Published in 1942, LAURA by Vera Caspary is a sophisticated mystery novel blending romance and psychological intrigue. Told through shifting perspectives, it follows a detective investigating the apparent murder of a glamorous ad exec. It remains a cornerstone of noir fiction.
It’s the basis of the 1944 American film noir produced and directed by Otto Preminger. The American Film Institute named it one of the 10 best mystery films of all time.
Published in 1943, Laura by Vera Caspary is a work of riveting psychological suspense. Caspary was born in 1899. In her Edgar Award winning autobiography The Secrets of Grown-Ups, she wrote that “I was born by accident in the nineteenth century.” In her 18 novels, 10 screenplays, and 4 stage plays, her main theme was the working woman and her right to lead an independent life. Laura, the novel, has largely been overshadowed by the 1944 classic noir film directed by Otto Preminger. In total, 24 movies were made from her scripts and novels. Vera Caspary died in 1987.
He met the “lovely child” eight years earlier when she tried to get him to endorse a Byron fountain pen. He describes her as a “fawn and fawn-like,” a “Bambi.”
He’s an omniscient narrator and interpreter. He describes scenes he never saw and dialogues he never heard. “My written dialogue will have more clarity, compatness, and essence of character than their spoken lines, for I am able to edit while I write, whereas they carried on their conversations in a loose and pointless fashion with no sense of form or crisis in the building of their scenes” (19).
Waldo saw everything through the lens of his own emotions. He thought of Laura as a perfect innocent protégée, Shelby as the false hero, and Mark as a little boy he could toy with. McPherson about Waldo: “You’re smooth all right, but you’ve got nothing to say” (9).
The restaurant he and Laura dined at is Montagnino’s. Slum smells mix with the smells of luscious Italian food and a rising storm. Waldo and Mark eat mussels cooked with mustard greens in a chianti, along with a chicken fried in olive oil, laid on a bed of yellow taglierini, garlanded with mushrooms and red peppers. They drink wine Lacrymae Christi (“Christ’s tear”) (produced on the slopes of Mt. Vesuvius, it’s the nearest equivalent of the wine drunk by ancient Romans).
Waldo sees in Claudius’s window a duplicate of the vase made of mercury glass that he had given Laura. Learning the piece has been sold, he breaks it. “He stood in the rain, looking back at Claudius’s shop and smiling. Almost as if he’d got the vase anyway” (105).
At the end of Laura by Vera Caspary, in the ambulance and at the hospital, Waldo keeps talking about himself in the third person. “He was like a hero a boy had always worshipped” (171).
“A two-timing dame gets murdered in her flat. So what? … I’m a workingman, I’ve got hours like everyone else. And if you expect me to work overtime on this third-class mystery, you’re thinking of a couple other fellows” (8). Soon thereafter, Waldo sees the light on in Laura’s apartment. “I knew that a young man who had once scorned overtime had given his heart to a job” (39).
He walks with a limp from a shootout (The Siege of Babylon, Long Island). How he lives: “The steel furniture in my bedroom reminded me of a dentist’s office. There wasn’t a comfortable chair in the room” (65). Waldo thinks he’s a misogynist and thinks “his heart was guarded” (35).
A female reporter uses female tricks, saying, “I shouldn’t mind being murdered half so much … if you were the detective seeking clues to my private life” (35).
Mark connects with Roberto, Waldo’s Filipino servant, on a human level by telling him he produced the evidence that cleared the name of a Filipino boxer accused of throwing a fight.
In Laura by Vera Caspary, Waldo tells Laura: “Do you know Mark’s words for women? Dolls. Dames.” Waldo sneers, “What further evidence do you need of a man’s vulgarity and insolence? There’s a doll in Washington Heights who got a fox fur out of him—got it out, my dear, his very words. And a dame in Long Island whom he boasted of deserting after she’d waited faithfully for years.”
