Helen Eustis (1916–2015)

Helen Eustis was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. Her mother Bessie Langdon Eustis died when her daughter was a young child, and she was raised by her father, Harold Eustis, a socially prominent stockbroker. She began writing as a child. She graduated from Smith College, where she won a creative writing award, with a degree in English literature in 1938. That year, she married Alfred Young Fisher, her English professor, with whom she had a son. She pursued a doctorate in English at Columbia University in New York City before giving up her studies in favor of a writing career. Ms. Eustis began contributing stories to Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, The New Yorker, and other magazines in the 1940s. She published a collection of stories, The Captains and the Kings Depart, in 1949. A children’s story, "The Rider on a Pale Horse," which first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in 1950, later became a children's book titled Mr. Death and the Redheaded Woman (1954). Her college experiences inspired her debut novel The Horizontal Man (1947), a mystery set at a small college in which a philandering English professor is murdered amid psychologically unstable students and professors. The book received critical acclaim and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel from the Mystery Writers of America the following year. At about that time, her marriage to Prof. Fisher broke down, and they divorced. Ms. Eustis’s other works, a novel and several short stories, often contained elements of psychological drama. Her Civil War thriller The Fool Killer (1954) was adapted into a 1965 Hollywood film of the same name. In later years, she translated works from French by authors such as Christiane Rochefort, Georges Simenon, Romain Gary, Michel Salomon, and Edmonde Charles-Roux.