Forgotten Book - The Sister of Cain

I was unfamiliar with the work of Mary Collins unless Stark House Press reprinted her novels, but now I've read The Sister of Cain, I can see why Greg Shepard of Stark House was tempted to bring her work back into print. This book, which dates from 1943 is a strong novel combining domestic suspense with a whodunit mystery and stylistically it reminds me a little of the work of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding.

Mary Collins (1908-79) grew up in California and wrote six novels between 1941 and 1949, all of them set in San Francisco, a city which has made a compelling background for so many crime stories over the years. I imagine that it was the brevity of Collins' career that has resulted in her descent into obscurity over the last seventy years, since there's no doubt that she could write.

One of the strengths of the book is the picture it gives of domestic life in the US during the Second World War, and after Pearl Harbor. While home life in the US wasn't affected as dramatically by the war as, say, life in London or Liverpool during the Blitz, there was nevertheless an impact. Here, the narrator, recently married Hilda Moreau, goes to stay with the six sisters of her husband David, who has gone off to war. Hilda is pregnant, and so, at the time she wrote the book, was Collins. The fact that she is on her own and in only limited contact with David adds to the tension and sense of claustrophobia, which Collins build with an assured touch.

The oldest sister, Pauline, is a deeply unpleasant and hypocritical woman who rules her siblings with a rod of iron. Each of them has a motive to murder her, and so do a couple of other characters - as well as Hilda herself. In fact, there are so many women behaving badly in this book that if a man had written it, he would probably be accused of sexism. It comes as no surprise when Pauline is murdered, but Collins shifts suspicion around quite skilfully and I found the story engaging. This is a good find.