Mark McPherson isn’t a typical cynical detective. He’s interested in high culture and willing to discuss philosophical concepts alongside practical police matters. His battles of wits” with Waldo takes place in buzzing Italian and Chinese restaurants (Thoughts on Papyrus).
Does Mark feel hardboiled in the same vein as, say, Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade?
He makes $35/week vs. Laura’s $175. “Not that I resented her success. She was so clever that I was awed and respectful. But it’s hard on a man’s pride. I was brought up to think of women differently.”
She says everyone adored Laura. “She worked like a dog!” She says Laura “had more friends than money” (24) and is a “sucker for a hard-luck story” (69). She’s disdainful toward Shelby and the engagement. She also disapproved of Waldo, though she had always “fluttered before my fame” (48).
It’s easy to underestimate her. While in mourning, she’s ready to assess her dead niece’s wealth and squabble with anyone who imagines they’re entitled to a slice of Laura’s estate. She’s vain and has spent a lifetime seeking the attention of men. At the same time, there isn’t much she misses. Here she is dropping clues to McPherson without appearing to have any idea what’s she’s saying.
From Laura by Vera Caspary:
“You don’t like Shelby very much, do you, Mrs Treadwell?”
“He’s a darling boy,” she said, “but not for Laura. Laura couldn’t afford him … Not that he’s a gigolo. Shelby comes from a wonderful family. But in some ways a gigolo’s cheaper. You know where you are. With a man like Shelby you can’t slip the money under the table” (82).
Laura: “Auntie Sue is always nicer when there are no men around. She is one of those women who must flirt with every taxi-driver and waiter. And then she is horrid because she must punish men for not desiring her. I love [her], but when I am with her I am glad that I was never a famous beauty” (138).
Laura’s mother had told her: “Never give yourself to a man.” Sue tells Laura, “I’ve seen you give yourself too easily to all the wrong people; don’t hold out against the right one” (138). She tells Laura that Mark makes $1,800-2,000 a year, but “Some men are bigger than their incomes” (138).
Mark: “She was small, robed in deepest mourning and carrying under her right arm a Pomeranian whose auburn coat matched her own. … She was like a picture done by one of Sargent’s imitators who had failed to carry over to the twentieth century the dignity of the nineteenth. Mark had … thought her young to be Laura’s aunt. Now he saw that she was well over fifty. The rigid perfection of her face was almost artificial, as if flesh-pink velvet were drawn over an iron frame.”
Diane had no bills “as there had been in Laura’s desk, for Diane came from the lower classes, she paid cash. The sum of it all was a shabby and shiftless life. Fancy perfume bottles, Kewpie dolls, and toy animals were all she brought home from expensive dinners and suppers in night spots. The letters from her family, plain working people who lived in Paterson, New Jersey, were written in night-school English and told about layoffs and money troubles. Her name had been Jennie Swobodo.”
Mark: “I had known girls like that around New York. No home, no friends, not much money. Diane had been a beauty, but beauties are a dime a dozen on both sides of Fifth Avenue ….”
She was brought up to spit whenever she saw a police officer or detective, but she calls Mark “a man,” unlike the other men (“big babies or old women”) (136). She cleaned the crime scene to protect Laura’s reputation. She says two glasses were in Laura’s bedroom. There’s cheap bourbon present (Three Horses) vs. the J and D Bluegrass Bourbon Waldo had taught her to buy.
She came from Colorado Springs. Before landing her first job, she had visited 68 advertising agencies. “Buried beneath the air of timidity was a magnificent will. Laura knew she was clever, and she was willing to suffer endless rebuffs in order to prove her talents.”
“She needed four or five days of loneliness … to bridge the gap between a Lady Lilith Face Cream campaign and her honeymoon” (20).
Laura sees everyone based on her love for them but during her narration we learn that she also sees them clearly. She forgives their faults. And she sees herself very clearly as well.
Laura was no ordinary innocent “damsel in distress” to be rescued – she was an independent and successful career woman who was more than capable shuffling her male suitors as she pleased.
