Bunny Lake Is Missing

by Evelyn Piper

  The chance to encounter or encounter anew female writers of pulp makes us wonder whether women writers dream a dream fashioned out of the longings and anxieties distinctive to female experience. Is the gratified wish different for women? Does the sense of menace originate in a different place in the psyche? Is a lonely place just a lonely place we all enter, or do women and men experience isolation differently? Bunny Lake Is Missing, like many of its sister fictions, raises these questions and by doing so also calls into question the social pieties and puritanical sexual mores of its time. Perhaps women writing pulp want us to feel (rather than rationally know) that the realities of the world are hard, hard enough to inspire and even demand unresigned counternarratives of the way the world not only does work but might work.

  But providing alternative descriptions of the world isn’t what makes pulp so shocking to the uninstructed or unsuspecting mind. It is in creating a new language for reality, language that seems to have seeped through the body’s secretions, its fearful sweats and anguished tears, that female pulp makes us feel and learn something new, even startling, about the world. This even the rational doctor Newhouse grasps in trying to understand the “piquancy” of Piper’s pulp heroine:

  Occasionally, the doctor thought, as, for example, it must have been with Keats, where the feverishness attendant on his T.B. added a special quality to his poetry, so with this girl; her delusion added to her piquancy. Her hysteria made her eyes notable and every motion of hers became exciting. When that died down, he told himself, she would resemble the others.

  This is both a psychiatric diagnosis and an invocation to the muse of pulp fiction. Hysteria individualizes; it converts heightened sensation into sensational poetry. Coursing through the flat plains of pulp prose we stumble across a seam of corded, twisted language, the language of palpable hysteria, of feeling too insistently itself, too knotted to be beaten easily into pulp. Usually these sudden spikes of feverish poetry come in that hard-boiled form of one liners, like this unmaidenly retort to an offer of respectable love from Skyscraper: “I can’t stand men with honorable intentions and small incomes.” Such lines say more about the hard choice between money and love that can warp a woman’s feelings in capitalist society than any sociological treatise or creditably subversive, politically correct plot. And can any didactic or incendiary tract protest more eloquently against the violence and shattered promises of American life than the motto of Blanche’s dark faith, “In gun I trust”?

  At other times the feeling captured is less practical and ideologically serviceable, a feeling that seems to spurt out of some abscess of the mind, lancing some hidden corruption we were too squeamish to acknowledge. Such emotional abjection is captured with uncanny power by Taylor in The Girls in 3-B when she describes the appalled feelings of a young woman who finds herself unable to resist the sexual advances of a man who physically repels her: “She saw herself crawling, slinking to her hole like the other basement animals, the mice that came out at night to feed from the garbage cans, the slick quick roaches and the scuttling thousand-legged worms.” This feeling of being “shamed, lost, doomed” is known only to creatures of darkness and those writers who illuminate their plight. Piper sees herself as one of these chroniclers of the underworld, teeming with verminous life, that lies just beneath the clean bright surface of the ordinary, brightly colored world: “The walls were brilliantly blue, but the paint was so lumpy that it seemed as if someone had simply painted the bright, clean colors right over whatever had been underneath; that dirt, insects, mouse droppings were permanently fixed in the paint like flies in amber.” Piper enjoys stripping off the paint, exposing the dirt and subterranean life beneath. Her imagination gravitates to those places where she might create her own flies in amber. This is the literary ground of glandular realism. This, in the tradition of female pulp fiction, is as real as it gets, but it is enough. And it keeps us coming back for more.

  Maria DiBattista

  Princeton University

  1. The theme of the docile, babbling mother who is transformed into a heroine once her child is threatened is given another virile turn in The Nanny. There the delicate, sensitive, and self-doubting mother-wife surprises everyone, including herself, when maternal instinct reveals her capacity for heroism in the Hemingway tradition: “Now she was like—she was like—like that Spanish girl in the Ernest Hemingway picture, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Maria, wasn’t it: The Fascisti had shaved that girl’s head (and raped her) but she was healed, and up on the mountain top she became a heroine” (222–23).

