Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney in Otto Preminger’s film adaptation of Vera Caspary’s “Laura.”

In a recent piece about the book “Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s,” edited by Sarah Weinman and published this month by the Library of America, Megan Abbott, a woman crime writer of the 2000s, pointed out that “women are the primary readers of crime fiction.” There is, Abbott noted, a popular theory about this: “that women savor the victim role,” that they “are masochists, unable to rise above the roles assigned them by the patriarchy.”

Abbott rightly refuted this theory, in part by detailing the virtues of the suspense novels that the collection reprints, which do not, in fact, gives us female characters who are mere “victims or corpses.” She might also have pointed to the women who wrote them—Vera Caspary, for instance, who does not, for one moment in her long, unusual life, seem to have imagined herself a victim of anyone or anything.

Here, for example, is a good Caspary story. Late in 1944, she was having dinner at the Stork Club when the director Otto Preminger walked in. Preminger was just coming off the great success of “Laura,” the film he directed based on Caspary’s novel of the same name, which is included in “Women Crime Writers.” In both the book and the movie, a woman is shot dead in her Manhattan apartment; days later, the presumed victim, Laura, walks in the door quite obviously alive. The mix-up makes her a suspect in her own murder. The success of Preminger’s adaptation vaulted him out of intra-studio shouting matches into fame and industry clout (and an Oscar nomination). He could have behaved graciously toward the woman whose novel provided the characters, story, and premise that audiences and critics alike couldn’t resist.

Instead, as Caspary put it in a memoir, “Preminger turned with a grin of triumph to inform me that the biggest hit of the year was the screenplay I’d criticized.” Preminger was a difficult man, known for screaming on sets and casting himself as a Nazi in his own movies. He was big, too. Caspary was shorter, older, framed by a cloud of frizzy hair. The “hysterical” shouting that followed Preminger’s remark brought waiters running and Caspary’s companions to their feet, as they “snatched off their jackets prepared to defend my honour.” A brawl was narrowly averted. This, Caspary reported, was a “fuss and fury that swelled my pride.”

Caspary did_ _hate the script that Preminger had first shown her. She’d given up the right to shape her characters for the screen by way of what she called “one of the worst contracts ever signed.” “Laura,” when published, had been a hot enough property to attract the attentions of Marlene Dietrich. But Caspary had, by then, been kicking around the movie business for a long time. She used the generous screenplay payments to finance her novels. Conscious of what a struggle it could be, in the collaborative environment of the movie studios, to get a picture made, she made an impulsive decision to let the producers write their own script.

When invited to read the first draft of the script, what bothered her most was Preminger’s ideas about the story’s dead-but-not-dead title character, Laura Hunt. He told Caspary, “In the book, Laura has no character. She’s nothing, a nonentity.” He added, “She has no sex. She has to keep a gigolo.” (He was referring to Laura’s fiancé, whom she supports financially but who is never identified as a prostitute.) Preminger had remedied this by all but stripping out Laura’s professional ambitions and practical-mindedness.

Caspary was appalled. “I raged like a shrew,” she remembered. “I resented Preminger’s turning her into the Hollywood version of a cute career girl.” Here, she thought, was evidence that Preminger didn’t know a thing about women, their “maternal instinct,” their “satisfaction in consoling a troubled man.”

Eventually, Caspary admitted that she found the final script wittier than the one she’d been shown. But she had been on to something: the Laura whom Gene Tierney played was more remarkable for her gorgeousness than for her other charms. It worked in the context of Preminger’s movie, but as an account of a career woman of the time, it lacks what you might call “moxie.”

Caspary was invested in the character because she’d modeled Laura’s personality on her own. She was a “career girl” avant la lettre and never seems to have pictured or wished herself otherwise. Born to bourgeois Jewish parents in Chicago in 1899, she went out to work almost as soon as she turned eighteen and rarely stopped churning out copy from that day until she died. There was no college and no finishing school, no slow courtship of traditional critical respect. She had to make a living, so she wrote.

Her first jobs had her writing the materials for scam correspondence courses on everything from ballet to salesmanship to screenplay writing. She did a little journalism, of the “RAT BITES SLEEPING CHILD!” sort, but credited a job at the Trianon ballroom in Chicago with opening her mind to experiences not her own. “I became both editor and staff of Trianon Topics,” she explained, “an eight-page tabloid-sized weekly devoted to clean dancing.” She worked the way most journalists once did: she hung around, talking to every sort of person who came through the place. And though she could not print scandals, she found that “through the gathering of inane and trivial news I was educated and profoundly changed.”

Her politics, personal and otherwise, were all of the liberatory variety. She had lovers aplenty long before feminism’s second wave arrived. One was a former boss, from an advertising agency where she was a copywriter. She’d later move to New York, working at dance magazines, hanging around Greenwich Village, and moving in socialist and Communist circles (which would come to haunt her in the era of HUAC and black-listing).

Caspary’s first novel, called “The White Girl,” tells the story of a black woman passing as white in Chicago. It was praised by a number of African-American newspapers, even as white papers mostly ignored the book. “There are many Solaria Coxes in America,” the Chicago Defender_ _wrote, “and Miss Vera Caspary, who happens to be a former Chicagoan, must have met some of them. She knows them far better than most white people get to know them.”

The critical success of that book seemed to encourage Caspary in marrying her politics and her art: when she turned to writing plays, she set one of them in a women’s residence and had one of the characters seek out an abortion. She wrote another that saw a housewife, in extremis, sell herself to bill collectors. To a producer who felt that the story was dirty, because the price set on the woman’s virtue was so low, Caspary retorted, “Do you think a whore who gets fifty dollars is morally superior to one who gets five?”

Caspary’s memoir, “The Secrets of Grown-Ups,” published in 1979 and lamentably out of print, is full of such anecdotes. (The Caspary estate has made the memoir available as an e-book.)* She was not, as a person, free from self-doubt. “I have a poor memory for distress,” she wrote, “but can recall discontent and raging fevers of impatience.” She seems to have been, in spite of a few successful books and screenplays, forever running out of money.