Waldo: “Marriage wasn’t her career. She had her career, she made plenty of money, and there were always men to squire and admire her” (34).
In Laura by Vera Caspary, “There are no photographs of family or lovers in Laura’s apartment, only her own portrait, a startling illustration of the individual as social unit” (A. B. Emrys, Afterward). The portrait: She’s holding gloves in one hand, a green hunter’s hat in the other, ready to be in motion. [Waldo says it’s too studied, “too much Jacoby and not enough Laura” (33).]
Laura tells Mark that freedom “meant owning myself, possessing all my silly and useless routines, being the sole mistress of my habits” (78).
Laura works in advertising. She is very successful at it – the Caspary woman is always a success in business and Laura does very well financially, much better than Shelby, who has a very loose work ethic. Caspary women tend to be more ambitious and earn more than the men they associate with; the men tend to have something of a problem with this.
There are two kinds of detectives: “the hardboiled ones who are always drunk and talk out of the corners of their mouths and do it all by instinct; and the cold, dry, scientific kind who split hairs under a microscope” (70).
Vera Caspary didn’t see herself as a mystery writer and had no interest in detectives and police procedurals. She preferred character studies to intricate crime novel plots. “Her novels revolve around women who are menaced, but who turn out to be neither mere victimized dames nor rescued damsels. Independence is the key to the survival of such protagonists as Laura” (A. B. Emrys, Afterword).
Vera Caspary: “Mysteries had never been my favorite reading. The murderer, the most interesting character, has always to be on the periphery of action lest he give away the secret that can be revealed only in the final pages.”
Waldo (Laura by Vera Caspary): “To solve the puzzle of her death, you must first resolve the mystery of Laura’s life” (16).
“Tell me, McPherson, how much were you prepared to pay for the portrait?”
“Tell me, Lydecker, did you walk past Laura’s apartment every night before she was killed, or is it a habit you’ve developed since her death?
Thunder crashed above us. The storm was coming closer. (62)
Caspary’s novel remains underappreciated for its singularly nuanced use of the mystery form as a medium for social and psychological portraiture.” (Women Crime Writers of the 1940s & 1950s)
Caspary like mystery writers Francis Iles (Anthony Berkeley Cox) who wrote Malice Aforethought and Cornell Woolrich who wrote Rear Window.
“Laura is an elegant novel about outwardly elegant people … and one of its pleasures is providing an opportunity to vicariously experience in rich detail an upscale 1940s Manhattan of supper clubs, cocktail parties, concert halls, and antique shops, even as that bubble world is turned inside out by a brutal murder. [The central figure in Laura by Vera Caspary]—an independent woman much like Vera Caspary herself—is seen from different angles by men with varying designs on her before she finally is permitted to speak in her own disarmingly straightforward voice.” (Women Crime Writers of the 1940s & 1950s)
Laura is narrated mostly in the first person by different characters. The first section starts off with Waldo’s description of his meetings with Mark McPherson. The second section is narrated by McPherson as he works the case. Another section is a “stenographic report of the statement made by Shelby J. Carpenter to Lieutenant McPherson.” Laura narrates the next section, followed by Mark’s final section.
Caspary wrote: “The murderer, the most interesting character, has always to be on the periphery of action lest he give away the secret that can be revealed only in the final pages.” Her solution: Laura.
Caspary based her narratorial approach on Wilkie Collins’ novel The Woman in White (1859). Laura is narrated in the first person by several alternating characters. These individual stories all revolve around the apparent murder of the title character, a successful New York advertiser killed in the doorway of her apartment with a shotgun blast that obliterated her face.
In The Woman in White, Anne’s and Laura’s identities are switched after Laura refuses to give up her marriage settlement of 20,000 pounds. Anne then dies of her long-term illness and is buried as Laura; Laura is considered mad for claiming to be Laura and is locked up. In Laura, We see Laura through the two men closest to her, and then we see her looking at them.