  2. Piper may be offering a homage to Melanie Klein, psychoanalytic portraitist of the “good” and “bad” mother as fantasized by the child dependent on her care, in the figure of Miss Klein, the teacher who skillfully, if impersonally, superintends the children, and in the character of Officer Klein, the “kind” policeman assigned to look for Bunny but who Blanche later spots in a bowling alley. Piper seems fascinated by the way motherhood is defined and evaluated, since she returns to the theme of the wicked and good mother in her psychological horror tale, The Nanny. Klein’s complex account of the child’s relation to the mother is developed throughout her work, but is most succinctly and elegantly expressed in “Love, Guilt, and Reparation” (see The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. 1: Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–1945, London: Virago, 1988).

  3. The titles of films that preceded and followed the twenty-episode series The Perils of Pauline (1914) suggest how Pearl White’s character was indebted to Victorian notions of female conduct and destiny: Home, Sweet, Home; Helping Him Out; Angel of the Slums; For the Honor of the Name (all from 1911); A Dip Into Society; Pearl as a Clairvoyant; Pearl’s Admirers; Knights and Ladies; Pleasing Her Husband; Hearts Entangled (all 1913); A Lady I Distress (1915). My favorite is What Didn’t Happen to Mary! (1914) Still, intimations of a nascent modern womanhood can be glimpsed in the titles, if in nothing else, of The Lady in Pants, The Lady Doctor, and (a tarnished Pearl perhaps) The White Moll (1912). Filmography and selected list can be found on http://www.classicimages.com/1997/july97/white.html.

  4. More imagination is it, actually.

  5. Rightly criticizing the film’s over-emphatic musical score, Neil Young goes on to comment: “As a breather from the muzak, top pop comb The Zombies turn up on a pub TV showing ‘Ready Steady Go,’ then later we hear their tunes blaring out of a transistor radio. Several Zombies cuts are played—perhaps the result of some deal between Preminger and their record company—so how bizarre it is that these don’t include the band’s most famous track, the all-too-appropriate 1964 smash ‘She’s Not There’!” Neil Young, seen in 7 December, CineSide, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to be found on www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film

  WORKS CITED

  Books

  Baldwin, Faith. 2003. Skyscraper. New York: Feminist Press, 2003. (Originally published by Dell Publishing Company, 1931.)

  Hughes, Dorothy B. 2003. In a Lonely Place. New York, Feminist Press (Originally published by Duell, Sloane & Pearce, 1947. Pulp paperback edition, Pocket Book, 1949.)

  Moers, Ellen. 1977. Literary Women. New York: Anchor.

  Piper, Evelyn. 1964. The Nanny. New York: Atheneum.

  ______. 2004. Bunny Lake Is Missing. New York: Feminist Press. (Originally published by Harper & Brothers, 1957. Pulp paperback edition, Dell Publishing Company, 1965.)

  ______. 1956. The Lady and Her Doctor. New York: Harper & Brothers.

  Taylor, Valerie. 2003. The Girls in 3-B. New York: Feminist Press. (Originally published by Fawcett Publications, 1959.)

  Films

  Bunny Lake Is Missing. 1965. Dir. Otto Preminger. Columbia.

  About The Feminist Press

  The Feminist Press is an independent nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. We publish exciting writing by women and men who share an activist spirit and a belief in choice and equality. Founded in 1970, we began by rescuing “lost” works by writers such as Zora Nea
le Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and established our publishing program with books by American writers of diverse racial and class backgrounds. Since then we have also been bringing works from around the world to North American readers. We seek out innovative, often surprising books that tell a different story.

  See our complete list of books at feministpress.org, and join the Friends of FP to receive all our books at a great discount.

  Femmes Fatales restores to print the best of women’s writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-twentieth century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era.

  SKYSCRAPER

  Faith Baldwin

  Afterword by Laura Hapke

  eISBN: 9781558617872 | ISBN: 9781558614574

  Lynn is an ambitious young woman who loves her job in a gleaming new Manhattan skyscraper. Soon, Lynn falls in love with Tom, the young clerk down the hall. They are so in love that if they don’t get married, something improper is bound to happen. . . . But her company has a strict new policy: Any woman who marries will be immediately fired. First published in 1931 as a serial in Cosmopolitan—the same year the Empire State Building opened its doors—Skyscraper marks the advent of a new kind of romance, and a new kind of heroine. This Sex in the City for its time was made into a pre-Code Hollywood movie starring Maureen O’Sullivan.

