy L. Sayers Ngaio Marsh Margery Allingham Josephine Tey Modern Motives: Mysteries of the Murderous Mind Patricia Highsmith P.D. James Ruth Rendell Mary Higgins Clark Sue Grafton and more!!

This was the first bibliography and guide to the American mass market paperback book, and it remains one of the most definitive. The major index is by author, and lists: author, title, publisher, book number, year of publication, and cover price. The title index lists titles and authors only. The publisher index provides a history of that imprint, with addresses, number ranges, and general physical description of the books issued. This is the place that all study of the American paperback must begin.