Caspary based Waldo on Count Fosco. In her autobiography, she said Waldo was intended as an “impotent man who tries to destroy the woman he can never possess,”
When Laura finally gets her own narrative, she must overcome the obstacle of the reader’s already seeing her through the male narrators’ eyes. Their narratives are a bid for control, but Laura’s is a bid for agency—a struggle that fuels the story to its finale.
Did the Laura in the last section feel like the one we had met in the other two sections? Which narrator in Laura by Vera Caspary is your favorite, and why?
“The literature of murder investigation bores me as profoundly as its practice irritated Mark McPherson. … I offer the narrative, not so much as a detective yarn as a love story” (17). Mark and Laura connect like old friends. She says to Mark, “We’re in the midst of Manhattan, and this is our private world” (71).
Mark goes home and dreams about Laura. In every dream, “She was just beyond my reach” (73). He realizes he’s a sucker and that she’s lying to him. “I thought I had found a woman who would know a real man when she saw one; a woman whose bright eyes would go right through the mask and tell her that the man underneath was Lincoln and Columbus and Thomas A. Edison. And Tarzan, too. I felt cheated” (107).
“Last night, alone in the apartment, he had made unscientific investigation of Laura’s closets, chests of drawers, dressing-table, and bathroom. He knew Laura, not only with his intelligence, but with his senses. His fingers touched fabrics that had known her body, his ears had heard the rustle of her silks, his nostrils sniffed at the varied, heady fragrances of her perfumes.”
Laura’s own words give us a woman of strength but human flaws, not a misogynist’s condemnation of those imperfections. We are fascinated by a woman who slowly becomes aware of exactly who the people are around her, dragging her down and feeding her illusions – as well as by her own growth as she recognizes the depth and feeling missing from her life. All this is done while Caspary refuses not to clear Laura of the possibility of guilt while the story unfolds from Laura’s own perspective.
In the afterword for the 2005 Feminist Press edition of Laura by Vera Caspary, A.B. Emrys writes: “Caspary’s fairy tale for working women takes place in a world of men who use women for advancement and self-reflection. The potential darkness of this world places Laura into the noir category and shadows even Caspary’s non-crime fiction … ‘Who can you trust’ was a game working women had to play frequently, and Laura makes evident that women might be labeled femmes fatales because they worked in the male-dominated business world.”
Laura tells Waldo: “You can’t hurt me. No man’s ever going to hurt me again” (148). She recognizes Waldo’s malice and writes, “I screamed for revenge; I was bloodthirsty” (155).
Laura isn’t particularly romantic. “I had used him as women use men to complete the design of a full life … wearing him as proudly as a prostitute wears her silver foxes to tell the world she owns a man. Going on thirty and unmarried, I had become alarmed. Pretending to love him and playing the mother game,” she bought him the 14-carat gold cigarette case “as a man might buy his wife an orchid or a diamond to expiate infidelity” (129). She writes, “He not sure of himself; he still needed the help I could give him; but he hated himself for clinging to me, and hated me because I let him cling” (126).
For Laura, as a true Caspary woman, gender roles are inverted. Laura thinks of Shelby as a child, exactly in the way a stereotypical male character in a novel by a male writer might think of his trophy wife. “I was afraid because I had always been weak with a thirty-two-year-old baby.”
In death, Laura becomes a Manhattan legend. Waldo: “I had gathered strength for the writing of Laura’s epitaph. My grief at her sudden and violent death found consolation in the thought that my friend, had she lived to a ripe old age, would have passed into oblivion, whereas the violence of her passing and the genius of her admirer gave her a fair chance at immortality.”
“And when that frail manhood is threatened, when her own womanliness demands more than he can give, his malice seeks her destruction. She is carved from Adam’s rib, indestructible as legend, and no man will ever aim his malice with sufficient accuracy to destroy her.”