  “With its sexual bargains and betrayals, insider trades and financial maneuvers, Skyscraper is pulp fiction at its best.”

  —Maria Dibattista, author of Fast-Talking Dames

  “A captivating and quietly subversive novel, featuring a spunky young working woman struggling to make it on her own. Skyscraper declares that despite all challenges, women should insist on their right to have it all.”

  —Alicia Daly, Ms.

  FAITH BALDWIN (1893–1978) was one of the most prolific mid-twentieth century authors of popular fiction. She published eighty-five books between 1921 and 1977, many of them focused on women juggling family and career, including White Collar Girl, Men Are Such Fools!, and An Apartment for Peggy, which was made into a Hollywood film in 1948.

  BEDELIA

  Vera Caspary

  Afterword by A. B. Emrys

  eISBN: 9781558616486 | ISBN: 9781558615076

  Long before Desperate Housewives, there was Bedelia: beautiful and “adoring as a kitten.” An ideal housekeeper and lover, she wants nothing more than to please her insecure new husband, who can’t believe his luck. But is Bedelia too good to be true? A mysterious new neighbor turns out to be a detective on the trail of a picture-perfect wife with a string of dead husbands in her wake. Caspary builds this story to a peak of psychological suspense when her characters are trapped together in a blizzard. The true Bedelia—the woman who escaped a life on the street—is revealed.

  “You must read Bedelia to see just how slick Miss Caspary’s technique of soft-shoe terror can be—how frightening she can make the chatter at an innocent dinner party, the lure of a lady’s deshabille, the glimpse of a black pearl in a dresser drawer.”

  —New York Times

  “A sinister entertainment, especially for admirers of the psychological horror story.”

  —New Yorker

  “Vera Caspary’s gift is perhaps more subtle and deadly than Jim Thompson’s, David Goodis’s, and Charles Willeford’s.”

  —Robert Polito, author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson

  “A tour de force of psychological suspense, Desperate Housewives meets Double Indemnity in Caspary’s Bedelia.”

  —Liahna Armstrong, President Emerita, Popular Culture Association

  LAURA

  Vera Caspary

  Afterword by A. B. Emrys

  ISBN: 9781558615052 (print only)

  Meet Laura Hunt, a “modern woman”—ravishing, elegant, ambitious, and utterly unknowable. No one can resist her charms, not even cynical NYPD detective Mark McPherson sent to track down the killer who has turned Laura into a faceless corpse. By day McPherson interrogates the men who loved her; by night, he combs her apartment for clues, gazing at her portrait, smelling her lingering scent. One stormy night, the door opens to an electrifying plot twist.

  Laura is a work of riveting psychological suspense, earning Otto Preminger’s 1944 film adaptation an Academy Award, and lasting renown as one of the greatest film noirs.

  “An intriguing melodrama . . . A top-drawer mystery.”

  —New York Times

  “Everyone loves the movie, of course, but it is now possible again to read this stunning novel with one of the great surprise moments in the history of mystery fiction. Brava!”

  —Otto Penzler, owner, The Mysterious Bookshop

  “Laura continues to weave a spell . . . achieving a kind of perfection in its balance between low motives and high style.”

  —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun Times

  “Laura will beguile and unsettle readers: a love story with a sinister underside . . . it remains a compelling original.”

  —Liahna Armstrong, president emerita, Popular Culture Association

  VERA CASPARY is the author of many books, plays, and screenplays. Her film credits include The Blue Gardenia and A Letter to Three Wives.

  THE BLACKBIRDER

  Dorothy B. Hughes

  Afterword by Amy Villarejo

  eISBN: 9781558617742 | ISBN: 9781558614680

  For three years Julie Guilles, the daughter of wealthy American expats, has navigated Nazi-occupied Paris as an agent of the French Resistance. Caught in a web of political intrigue, Julie flees to New York in secret, where an acquaintance from the old world turns up dead on her doorstep. Once a sheltered socialite, Julie must rely on raw nerve and a smuggled diamond necklace to find the legendary Blackbirder, a trafficker who flies refugees to freedom across the Mexican border.

