Women in Noir: Sleuths & Sages

WOMEN IN NOIR is a three-volume collection that features some of the famed crime and suspense writer Cornell Woolrich’s most exciting short fiction. These 22 stories are exceptional for the sole reason that they feature and center women, whether as the protagonist or the narrator herself, something not often seen done by Woolrich’s contemporaries. Lurking between the lines of these stories is one still more fascinating – that of Woolrich’s doomed partnerships with women and the tortured love/hate relationship with his mother. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, you’ll find within these volumes some of the most unique and dynamic female characters ever conceived in the crime and suspense genres, many of whom haven’t been given life on the printed page in decades.

Sleuths and Sages brings you eight of the savviest gals in the Woolrich canon. Regular women solving crimes permeate these pages, and while cops might not believe their hunches, these intrepid women feel compelled to do what’s right. In these eight stories, they do what men can’t, or won’t—go undercover, act as bait, and set elaborate traps to catch the bad guys:

-The Dancing Detective

-The Book that Squealed

-The Case of the Killer-Diller

-The Riddle of the Redeemed Dips

-Murder at Mother's Knee

-The Body in Grant's Tomb

-The Death Rose

-The Humming Bird Comes Home

Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich (1903–1968) is one of America's best crime and suspense writers, and sometimes wrote under the pseudonyms William Irish or George Hopley. He invented and mastered the genre of "pulp-fiction" and wrote hundreds of short stories, novellas and full-length novels. One of his most famous stories was “It Had to be Murder,” which was adapted into the classic Alfred Hitchcock film Rear Window in 1954.