He could have behaved graciously toward the woman whose novel provided the characters, story, and premise that audiences and critics alike couldn’t resist. The success of Preminger’s adaptation vaulted him out of intra-studio shouting matches into fame and industry clout (and an Oscar nomination). The mix-up makes her a suspect in her own murder. Preminger was just coming off the great success of “Laura,” the film he directed based on Caspary’s novel of the same name, which is included in “Women Crime Writers.” In both the book and the movie, a woman is shot dead in her Manhattan apartment days later, the presumed victim, Laura, walks in the door quite obviously alive. Late in 1944, she was having dinner at the Stork Club when the director Otto Preminger walked in. Here, for example, is a good Caspary story. In a recent piece about the book “Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s,” edited by Sarah Weinman and published this month by the Library of America, Megan Abbott, a woman crime writer of the 2000s, pointed out that “ women are the primary readers of crime fiction.” There is, Abbott noted, a popular theory about this: “that women savor the victim role,” that they “are masochists, unable to rise above the roles assigned them by the patriarchy.”Ībbott rightly refuted this theory, in part by detailing the virtues of the suspense novels that the collection reprints, which do not, in fact, gives us female characters who are mere “victims or corpses.” She might also have pointed to the women who wrote them-Vera Caspary, for instance, who does not, for one moment in her long, unusual life, seem to have imagined herself a victim of anyone or anything. Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Otto Preminger’s film adaptation of Vera Caspary’s “Laura.”
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