Sue Brown Hays & Louise Eskrigge Crump

Sue Brown Hays was the descendant of several generations of Mississippi and Louisiana cotton planters. In Go Down, Death, her protagonist is a former New Orleans reporter, now housewife, who leases Rutledge Hall in the fictional Mississippi town of “Riverton.” Soon afterwards a series of murders occur in and around the estate. The denouement reveals that the home’s owner committed the crimes in an effort to hide the mixed-race heritage of his wife. Exhibited are the 1946 American edition and the 1948 English edition.

Born in Greenville, Mississippi, Louise Eskrigge Crump was the society editor of her hometown’s newspaper. In The Face of Fear (1952), the narrator holds a similar job when Sadie Eaton, “the richest and stingiest woman in Eatonville” is mutilated and killed. Crump dedicated her novel to Hodding Carter, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of Greenville’s Delta Democrat.

Cid Ricketts Sumner & Leslie H. Whitten

Cid Ricketts Sumner was born in Brookhaven, Mississippi in 1890, and grew up in Jackson. She graduated from Millsaps College, received her master’s degree from Columbia University, and attended Cornell University’s Medical School for one year, where she met and married a future Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. Sumner started writing after her children were old enough to attend school. Hollywood adapted Quality, her 1946 novel about a black woman passing as white, into the controversial film “Pinky.” Her “Tammy” novels inspired three popular movies starring first Debbie Reynolds and later Sandra Dee, as well a television series. In 1964, Sumner wrote her only mystery, Withdraw Thy Foot, in which a New England spinster schoolteacher investigates a brutal murder during her summer vacation on the Massachusetts coast. Sumner herself died at the hands of a grandson in 1970. The exhibit features both the American edition and an inscribed 1966 British edition.

The Doubleday Crime Club published Moon of the Wolf by Leslie H. Whitten in 1967. The shockingly savaged body of a student nurse leads the citizens of “Stanley,” Mississippi to speculate that the young woman had fallen prey to wolves – or werewolves. A 1977 made-for-TV movie changed the setting to the Louisiana bayous. (Ace Edition, 1967)

Benjamin Hawkins Dean / Dean Hawkins

Born in 1892, Benjamin Hawkins Dean later wrote for one of his dust jacket covers: “I was born at Senatobia, Mississippi, so many years ago that a family horse and I met our first automobile together and I was worse scared than the horse.” After graduating from the University of Mississippi in 1912, he moved to Florida. He tried various occupations -- teaching, banking, pumping oil, grading cattle and hogs, and selling real estate and groceries -- before ending up in the paper business. Dean also wrote four mysteries under the pseudonym Dean Hawkins and one under the name Schuyler Broocks (Murder Makes a Marriage, 1946 edition; 1947 edition, abridged)

In Memory of Murder (1936), Skull Mountain (1941), and Walls of Silence (1943) first appeared as Doubleday Crime Club editions. Begun in 1928, Doubleday’s subscription sales service of mystery stories was the first time an American publisher delivered hardcover editions of the genre on a regular basis. The firm published both established and new authors, British and American, under the imprint of the little gunman. In 1943, the Crime Club introduced “bullseyes,” whose symbols on the front dust jacket flap, and later the spine, indicated the type of story inside. Set in the fictional Mississippi town of “Afton,” the bullseye for Walls of Silence promised a tale with “Character and Atmosphere.” Note also the intimations of World War II in the promotion of Victory Bonds, the notice that the book conformed to wartime paper usage, and the suggestion that the reader forward the novel to an army library. (See also: Headsman's Holiday, 1946)

Genevieve Holden

Genevieve Holden is the penname of Genevieve Long Pou, who was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1919. She attended the University of Mississippi for two years before transferring to the University of Georgia’s School of Journalism. After college, Pou worked on The Birmingham Post and the Idaho Statesman before writing her first mystery in 1953. The Doubleday Crime Club published all seven of her novels, assigning them symbolic bullseyes for “Damsel in Distress” and/or “Chase and Adventure.” Set in the South, Pou’s books epitomize the subgenre termed “Gothic,” known more widely these days as “Romantic Suspense.” Written primarily for a female audience, books of this nature feature heroines in dangerous situations who tend to find themselves attracted to handsome yet potentially menacing men.

Also included are are an abridged version ofKiller Loose! (1953); a British paperback of The Velvet Target (1957) from Frederick Muller Ltd.’s Midnight Thriller Series, and a Dutch translation of Deadlier Than the Male.

Louise Eskrigge Crump. The Face of Fear. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1954

Dean Hawkins. In Memory of Murder. New York: Caxton House, 1939.

-- Skull Mountain. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1941.

-- Walls of Silence. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1943.

-- Headsman’s Holiday. New York: Mystery House, 1946.

-- Photograph of Benjamin Hawkins Dean in matting. 1932. 9 ½ x 5 ¾.

Sue Brown Hays. Go Down, Death. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946.

-- Go Down, Death. London: Hammond, Hammond & Co., 1948.

Genevieve Holden. Killer Loose! New York: Mercury Publications, 1953. Title page.

-- Killer Loose! New York: Doubleday & Company, 1953. Abridged edition.

-- Sound an Alarm. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1954.

-- The Velvet Target. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1956.

-- The Velvet Target. London: Frederick Muller Ltd., 1957. A Midnight Thriller.

-- Something’s Happened to Kate. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1958.

-- Deadlier than the Male. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1961.

-- Beroeps Weduwe. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij G. van Reemst, [1962]. (Dutch translation of Deadlier than the Male)

-- Don’t Go in Alone. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1965.

-- Down a Dark Alley. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1976.

Cid Ricketts Sumner. Withdraw Thy Foot. London: Robert Hale, 1964.

-- Withdraw Thy Foot. New York: Coward-McCann, 1964.

Leslie H. Whitten. Moon of the Wolf. New York: Ace Publishing, 1967.

-- Moon of the Wolf. New York: Doubleday & Company, 1967.