Listen: Library of America makes rediscovered genre masterworks available in audio, digital formats

Library of America e-book editions of
The Horizontal Man and Fools’ Gold.

What’s old is new again this fall, when The Library of America simultaneously releases two rediscovered mystery-suspense novels—The Horizontal Man (1946) by Helen Eustis and Fools’ Gold (1958) by Dolores Hitchens—in both audiobook and e-book editions. The two works mark The Library of America's first foray into the audiobook medium.

The Horizontal Man and Fools’ Gold are part of the new LOA two-volume collection Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s, which restores to print eight unjustly overlooked or neglected noir novels of the mid-twentieth century. Surveying the Women Crime Writers set last month in the Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout singled out these two books for particular praise: “Each of them is smartly plotted, tautly written, sharply characterized and not at all dated.”

The Library of America has drawn on established talent for its inaugural audiobook productions. The reader for The Horizontal Man is veteran actress Barbara Rosenblat (Orange Is the New Black), an acclaimed reader with hundreds of titles to her credit, while Fools’ Gold is read by Scott Brick, another experienced narrator whose résumé includes literary classics like In Cold Blood and Light in August. Patti Pirooz, the former publisher of audiobooks at Penguin, produced both The Horizontal Man and Fools’ Gold.

As a special bonus feature, both audiobooks include commentary by Sarah Weinman, editor of Women Crime Writers and an authority on mystery-suspense fiction.

Listen to an excerpt from The Horizontal Man:

Buy from Audible • Buy from iBooks

Listen to a Fools’ Gold excerpt:

Buy from Audible • Buy from iBooks

Meanwhile, e-book editions of The Horizontal Man and Fools’ Gold arrive in response to ongoing demand for Library of America books in electronic form. Click on the relevant links below for specific e-book platforms.

The Horizontal Man
Kindle • Kobo • Google Books • iBooks • Nook

Fools’ Gold
Kindle • Kobo • Google Books • iBooks • Nook

Watch Reader’s Almanac for information on new Library of America audiobooks and e-books in the months ahead.

Visit the Women Crime Writers companion website for complete information on The Horizontal Man and Fools’ Gold and their authors, along with appreciations by contemporary writers and related contextual material.

Related posts:

• Listen: Lost suspense masterwork returns to life in second Library of America audiobook
• Orange Is the New Black star is the voice behind first Library of America audiobook

Women Crime Writers: Forty books, four pen names, and one enigmatic author

Published last week, The Library of America’s two-volume collection Women Crime Writers of the 1940s and 50s has already won praise from the Washington Post and the Charlotte Observer, which says that the anthology “revives many a forgotten masterwork.”

Fools’ Gold author
Dolores Hitchens.

“Forgotten masterwork” is a helpful capsule description of the last novel collected in the set, 1958’s Fools’ Gold by Dolores Hitchens, which had effectively fallen off the cultural radar despite having been made into the film Band of Outsiders by Jean-Luc Godard in 1964. Readers may be curious to know more about Hitchens (1907–1973) beyond what’s contained in The Library of America’s biographical note, which lists the more than forty titles she published under four different names in a career that spanned thirty-five years.

So who was Dolores Hitchens, aka D. B. Olsen, aka Dolan Birkley, aka Noel Burke? Women Crime Writers editor Sarah Weinman has uncovered a 1952 letter from Hitchens to her editor at Doubleday, Isabelle Taylor, which explains at least one change of nom de plume and also serves as a witty miniature author bio. The letter originally saw the light of day in the privately published 1995 Doubleday Crime Club Compendium 1928–1991, edited by Ellen Nehr, and is here reprinted by permission of the Dolores Hitchens estate.

It’s no secret that I am also D. B. Olsen. In fact I’m glad to get away from the Olsen name for a change (not having been married to Mr. Olsen for some twelve years now makes the necessity of continuing to be D. B. Olsen literally a bit irksome). The books I do under the Hitchens label are not the same type. It gives me a fresh lease on life. A new reincarnation, book-wise.

The full name, and I’m not making this up as I go along, is Julia Clara Catherine Maria Dolores Robins Norton Birk Olsen Hitchens. The first five names have been whittled down to one—the only one I like. The five last names are accounted for by a series of step-fathers and two husbands.

I always hated the name Julia and the pay-off came, at a graduation party at High School, when names were used in rhymes on the place-cards, and some would-be poet rhymed Julia with fool-ya. That was the moment when I became, once and for all, Dolores. Wouldn’t you?

I’m taking psychology courses at the local college in my spare (joke) time with the ultimate aim of outfitting my characters with the latest in psychoses and fixations. Last time I wrote you we lived in Eureka but are now back in southern California on the outskirts of Long Beach in a district called Lakewood where the houses are laid overnight, like eggs. An estimated 3,500 people are moving in. We’re in an older district, however, and miss much of the excitement.

Fools’ Gold by Dolores Hitchens is also available as a Library of America e-book and audiobook. Click here (scroll down) for more information on both formats.

Visit the Women Crime Writers companion website for complete information on all eight novels and their authors, along with appreciations by contemporary writers and related contextual material.

