Zelda Popkin solves her intriguing mystery with a female detective named Mary Carner. Death Wears a White Gardenia is the first of a series of mystery novels featuring young, and pretty Mary Carner, a trained investigator on the security staff of a major department store in New York City in the late thirties and early forties. Mary Carner is analytical, intuitive, direct, tactful, independent, and receptive. Her character, emerging when it did, challenged the male gender-role stereotyping that for many years was all there was in detective fiction. By now, however, the female detective has found her place and is much admired in literature, film, and television. Zelda Popkin's Mary Carner was before her time. She emerges here again, a fully-conceived woman, a fully-conceived professional so we can see that today's female detectives, like Jessica Fletcher and V. I. Warshawski, follow in the footsteps that Zelda Popkin's Mary Carner marked so well. Boson Books also offers Time Off for Murder by Zelda Popkin. For an author bio and photo, reviews, and a reading sample, visit bosonbooks.com.

Many bibliographers focus on women who write. Lawyer Barnett looks at women who detect, at women as sleuths and at the evolving roles of women in professions and in society. Excellent for all women's studies programs as well as for the mystery hound.

Zelda Popkin’s adventurous life could have made her the protagonist of one of her own novels. In his brilliant telling of the story of her life, her historian grandson, Jeremy D. Popkin, has made a singular contribution to the history of American Jewish women in the twentieth century. From the 1920s when she worked in the highly competitive and male-dominated public relations business to her rise as a million selling author of popular fiction beginning in the 1940s, including some of the earliest fiction on the Holocaust and the state of Israel, Zelda’s life and work documented the rise of American Jewish women. Popkin uses Zelda’s experience to bring to life a larger story of American Jews and American women in the twentieth century, with the vividness that comes from having a lively character at its center. At the same time, this will also be a story about a woman whose powerful personality profoundly influenced several generations of a family. Popkin makes the case that even if she sometimes burnished her stories to create what he calls “legends of Zelda,” she was one of the most articulate female members of the generation of Jews who fought their way into the American middle class during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s. Zelda’s life is a rich source of evidence about the experience of American Jewish women and offers perspectives that are frequently at odds with analyses based on men’s lives. The story of Zelda, her generation, and its rich and significant legacy will create a compelling portrait and detailed tapestry of an iconic woman and her time.

This was the first bibliography and guide to the American mass market paperback book, and it remains one of the most definitive. The major index is by author, and lists: author, title, publisher, book number, year of publication, and cover price. The title index lists titles and authors only. The publisher index provides a history of that imprint, with addresses, number ranges, and general physical description of the books issued. This is the place that all study of the American paperback must begin.

Includes Part 1, Number 2: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals July - December)