Caspary later described this woman in her memoir: “I’d given Laura a heroine’s youth and beauty but had added the strength of a woman who had, in spite of the struggle and competition of success in business, retained the feminine delicacy that allowed men to exercise the power of masculinity.”
What do you think happens for Laura after the story ends?
“I was born by accident in the nineteenth century” (The Secrets of Grown-Ups). Her mother was in her 40s. She was 18 years younger than her oldest sibling.
Born to bourgeois Jewish parents in Chicago, Caspary worked nonstop from age 18 onward. She worked as an ad agency stenographer and wrote ad copy, materials for scam correspondence courses, and later, fiction. She moved in socialist and Communist circles, wrote The White Girl (about a black woman passing as white), wrote a play where a woman seeks an abortion, wrote another where a housewife sells herself to bill collectors.
Her husband, whom she met when she was 40, was a movie producer. She earned more than he did, and he resented it. She corrected people at parties who called her Mrs. Goldsmith.
Caspary sold the rights to Laura to Twentieth Century Fox, giving up the right to shape her characters for the screen. “Once a writer sells a story to Hollywood, they can kiss it goodbye.” “My agent wrote one of the worst contracts ever written. I signed it as carelessly as a five-dollar check. As I would be [constantly] reminded, I had signed away a million dollars. Who would have thought that a film which … was not expensive, whose stars were not then considered important, would become a box office smash and a Hollywood legend?”
“In the film Caspary wanted to see the interaction of class, crime, and sexual politics that she had created in the novel” (Emrys, Afterward). When invited to read the first draft of the script, what bothered her most was Preminger’s ideas about Laura Hunt. He told Caspary, “In the book, Laura has no character. She’s nothing, a nonentity.” He added, “She has no sex. She has to keep a gigolo.”
Laura by Vera Caspary has largely been overshadowed by the 1944 noir film directed by Otto Preminger [Dana Andrews, Gene Tierney, Vincent Price (Shelby), Clifton Webb (Waldo)]. The film version has given Laura an enduring cultural presence. It was nominated for many Academy Awards: Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Screenplay, and Best Art Direction. It won Best Cinematography. It’s on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 Years … 100 Thrills (#73), 100 Years of Film Scores (#7), and 10 Top Ten (#4 Mystery Film).
Caspary’s memoir: She ran into Preminger at the Stork Club. The success of Preminger’s adaptation brought him fame, clout, and an Oscar nomination. “Preminger turned with a grin of triumph to inform me that the biggest hit of the year was the screenplay I’d criticized.” A verbal brawl ensued.
“I raged like a shrew,” Vera Caspary wrote. “I resented Preminger’s turning Laura into the Hollywood version of a cute career girl.” (Emrys, Afterward).
David Lynch’s mystery series Twin Peaks (1990-1991) borrows general plot elements and character names from Laura. Laura Palmer is a murder victim being investigated by detective Dale Cooper, who reads her diary and develops feelings for her. The name Waldo Lydecker from Laura appears twice in the show – as both the name of a myna bird (Waldo) and the local veterinarian (Bob Lydecker).
Portraits of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) are central visual cues. Each is defined by her absence, leaving their characters to be constructed through the recollections of those around them – projections of what others want them to be.
One of the biggest distinctions between Laura by Vera Caspary and the film by Otto Preminger is found in the character of Waldo Lydecker. Caspary states that she based him on a character in a Wilkie Collins novel–The Lady in White’s Count Fosco (played by the hefty Sydney Greenstreet in the 1948 film version). In the film, Lydecker is an effete, effeminate, fussy product of New York society. The film makes Shelby a gigolo simultaneously having an affair with Laura’s aunt, so that makes him with three women at the same time.
Laura was in the advertising business, as was Caspary. Caspary felt that Preminger moulded Laura into a woman who owes her career to a male. Caspary was an extremely hard-working woman, and she made a success in advertising when women were supposed to be there to type.
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