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Helen Eustis (1916–2015)

Author of The Horizontal Man

4+ Works 213 Members 5 Reviews

About the Author

Helen Eustis was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on December 31, 1916. She graduated from Smith College in 1938. She was pursuing a doctorate in English at Columbia University, when she gave up her studies in favor of a writing career. She wrote for several magazines in the 1940s including Harper's show more Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, and The New Yorker. Her first novel, The Horizontal Man, won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best first novel in 1947. Her other works included The Captains and the Kings Depart, The Redheaded Woman, and The Fool Killer, which was adapted into a 1965 film starring Anthony Perkins and Edward Albert. She also translated books written in French by authors including Christiane Rochefort and Georges Simenon. She died on January 11, 2015 at the age of 98. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Includes the name: Eustis Helen

Image credit: Cut down scan from back cover of Penguin No.718. Unattributed photo.

Works by Helen Eustis

Associated Works

Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow (1952) — Contributor — 454 copies, 6 reviews
Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s (2015) — Contributor — 168 copies, 9 reviews
Haunted America Star Spangled Supernatur (1990) — Contributor — 119 copies, 2 reviews
The Best American Short Stories 1944 (1944) — Contributor — 19 copies

Tagged

Common Knowledge

Legal name
Eustis, Helen White
Other names
Harris, Helen Eustis
Birthdate
1916-12-31
Date of death
2015-01-11
Gender
female
Nationality
USA
Birthplace
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Place of death
Manhattan, New York, USA
Places of residence
New York, New York, USA
Education
Smith College (BA | 1938)
Columbia University
Occupations
mystery writer
translator
short story writer
novelist
Short biography
Helen Eustis was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her mother Bessie Langdon Eustis died when her daughter was a young child, and she was raised by her father, Harold Eustis, a socially prominent stockbroker. She began writing as a child. She graduated from Smith College, where she won a creative writing award, with a degree in English literature in 1938. That year, she married Alfred Young Fisher, her English professor, with whom she had a son. She pursued a doctorate in English at Columbia University in New York City before giving up her studies in favor of a writing career. Ms. Eustis began contributing stories to Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, and other magazines in the 1940s. She published a collection of stories, The Captains and the Kings Depart, in 1949. A children’s story, "The Rider on a Pale Horse," which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1950, later became a children's book titled Mr. Death and the Redheaded Woman (1954). Her college experiences inspired her debut novel The Horizontal Man (1947), a mystery set at a small college in which a philandering English professor is murdered amid psychologically unstable students and professors. The book received critical acclaim and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America the following year. At about that time, her marriage to Prof. Fisher broke down, and they divorced. Ms. Eustis’s other works, a novel and several short stories, often contained elements of psychological drama. Her Civil War thriller The Fool Killer (1954) was adapted into a 1965 Hollywood film of the same name. In later years, she translated works from French by authors such as Christiane Rochefort, Georges Simenon, Romain Gary, Michel Salomon, and Edmonde Charles-Roux.

Members

Reviews

Eustis' novel won the Edgar Award for the best first crime novel but has received little subsequent attention. Some elements have not aged well, but the backbone of the novel remains an excellent suspense treatise on mental illness. It would have made a great noir film in the vein of Gaslight.

I read it as one of the novels bundled in the Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s, edited by Sarah Weinman. The other authors are: Vera Caspary (Laura), Dorothy B. Hughes (In A Lonely Place), and Elizabeth Sanxay Holding (The Blank Wall).

Eustis (1916-2015) attended Smith College and did graduate work at Columbia. She wrote several novels and stories in addition to "The Horizontal Man", including a Civil War novel, "The Fool Killer" which in 1965 was made into a film starring Anthony Perkins. In her latter years, Eustis translated several important books from French including "When I was Old" by Georges Simeon.
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Dorothy2012 | 4 other reviews | Apr 22, 2024 |
The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis is a vintage mystery that won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1947. Set in the academic world of an elite woman’s college we are immediately immersed in the angst and despair of a student’s unrequited love for her English professor. A professor who is just about to be murdered.

