Vera Caspary
Vera Caspary was a prominent American writer born in Chicago on November 13, 1899, known for her evocative contributions to the mystery genre. Her most famous work, "Laura," published in 1943, not only garnered critical acclaim but also inspired a successful Broadway play and a film adaptation. Caspary's writing often features complex female protagonists who navigate the dangers of urban life, reflecting the societal dynamics of 20th-century America. Her characters, marked by individuality and depth, often confront themes of isolation, betrayal, and the quest for identity amidst the superficiality of modern society.
Caspary’s narratives delve into the lives of career women and dreamers, portraying their vulnerabilities and the harsh realities they face. Through her use of literary techniques like multiple viewpoints and red herrings, she crafts intricate plots that challenge readers’ perceptions of morality and justice. Her works also serve as social commentary, critiquing the cultural divides and violence prevalent in American cities. Although many of her novels are out of print today, Caspary remains an influential figure in mystery writing, celebrated for her ability to blend suspense with profound insights into human nature. She passed away on June 13, 1987, in New York.
Vera Caspary
- Born: November 13, 1899
- Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
- Died: June 13, 1987
- Place of death: New York, New York
Type of Plot: Thriller
Contribution
Vera Caspary’s tales of life in large American cities and their suburbs are among the most evocative in the annals of mystery writing. Many of her works, however, have suffered the fate of less powerfully written works by lesser writers because they are out of print and hard to find even on library shelves. Without overtly judging the mores of her twentieth century America, Caspary nevertheless depicts a society of aloof, self-absorbed, and predatory loners and their unrealistic, selfless victims. Dreamers and romantics have little chance of seeing their dreams come true, and too many times they open themselves up to friendship or love, only to be hurt or killed by those whom they trusted.
Caspary’s characters each have individual voices and distinct, original, and often unforgettable personalities. The majority of her characters are developed as three-dimensional rather than as the often disposable, one-dimensional characters of much mystery fiction. Neither her main characters nor her richly constructed settings are easily passed over en route to the conclusion of her stories, for she spends time and effort making certain that they are as real as possible. Caspary writes not only to entertain but also to say something important about the kind of people and places she knows best.
Biography
Vera Caspary was born in Chicago on November 13, 1899, and spent most of her early years in that city. After graduation from the Chicago public schools, she took a variety of jobs, all of which helped her amass the experiences that she would later draw on in her books. She wrote copy at an advertising agency, worked as a stenographer, directed a correspondence academy, and served as an editor of the magazine Dance for two years before turning to freelance writing. Before becoming a mystery writer, however, she wrote novels of a highly romantic coloration between the years 1929 and 1932; in the mid-1930’s, she began writing screenplays for Hollywood producers, an activity she continued until well into the 1960’s.
In 1943, Caspary published what would become her most successful and most remembered mystery novel, Laura, which also became a well-received Broadway play and a film directed by Otto Preminger in 1944. In 1949, she married I. G. Goldsmith. Success with Laura led to the production of fourteen other mysteries, the most noted artistically having been Evvie (1960). Caspary received the Screen Writers Guild Award for her screenplays in 1950. She died on June 13, 1987, in New York.
Analysis
Vera Caspary’s mystery tales often feature women as central characters. With their obscure or provincial backgrounds, they are often career women who have come to the big city for a climb up the corporate ladder or opportunists looking for a rich Mr. Right. Sometimes they are suburbanites unhappy with their situations.
In terms of technique, Caspary uses the devices of the red herring, multiple viewpoint, and double ending to great effect. In Laura, for example, just as the circumstantial case against Shelby Carpenter, Laura’s suitor, becomes strong, the focus shifts to Laura herself, and the circumstantial evidence against her seems to make her, rather than Shelby, the true murderer of her young friend. The reader is allowed to discover that the murdered girl, Diane Redfern, and Shelby had had an affair that might have led to an even deeper romantic entanglement if it had been allowed to continue. Yet, in the background, out of sight and mind for a good portion of the novel, Waldo Lydecker, the murderer, congratulates himself on escaping detection. Only after it is apparent that Waldo had not only a motive (jealousy) but also a weapon like that which had killed Diane (a cane with a hidden shotgun), does he become the chief suspect.
Caspary’s skill at creating double endings and writing from various perspectives makes her writing of exceptional interest. The tale of Laura, for example, is told from several angles: first from the perspective of Waldo Lydecker (an appropriately subtle and self-serving report on a murder by a man who committed it); then, when Waldo stops writing, the story is picked up by a more disinterested party—Mark McPherson, the Scottish-born police detective. Straightforward and austerely written, McPherson’s commentary is completely different in word choice and tone from Waldo’s effete, precious, and self-serving version of things. Last comes Laura’s own account of what transpired, which is, again, much different from what was said before. She is transfixed by the evil she witnesses, and her commentary is full of concern and awe.