Related posts:

• Sarah Weinman: Women Crime Writers anthology tells a new story about genre fiction
• Listen: Lost suspense masterwork returns to life in second Library of America audiobook

Sarah Weinman: Women Crime Writers anthology tells a new story about genre fiction

One week from today, The Library of America proudly publishes Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s, a two-volume collection of eight pioneering novels from the mid-twentieth century that are overdue for rediscovery. Sarah Weinman, widely recognized as an authority on crime fiction, edited the anthology; in the guest post below, she describes how the project came about, what it means for her personally, and its significance for our understanding of women writers in the American noir tradition.

Women Crime Writers:
Eight Suspense Novels
of the 1940s & 50s
(Sept. 2015)

Several years ago, I looked at my bookshelves and realized that the most compelling and creative American crime fiction was being written and published by women. One need only look at recent best seller and awards lists to see example after example, from Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn to The Fever by Megan Abbott, Coptown by Karin Slaughter, and Hush Hush by Laura Lippman. They explore American society, the desires and anxieties of women, and the ways in which anyone could be capable of murder with a surgeon’s precision, a psychologist’s understanding, and hidden reserves of empathy.

That got me to wonder: what of the women who preceded them? I started reading and researching and was floored by what I discovered: a rich trove of nerve-jangling suspense, thick with the fears and longings of women trapped in bad marriages, stuck between parents and children, who show steel and backbone in the most terrifying of circumstances. Here were stories borne out of and belonging to the post–World War II world, when women’s independent spirits, prized while fighting the enemy, were crushed by the return to traditional values. These stories, quite frankly, deserve to be recognized as the classics they are. (Much of that research led to Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, the domestic suspense fiction anthology I edited a few years ago.)

Why weren’t these women getting their due? Why were their male counterparts, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Elmore Leonard, showered with accolades and acclaim, and they were not? It is my greatest pleasure, as editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s, to introduce twenty-first-century readers to eight masters of the genre, part of a literary heritage they may not have realized existed or are eager to learn much more about.

If you’ve seen the wonderful film noirs Laura and In a Lonely Place, prepare to be blown away by the original novels by Vera Caspary and Dorothy B. Hughes. After reading The Blank Wall by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, you may wonder how far you’d go to protect your daughter from murderous ruin. And you’ll never look at a college campus in quite the same way once you’ve read The Horizontal Man, the Edgar Award–winning novel by Helen Eustis.

As for our choices from the 1950s, two of the mystery genre’s greatest practitioners, Charlotte Armstrong and Margaret Millar, present graduate-level clinics in madness and suspense with Mischief and Beast in View. Patricia Highsmith's The Blunderer is not only a major novel but an important precursor to her quintet of Ripley novels. Finally, we’re proud to introduce a new generation to Dolores Hitchens with Fools’ Gold, a tale of delinquent teens and a heist gone very, very wrong.

Women Crime Writers tells a story about crime fiction you may not have been aware of before. But it’s a story that needs to be told, and I am honored to be part of the telling.

Sarah Weinman
(© Michael Lionstar)

Sarah Weinman is the editor of Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense, which the Los Angeles Review of Books called “simply one of the most significant anthologies of crime fiction, ever.” She is the news editor for Publishers Marketplace, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the National Post, and The Washington Post, among other publications. Click here for her Women Crime Writers book tour schedule.

Visit the special Women Crime Writers companion website for complete information on the eight novels and their authors, along with appreciations by contemporary writers and a wealth of contextual material.

Related posts:

• Listen: Lost suspense masterwork returns to life in second Library of America audiobook
• Orange Is the New Black star is the voice behind first Library of America audiobook

Listen: Lost suspense masterwork returns to life in second Library of America audiobook

Last week we shared details of our first-ever audiobook: The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis, a 1946 novel included in our upcoming two-volume anthology Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s.

Fools’ Gold by
Dolores Hitchens
(Doubleday, 1958)

Today we’re equally excited to give a sneak preview of our second audiobook, Fools’ Gold (1958) by Dolores Hitchens, another title in the Women Crime Writers collection. The story of two juvenile delinquents fresh out of lockup and a sheltered young orphan girl who hatch a robbery scheme that goes badly astray, Fools’ Gold is perhaps best known today as the inspiration for Jean-Luc Godard's 1964 film Bande À Part (Band of Outsiders).

A 2011 review by Dan Stumpf on the MysteryFile blog suggests the novel is ripe for reappraisal: Stumpf calls it “a nasty piece of work. . . . quite well done. [Hitchens] has a good feel for letting the characters shape the plot, and she isn’t bothered by a bit of clutter and untidiness as things play out in a nicely cluttered and untidy finale.”

Scott Brick recording Fools’ Gold
in Los Angeles, June 2015.

Longtime audiobook producer Patti Pirooz, who is also handling The Library of America’s Horizontal Man audiobook, is shepherding Fools’ Gold through production in Los Angeles. Behind the microphone is Scott Brick, a writer, actor, and veteran audiobook narrator with more than 600 titles to his credit, ranging from bestsellers like Moneyball and The Bourne Identity to classics like In Cold Blood and Light in August. Publishers Weekly named Brick its “Narrator of the Year” in 2007, and he has won two Audies from the Audio Publishers Association and over fifty Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine for his work as a reader.

Want to hear a sample of the narrating chops that have made Brick so lauded in his field? Enjoy a brief excerpt of his Fools’ Gold reading via the audio player embedded below.



Watch Reader’s Almanac in the coming months for further information about our Fools’ Gold audiobook and Women Crime Writers, both of which will be released in September.

Related post:
Orange Is the New Black star is the voice behind first Library of America audiobook