We know a woman killed him and we know she declared her love for him just before doing the deed. What we don’t know is whether this particular student is the murderer, or if her confession is simply part of her hysteria. The story unfolds through the viewpoint of a number of characters some of whom I liked much more than others. Although I was sure that I knew who the murderer was, the author managed to completely blindside me in the last few pages.

I found The Horizontal Man a challenging read as the author didn’t break the book into chapters, instead the book ran as one narrative so I didn’t always realize when one narrator was changed to another. At times I felt the author delved too deeply into psychology but overall it is a compelling and unusual story.
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½
 
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DeltaQueen50 | 4 other reviews | Jul 15, 2022 |
BOTTOM-LINE:
Doesn't hold up through the years
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PLOT OR PREMISE:
A professor is killed, and a young student in love with him confesses to the murder. But there are lots of other more likely suspects.
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WHAT I LIKED:
Eustis won the 1947 Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and it is easy to see why it won. The sense of place is strong, and a strong foreboding all the way through the novel adds some suspense. There is more than a hint of psychological darkness lurking in the shadows.
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WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE:
There are some parts that just don't hold up. The understanding of mental health disorders were not as rich, and the interactions of the two protagonists are misogynistic to read (he continually calls her fatty and comments when she drinks a beer that there too many calories). There's also an underlying current that women are nothing without a man. Hard to read in 2019, even as historical. The red herrings clear by midway through the novel, and the solution / foreshadowing is obvious, leaving the last 40% of the novel just "get to it, already".
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DISCLOSURE:
I received no compensation, not even a free copy, in exchange for this review. I am not personal friends with the author, nor do I follow her on social media.
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1 vote
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polywogg | 4 other reviews | Nov 9, 2019 |
Another book I’m glad was collected in the Women Crime Writers set. I am not an expert, but this feels like the first or certainly one of the first crime novels that is more a connected series of character studies linked by a single death, than one linear narrative. There are so many ways to tell the story of a murder and these days crime fiction is more popular than ever. Eustis has a nice bit about it in a scene where Freda gets in Leonard’s face to make him tell what he knows about her and the dead man - “Personally, I think there are not enough murders. They feed us in some way. See how avidly we devour all accounts of crime, or detective stories! And after all, the responsibility of giving death is a small one which we regard so seriously in comparison to the responsibility of giving life, which we take so lightly.”

As meanderingly interesting as it is, a modern reader will work out the culprit ahead of anyone in the story and many will find Molly an exasperating figure; I certainly did. She’s such a pathetic ninny that it’s hard to read her sections. There is hardly any police involvement although their menace looms large for Molly whose confession is patently false. It falls to the good Dr. Forstmann to make sure she isn’t arrested and to find the real killer. Not that he does anything like serious detecting, he’s more a vehicle to show us various scenes in the suspects’ lives.

No, events in the book aren’t driven by the shrink, that falls to Jack and Kate who join in an uneasy alliance to find out what’s going on with teachers Freda, George and Leonard and which of them is guilty of killing Kevin Boyle. There are shenanigans and some vaguely insulting scenes where Jack bemoans the fact that Kate doesn’t get all dolled up all the time and might need to lose a few pounds. Also that she can’t be a lesbian because she isn’t flat chested. What?

Spoilers

Molly isn’t the only extreme character, George is a histrionic mama’s boy who is nearly insulting in his portrayal of the repressed homosexual. The scenes with the two of them are incredibly nutty. His sinister notebook is an interesting idea that must have been fresh in 1946, but for a modern reader the mysterious writer won’t be; it’s George himself, obviously. Eventually the Doctor works out that George has a dual personality and the writer is his other one; the hidden one. The woman. She was in love with Boyle and because she was trapped inside George’s body, that love would forever be unrequited. Better to kill him than suffer his affairs with real women. Again, the ideas here are not new, but are presented as highly deviant which can be insulting, but it’s fiction so I let it go. Not the best psychological thriller ever, but a good one. I can see why it shocked people when published. The ideas and tropes it uses have become part and parcel of the genre and so feels dated, but is written with lively language and things follow logically. Not a lot of silly coincidences or a pig pile of misery and mischance.
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1 vote
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Bookmarque | 4 other reviews | Aug 30, 2016 |

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Works
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