Caspary handles double endings, like multiple viewpoints, with great skill. At the end of Evvie, the advertising agency head, Carl Busch, a headstrong, vain, and at times violent man, is arrested for Evvie’s murder, thus providing a seeming end to the novel, appropriate and commonsensical. Yet the novel has not run its course. Before it can end, there is a surprise waiting for readers: It was not the ad man who killed Evvie (nor was it the sinister gangster Silent Lucas described pages earlier); rather, it was the mentally retarded handyman.
In another example, The Man Who Loved His Wife, it is reasonable and even probable for the reader to assume that Elaine Strode was framed by her husband and her stepson and his wife because her husband created a diary that, on his death, would brand Elaine not only as an adulteress but as a murderer as well. There would appear to be no truth to his accusations, and his growing hatred of her seems to be the work of an unhinged mind. Toward the novel’s end, when it is determined by the police detectives that Fletcher Strode was strangled when a dry cleaning bag was placed over the airhole in his neck from which he breathed, readers are led to think that the son and his wife had something to do with it. They would, after all, have a strong motive (insurance money) and the ability to conceive of the plan.
Nevertheless, with a characteristically wry twist, Caspary allows the novel to end with Elaine’s confessing to the murder. The author has a laugh at the readers’ expense, for anyone who truly followed the evidence in the case would know that it must have been Elaine who killed Fletcher. Yet, because readers like Elaine, they tend to overlook the evidence and vote with their hearts, not their minds. The facts are that Elaine, bored and restless, did have a brief affair, did get tired of seeing her husband lying inert in bed, did resent his bullying, and therefore solved all her problems by killing him.
Caspary’s murderers, seldom obvious killers, range from the unusual and absurd to everyday people encountered on any street of any city. They have little in common with one another except a need to exert power. Some are genuine monsters; others are merely pawns of their own inner demons. Products of the heterogenous, violent American cities and suburbs, they carry out the inner directives that others also receive but on which they fail to act. Just as interesting as Caspary’s murderers are her victims. Sometimes readers know much about the victim before his or her death; other times, reader only learn about him or her through the reminiscences of others. In Evvie, for example, victim Evelyn Ashton, though she is dead from the outset of the novel, is resurrected for readers by the narrator Louise Goodman. The book becomes not only a murder mystery but also a celebration of the life of a career woman who loved much and died a sordid death.
Social commentary is an important part of Caspary’s stories. Implicit in her work is the idea that Americans have created a dangerous society, a cultural split between the haves and have-nots, where the rich ignore the poor and flaunt their wealth and the poor, for their part, envy and hate the rich. Such a society always has violence below the surface, ready to erupt. The immorality of such a society is not so much a result of the breakdown of morals among bohemians but among those of the mainstream who set society’s tone. In this period of human conflict, the moral calluses people have developed keep them from developing appropriate responses to the needs of others. Locked in selfishness and motivated by greed, Caspary’s world is one in which human life is cheap. With her implicit critique of American mores, Caspary is more than a pedestrian mystery writer. She is a wonderfully accurate portrayer of young, romantic people living in an indifferent milieu that, by necessity, must destroy romance.
Laura
Laurais set in New York City’s well-heeled Lower East Side. Laura Hunt, the protagonist, is a lovely although spoiled young woman to whom men are easily drawn. Charming, intelligent, and upwardly mobile, she is emblematic of all Caspary’s female protagonists. Despite the fact that Laura is resourceful, she is neither as self-sufficient nor as knowing as she believes herself to be. To her horror, she discovers early in the story that trusting, resourceful women can be the targets of murderers.
When it is made apparent that a female friend was murdered by mistake and that the real victim was to have been Laura herself, she becomes both disillusioned with human nature and extremely frightened. For perhaps the first time in her life, Laura finds that despite her beauty, wit, education, and money, life is no more secure for her than it is for a prostitute on the street. When detective Mark McPherson appears to ask her questions about her friend’s death, she opens herself up to him, only to discover her vulnerability once more. She finds that she is a murder suspect, but she hopes that McPherson can shield her from harm.
Her self-perceived ability to evaluate the character of others is also severely undermined when she is told that the murderer must certainly be someone who knows her well. Finding no one close to her who fits that description, Laura is clearly baffled for the first time in her life. She not only learns to distrust people but also discovers that distrusting others is the basis of modern urban life.
