SinC25 #3--Women Crime Writers

I used to work for a now-defunct weekly newspaper called the L.A. Reader. I was a general assignment reporter there, which meant I covered everything from hearings on mosquito abatement policies (just as fascinating as it sounds) to best Halloween costumes.
Occasionally, I snagged a crime story. The last crime-related story I covered was a report on a very special meeting of the local Parents of Murdered Children group.  They were meeting with the state's Attorney General and they had some questions to ask and some bones to pick.
One of the attendees was Dominique Dunne's mother Ellen.  (Dominique would have been 52 now. Next year will be the 30th anniversary of her death.)
Ellen Dunne died in 1997 and this was a decade earlier than that and she was already extremely frail and wheelchair-bound. She must have been a great beauty in her youth and even pain-ravaged and grief-stricken, she had an immense presence.

I sat through the meeting, listening to the parents tell their stories and listening to the Attorney General try to deflect their anger.  "The man who killed my son did five years," one man said. "Why shouldn't I kill him?  I can do five years standing on my head." The room was  not with the AG when he pompously suggested that would be a bad idea.
I was not a great crime writer and this experience was actually the one that soured me on reporting news. I switched to features and then I switched to fiction and I've never really looked back.
But that doesn't mean I don't love true crime.  I'm not as avid about it as my friend Berkeley, but a well-written crime story is a thing of beauty.  And the queen of that is ...

EDNA BUCHANAN.  Edna Buchanan wrote for the Miami Herald and covered thousands of crimes.  She was tough, smart, and savvy.  And she was GLAMOROUS.  Even now, as a woman of une certain age, she's got it going on. 
She won a Pulitzer for general reporting in 1986 and a slew of other awards for both her crime reporting and her fiction. I've never read any of her novels but I loved both The Corpse Had a Familiar Face and Never Let Them See You Cry, her memoirs about working the crime beat. The late, great Elizabeth Montgomery starred in several television movies based on these non-fiction books and she copied Buchanan's signature look of touseled hair and big sunglasses. (See the above photo.) You can download Buchanan's short story "Red Shoes" from Mary Higgins Clark's mystery magazine here.