Charlotte Armstrong

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Charlotte Armstrong Lewi (b. 1905-05-02 Vulcan, Michigan, d. 1969-07-18 Glendale, California) was an American author. Under the names Charlotte Armstrong and Jo Valentine she wrote over 28 novels, as well as working for the New York Times advertising department, as a fashion reporter for Breath of the Avenue (a buyer's guide), and in an accounting firm.[1]

Armstrong Lewi attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Barnard College in 1925.[2] She had a daughter and two sons with her husband, Jack Lewi.

In 1957, she received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for her novel A Dram of Poison. She had two other Edgar-nominated novels, both in published in 1967: The Gift Shop, and Lemon in the Basket. Three of her short stories, all published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, were nominated for Edgars: "And Already Lost," (1957) and "The Case for Miss Peacock" (1965) and "The Splintered Monday" (1966).[3]

Contents

[edit] Publications

  • The Happiest Days, 1939 (play)
  • Ring Around Elizabeth, 1941 (play)
  • Lay On, Mac Duff! 1942
  • The Case of the Weird Sisters, 1943
  • The Innocent Flower, 1945 (also known as Death Filled the Glass)
  • The Unsuspected, 1946 (ISBN 1-122-42233-4)[4]
  • The Chocolate Cobweb, 1948
  • Mischief, 1951
  • The Black-Eyed Stranger, 1952
  • Catch-as-Catch-Can, 1953 (also known as Walk Out on Death)
  • The Trouble in Thor, 1953 (as Jo Valentine; also known as And Sometimes Death)
  • The Better to Eat You, 1954 (also known as Murder's Nest)
  • The Dream Walker, 1955 (ISBN 1-127-32660-0, also known as Alibi for Murder)
  • Dram of Poison, 1956 (ISBN 1-117-07473-0)
  • The Albatross, 1957 (short story collection)
  • The Seventeen Widows of San Souci, 1959
  • Something Blue, 1959
  • Then Came Two Women, 1962
  • The One-Faced Girl, 1963
  • The Mark of the Hand, 1963
  • Who's Been Sitting in My Chair?, 1963
  • A Little Less Than Kind, 1964
  • The Witch's House, 1964
  • The Turret Room, 1965
  • Dream of Fair Woman, 1966
  • I See You, 1966 (short story collection)
  • Gift Shop, 1967
  • The Balloon Man, 1968 (ISBN 1-122-42235-0)
  • Lemon in the Basket, 1968
  • Seven Seats to the Moon, 1969
  • The Protege, 1970

[edit] Screenplays

  • "Incident at a Corner", episode of Startime, dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1959
  • "The Summer Hero," episode of The Chevy Mystery Show, 1960
  • Three episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Sybilla" (dir. Ida Lupino), "The Five-Forty-Eight," "Across the Threshold" (1960)

[edit] Films

The following films were adapted from Armstrong Lewi's novels and stories.

  • Merci pour le Chocolat, 2000 (from the novel The Chocolate Cobweb)
  • The Sitter, 1991 (from the novel Mischief)
  • La Rupture, 1970 (from the novel The Balloon Man)
  • Talk About a Stranger, 1952 (from the short story, "The Enemy")
  • Don't Bother to Knock, 1952 (from the novel Mischief)
  • The Three Weird Sisters, 1948 (from the novel The Case of the Weird Sisters)
  • The Unsuspected, 1947

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^  Detective Fiction
  2. ^  Swartley, Ariel (Apr. 30, 1999) "Guns and Roses: The Women of Noir". LAWeekly.
  3. ^ Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards Database
  4. ^  Fantastic Fiction

[edit] Further reading

Burke, Jan. "The Last Word: The Mean Streets of the Suburbs, the Kindness of Strangers---A Tribute to Charlotte Armstrong." Clues: A Journal of Detection 25.4 (Summer 2007): 65-69.

[edit] External links