“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

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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.

So far, we have examined the early writing career of “Laura” novelist Vera Caspary,  four murder mystery films made between 1932 and 1938 based on variations of a story titled “Suburb,” which Caspary sold to the studios eight times before Paramount told her to knock it off. We made a brief detour to “Easy Living,” in which we found that in adapting Caspary’s original story for the screen, Preston Sturges discarded everything but the title and the principal plot device: a fur coat.

We also looked at Caspary’s attempts at writing for the stage, finding that although she labored diligently on plays, they did not turn out well. Her previous effort before “Laura,” “Geraniums in My Window,” received 27 performances on Broadway and earned poor reviews. New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson described “Geraniums” as “a misshapen piece of Broadway clap-trap.”

”Laura” began as a play – and not a very good one.

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

Spoilers ahead.

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