“Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror,” edited by Dorothy L. Sayers. From the library of Fernando Pessoa.

In case you just tuned in, I’m using Louella Parsons’ May 15, 1944, item on Rouben Mamoulian being replaced as the director of “Laura” to take a meandering look at the making of the film, which was released in Los Angeles in November 1944. Previous posts have examined the writing career of “Laura” novelist Vera Caspary, her original stories for the screen, her less than successful attempts to write plays – including the first version of “Laura” – and her work on the novel.

Before digging into “Laura,” I thought it would be worthwhile to examine the state of detective fiction as it was in 1941, when Caspary was sketching out the play and then writing her novel.

In the previous post, we found that 1941 was the 100th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and was informally celebrated as the centennial of the detective story. At the time “Laura” was written, the genre was experiencing a surge of interest. In its Sept. 6, 1941, issue, the New Yorker said:  “One out of every four new works of fiction published in the English language is a detective story, and even the New Republic reviews it.”

In this post, we are going to look at some of the central rules of the genre as they were practiced when Caspary was writing “Laura.” The evolution of conventions in the modern detective story is a subject more suitable for a doctoral dissertation than a blog post, so I will leave the exploration of all these sets of rules for the diligent researcher or the aspiring mystery writer (you know who you are).

Keep in mind that such conventions are somewhat artificial and flexible – rather like citing the rules on the tonality of Western music and having Charles Ives come along and do whatever he pleases. Dorothy Sayers might have bemoaned the way romance muddied the clear waters of the detective story, but that didn’t stop her from introducing the multi-novel relationship of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.

Let’s look at a few of the conventions that Caspary follows in “Laura” and — more important — on the ones she violates.

The Making of “Laura” Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15

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“The Case of the Haunted Husband,” a 1941 novel by the prolific Erle Stanley Gardner, listed on EBay at $26.99, with a reinforced dust jacket that might indicate a previous life in a lending library. (Note to millennials: A lending library was a business that rented books for a small fee. Sometimes the fare was popular fiction, other times it might be a little more off-color material that was considered out of bounds for the public library – now you understand the line in “Chinatown.”)

In case you just tuned in, I’m using Louella Parsons’ May 15, 1944, item on Rouben Mamoulian being replaced as the director of “Laura” to take a meandering look at the making of the film, which was released in Los Angeles in November 1944. Previous posts have looked at the writing career of “Laura” novelist Vera Caspary, her original stories for the screen, her less than successful attempts to write plays – including the first version of “Laura” – and her work on the novel.

Before digging into “Laura” as a mystery novel, I thought it would be worthwhile to examine the state of detective fiction as it was in 1941, when Caspary was sketching out the play and then writing the novel.

The Making of “Laura” Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14

Continue reading →