The serial killer thriller has become a common format over the past ­quarter-century. But long before Hannibal and Dexter, there was Dorothy B. Hughes. “In a Lonely Place” created the trend of taking us inside the head of a compulsive killer. Dix Steele, the protagonist, has left behind the glamour of flying fighter planes but not the sense of entitlement it gave him. But in the process of revealing his alienation, Hughes shows us the anxiety and perturbation of postwar America, a society ­shifting gears without a clear sense of direction. The depth of the ­changes in America is mirrored by the fact that it’s the women who bring him down in the end, not the hard-bitten cops.

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding was described by Raymond Chandler as “the top suspense writer of them all,” and “The Blank Wall” surprised me with delight more than any other story in this collection. Lucia Holley is struggling to keep her family on an even keel while her husband is away in the Navy. Hard enough at the best of times but unimaginable when there’s a corpse in the family rowboat. Maternal love, the subtle interplay of family relationships, the blending of terrible events with the everyday; it’s as if ­Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway had strayed into a crime novel.

Charlotte Armstrong’s “Mischief” was my least favorite of the eight. So much about it is good — many of the characters and their reactions, the details of the hotel setting, the sense of time and place, the acute observation of social standing. But this Trojan horse tale of a babysitter gone rogue failed for me because of its series of unlikely coincidences coupled with the entrances and exits better suited to farce than serious suspense.

No such disappointment in Patricia Highsmith’s “The Blunderer,” an early exploration of the themes she returned to again and again in later work. It throws together a man who has committed murder and another who wants to. As the tension between them and a dogged detective grows more unbearable, we find ourselves confronted with Highsmith’s perpetual questions. How far will you go for love? What happens when events conspire against you? And how do we readers deal with the way Highsmith makes us feel sympathy for the Devil?

Margaret Millar’s stunningly original “Beast in View” offers a series of enigmatic encounters whose weight gradually builds until the pressure is almost intolerable. Who is the mysterious persecutor at the heart of the story, and how can we make sense of what seems an impenetrable mystery? The ending shocked readers at the time; it’s less shocking now only because so many other writers have worked their own variations on the theme.

Dolores Hitchens’s “Fools’ Gold” starts out with three young delinquents who think they’re smart, coming up with the kind of caper so stupid only the young could have dreamed it up. Then they make the mistake of letting a really bad man in on the action. Horrible possibilities unfold and the pace picks up, leaving us breathless and horrified as we desperately flick the pages to discover just how bad it’s going to get. It’s a great finale to the collection.