  “One of crime fiction’s finest writers of psychological suspense.”

  —Marcia Muller, author of the Sharon McCone novels

  “Dorothy B. Hughes was such a mistress of dark suspense, I always had to read the end of her books first to keep from biting off all my fingernails.”

  —Margaret Maron, author of the Deborah Knott novels

  IN A LONELY PLACE

  Dorothy B. Hughes

  Afterword by Lisa Maria Hogeland

  eISBN: 9781558617223 | ISBN: 9781558614550

  Postwar Los Angeles is a lonely place where a strangler is preying on young women. Dix Steele, a cynical vet with a chip on his shoulder, is the LAPD’s top suspect. Dix knows enough to watch his step, especially since his best friend is on the force, but when he meets the sultry Laurel Gray, something begins to crack. Hughes’s brilliant portrayal of American masculinity and the fine line between danger and desire became the classic film noir by Nicholas Ray, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame. In a Lonely Place is an unforgettable thriller.

  “If you wake up in the night screaming with terror, don’t say we didn’t warn you.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “A tour de force laying open the mind and motives of a killer with extraordinary empathy. The structure is flawless, and the scenes of postwar LA have an immediacy that puts Chandler to shame. No wonder Hughes is the master we keep turning to.”

  —Sara Paretsky, author of the V.I. Warshawski novels

  “A superb novel by one of crime fiction’s finest writers of psychological suspense . . . What a pleasure it is to see this tale in print once again!”

  —Marcia Muller, author of the Sharon McCone novels

  “This lady is the queen of noir, and In a Lonely Place is her crown.”

  —Laurie R. King, author of the Mary Russell novels

  DOROTHY B. HUGHES (1904–1993) was the author of several crime novels, many of which were made into major motion pictures. Her books include The Blackbirder, In a Lonely Place, Ride the Pink Horse, and The Fallen Sparrow.

  BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING

 
Evelyn Piper

  Afterword by Maria Dibattista

  eISBN: 9781558617759 | ISBN: 9781558614741

  Blanche Lake, a young mother, arrives to pick up her daughter at nursery school. But Bunny Lake has vanished, and soon everyone suspects that she is merely a figment of her mother’s female imagination. Searching desperately for her daughter, with no help from the police, Blanche needs every trick in the book to navigate a world that distrusts and disowns her. This psychological thriller was made into a classic motion picture in 1965 by Otto Preminger.

  “The distraught, gutsy, and hip mother I played in Bunny Lake Is Missing is my all-time favorite role.”

  —Carol Lynley

  “A brilliant tale of psychological suspense, Bunny Lake is Missing is a classic thriller—a riveting revisit to the dark side of the 50s, where the tension beneath the calm surface has an undertow that drags the reader into its grip. Prime pulp—pure pleasure.”

  —Linda Fairstein, author of The Bone Vault

  “A beautiful job . . . Frantic scenes of action, contagious terror, and near hysteria.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  EVELYN PIPER was the pseudonym of Merriam Modell (1908–1994), whose novels include The Lady and Her Doctor, Hanno’s Doll, and The Nanny (1965), which was made into a film starring Bette Davis.

  NOW, VOYAGER

  Olive Higgins Prouty

  Afterword by Judith Mayne

  eISBN: 9781558616332 | ISBN: 9781558614765

  A soaring romance and one of the greatest makeover stories in literature, Now, Voyager, first enthralled readers in 1941 and became a screen phenomenon the following year. Bette Davis triumphantly portrayed heroine Charlotte Vale, the shy, dowdy Boston heiress who blossoms into a defiant, sexually liberated woman. After a nervous breakdown releases her from the tyranny of her mother and blueblood society, Charlotte embarks on an ocean cruise where her fabulous new wardrobe and burgeoning charm lead to a love affair with a married man. Charlotte’s transformation has just begun. . . .