Some Wicked and Wounded Women: The Lethal Sex (1959), edited by John D. Macdonald

....As you read each [story], keep in mind that a woman wrote it, and try to imagine what special qualities inhabit the mind and heart and soul of that woman.  And after you are through, take all of those qualities and form of them a composite woman.

She will be magic and mystery, sensitive, earthy, compelling, wry, humorous, humble, arrogant, diligent, lazy, neat, careless, spiritual and bawdy.  I guess this is a love note to that woman.  She is a very special gal.  And she is, of course, any woman, anywhere....

....Here they are, with their buttons and bows, their silks and scents...and their savage little minds.

--John D. MacDonald, Introduction to The Lethal Sex 

Reading John D. MacDonald's introduction to the 1959 Mystery Writers of America anthology, The Lethal Sex, that he edited, I was struck, 55 years later, by its ill-chosen, patronizing tone (it reads like a sexual proposition en masse to the assembled authors).

At least the MWA focused on women writers, even if they did get a hard-boiled male author to edit and introduce the book. Now, as JDM might say, shall we join the ladies?

There are fourteen stories in The Lethal Sex.  Interestingly, there's not a huge amount of crossover with Sarah Weinman's recent Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives.  We again have the magnificent Margaret Millar, Miriam Allen deFord and Nedra Tyre, but that's it.  However, many of the stories that Weinman collected in her anthology are post-1959, from the 1960s and 1970s.

Macdonald writes that he wanted in his anthology "bite and violence and atmosphere....If you adore those comfy little predictable puzzles, you've bought the wrong book."

Two British authors, Christianna Brand and Anthony Gilbert (yes, AG is a woman), contribute excellent and highly characteristic pieces, Brand's, "Dear Mr. Macdonald," a coy and clever murder story about two sisters, and Gilbert's, "You'll Be the Death of Me," another of this author's parables of the plain woman and the handsome devil (who may be a murdering devil).

Millar's story, "McGowney's Miracle," is an odd--and oddly moving--story about a mortician and the "client" he didn't actually bury.  It definitely has a noirish quality to it.

The concluding tale is a novelette/novella by Juanita Sheridan, whose mystery novel series in Hawaii has been reprinted by Rue Morgue Press and sounds charming.  "There Are No Snakes in Hawaii" tells of an artist and his philistine wife and how their marriage becomes dangerously unglued in Hawaii. It's a compelling tale with excellent local color.

Of the remaining ten stories, my favorites were:

"Snowball," by Ursula Curtiss, one of the most important "domestic suspense" writers of the 1950s and 1960s in my view.  At the snowbound country cottage did the husband murder the wife or the wife the husband?  Or something else?

"He Got What He Deserved," by Bernice Carey, a fine piece or irony about a mother and a daughter and the man who comes between them.

"Two for Tea," by Margaret Manners, which was adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents the previous year, pits a calculating wife against a scheming mistress. Who will win?

"To Be Found and Read," by Miriam Allen deFord, with a male protagonist and a whipsaw final paragraph.

"What Is Going to Happen?", by Nedra Tyre, a dramatic monologue by an eight-year-old girl who seems to have done something very bad.

"Thirty-Nine," by D. Jenkins Smith, about a wife reaching the "dangerous age," is in some ways the most striking of the bunch, visceral in a way I wasn't expecting from such a volume, like a precursor to some of the books by Gillian Flynn and Megan Abbott.

This tale would have made a fine addition to Sarah Weinman's anthology (about which I hope to writing here on Sunday).  Weinman provided some excellent short bios of the authors, something Macdonald did not do.  What about D. Jenkins Smith?