Charlotte Armstrong

Charlotte Armstrong Lewi (1905-05-02 Vulcan, Michigan – 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 graduated from Vulcan High School in Vulcan, Michigan, in June 1921. She attended the junior college program at Ferry Hall in Lake Forest, Illinois for one year (1921-22), during which time she served as Editor-in-Chief of the student publication, Ferry Tales. She 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]

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

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)

Films

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

• Merci pour le Chocolat, 2000 (from the novel The Chocolate Cobweb) (dir. Claude Chabrol)
• The Sitter, 1991 (from the novel Mischief) (dir. Rick Berger)
• La Rupture, 1970 (from the novel The Balloon Man) (dir. Claude Chabrol)
• 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) (dir. Daniel Birt)
• The Unsuspected, 1947

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

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.

External links

• Charlotte Armstrong at the Internet Movie Database
• List of Charlotte Armstrong stories