Laura (novel)
First edition
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| Author | Vera Caspary |
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| Original title | Ring Twice for Laura (serial title) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Mystery novel |
| Publisher | Colliers, 1942 (serial); Houghton Mifflin, 1943 (book). |
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Publication date
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1942, 1943 |
| Pages | 237 (Houghton Mifflin edition) |
Laura (1942, 1943) is a detective novel by Vera Caspary. It is her best known work, and was adapted into a popular film in 1944, with Gene Tierney in the title role.
Originally, Laura ran in Colliers from October to November 1942 as a seven-part serial entitled Ring Twice for Laura. Houghton Mifflin republished Laura in book form the next year; afterwards, Caspary sold the film rights to Twentieth Century Fox, resulting in a 1944 hit movie starring Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. In 1946, Caspary sold the story for a fourth time, this time co-writing a theatrical version with George Sklar.
Laura achieved an international readership and has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese and Dutch. Since its original publication, the novel has been reissued many times. I Books released an edition in 2000, billing it as a "lost classic." Although this is now out of print, a Feminist Press edition became available in 2006.
Like Wilkie Collins' detective novel The Moonstone (1868), 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.
Detective Mark McPherson, assigned to the case, begins investigating the two men who were closest to Laura: her former lover, a narcissistic middle-aged writer named Waldo Lydecker, and her fiance, the philandering Shelby Carpenter. As he learns more about Laura, Mark – not the most sentimental of men – begins to fall in love with her memory. When Laura turns out to be very much alive, however, she becomes the prime suspect.
The novel has some autobiographical elements; Caspary, like Laura, was an independent woman who earned her living as an advertiser and who struggled to balance career and romance.
Laura recalls the day she discovered her fiance's infidelity with a young model named Diane Redfern.
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