Evvie
More hedonistic but no less vulnerable than Laura Hunt, Evelyn Ashton—better known as Evvie—of the novel Evvie seems only to discover her worth through the men she loves, most of whom are of the fly-by-night variety. Idealistic and sensitive like Laura, Evvie wants to ease the painful existence of the less fortunate people she encounters in Chicago’s streets, believing that by opening herself to them she will not be harmed. This dangerously cavalier attitude leads to her death when she allows a mentally retarded man whom she barely knows into her apartment, and he proceeds to bludgeon her to death with a candlestick in a fit of sexually induced frustration. Evvie’s destruction can be seen as confirming the belief of conservative American society about the fate of young women who come to large cities and lead a single lifestyle there.
Unintentionally, perhaps, Caspary may be exhibiting this mainstream outlook that posits the idea that cities are evil and that single women ought to get married and live in the safer suburbs. Independence and rebelliousness will lead only to destruction. Evvie, wanting to lead a bohemian life, allows urban violence into her life and dies because of it. By so doing, she serves as a convenient scapegoat for her suburban sisters, who enjoy hearing tales of big-city adventurers without exposing themselves to big-city dangers.
The Man Who Loved His Wife
Like Laura and Evvie, Elaine Strode of The Man Who Loved His Wife (1966) is a remarkable and resourceful woman of many talents who is victimized by a man. Yet, unlike them, she is also capable of being a victimizer and murderer. Caspary here seems to have altered her view of women’s potential for violence. It would be hard to imagine the women in her stories about the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1950’s as anything but kind and considerate. Elaine, on the other hand, though as remarkable a woman as Laura or Evvie, is much tougher than either. Victimized to a limited extent by her domineering husband, Fletcher, Elaine takes charge of their lives after he loses his booming voice to cancer of the larynx. Unable to force his wife to do his bidding, he has to resort to manipulation based on her alleged sympathy for his plight.
Elaine, later found to be guilty of Fletcher’s murder by strangulation, is overall an appealing character—strong beautiful, intelligent, well-read, and resourceful, a good match for a successful, egotistical husband. Like other Caspary women, however, she is not content to remain a housebound American wife. For her, marriage has become hell. Distraught because of both her loss of physical contact with Fletcher and his increasingly paranoid delusions about her secret affairs, Elaine decides to change what she can change, despite the fact that these alterations can be ushered in only by murder.
Because she is highly sexed, Elaine resembles other Caspary characters whose physical needs often get them into trouble. By being overtly sexual, Elaine breaks a long-standing American taboo, a holdover from Victorian days, against women being sexually adventurous (even though men can be as venturesome as they wish).
One theme that emerges in Caspary’s crime novels is a sense that conformity brings rewards to those who choose it over bohemianism and that those few who do rebel will often pay a fearsome price for their defiance of custom. Caspary’s female characters are free spirits who choose to follow any force that dominates them, whether it be the pursuit of money, of fame, or of love. Male characters are magnetically drawn to these women and encourage them to be unconventional, yet they also try to take advantage of them.
This is not to imply that Caspary’s Evvie, Laura, or other female characters are always admirable, for there is a certain lassitude to their personalities, a kind of amoral drift as a result of lack of concern for the effects of their actions, that makes them flawed characters. One of the author’s gifts is that she, unlike many crime-novel writers, is able to render rounded portraits of these women and the men who surround them. That they sometimes act in contradictory or paradoxical ways is an indication that Caspary has created flesh-and-blood characters rather than one-dimensional cutouts.
Bibliography
Bakerman, Jane S. “Vera Caspary’s Fascinating Females: Laura, Evvie, and Bedelia.” Clues: A Journal of Detection 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1980): 46-52. This comparison of Caspary’s most famous and striking female characters reveals the mechanics of the author’s representation of gender.
Carlin, Lianne. Review of Laura, by Vera Caspary. The Mystery Lovers/Readers Newsletter 3, no. 3 (February, 1970): 31. A review geared toward avid fans of the genre.
Caspary, Vera. The Secrets of Grown-Ups. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979. The author’s autobiography; essential reading for those who seek her own opinions on her life and work.
Giffuni, Cathe. “A Bibliography of Vera Caspary.” Clues 16, no. 2 (Fall/Winter, 1995): 67-74. Useful checklist of Caspary’s works.
Huang, Jim, ed. They Died in Vain: Overlooked, Underappreciated, and Forgotten Mystery Novels. Carmel, Ind.: Crum Creek Press, 2002. Caspary’s Laura is a surprising entry in this book about underappreciated works of detective fiction.
Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Contains an essay on the life and work of Caspary.
McNamara, Eugene. “Laura” as Novel, Film, and Myth. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Compares the novel and the film as texts, as well as discussing popular perceptions of each.
Malmgren, Carl D. Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001. Includes discussion of Laura. Bibliographic references and index.
Penzler, Otto, ed. The Great Detectives. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Argues for including Caspary’s Detective Mark McPherson among the mystery genre’s “great detectives.”