Elisabeth Sanxay Holding

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding (1889–1955) was an American novelist and short story writer. She primarily authored fiction in the hardboiled subgenre of detective novels.

Life and career

Born June 18, 1889, in Brooklyn, New York, Sanxay attended Miss Whitcombe's and other schools for young ladies before marrying British diplomat George E. Holding in 1913. The couple had two daughters, Skeffington (1917-2009) and the enamelist and novelist Antonia Holding Schwed (1919-2006), and traveled widely in South America and the Caribbean before living in Bermuda for a number of years, where Mr. Holding was a government official. After Mr. Holding's retirement, the couple lived in the Bronx section of New York City, where Elisabeth Sanxay Holding died on February 7, 1955.

Elisabeth Sanxay Holding wrote romantic novels during the 1920s, but, after the stock market crash in 1929, she turned to the more lucrative genre of the detective novel. From 1929 through 1954, she wrote eighteen detective novels, which sold well and earned her praise for her style and character development. Her series character for these novels was Lieutenant Levy.

Holding also authored many short stories.

Her novel The Blank Wall (1947) was popular enough to inspire the film adaptation The Reckless Moment in 1949. It was adapted again into the 2001 The Deep End. It was republished by Persephone Books in 2003 and again in 2009. It appeared in 2015 as part of the Library of America's omnibus Women Crime Writers: Four Suspense Novels of the 1940s. A number of Holding's crime novels have been more recently reprinted by Stark House Press and other publishers and made available to new readers.

Critical reputation Holding was much admired during her day. Raymond Chandler, one of the top writers of detective fiction during its golden age of 1920–1940, said of Holding that she was "the top suspense writer of them all."

Literary critic and editor Anthony Boucher wrote that "For subtlety, realistic conviction, incredible economy, she's in a class by herself." Boucher also praised Holding's Miss Kelly, about a cat who learns to speak with humans, as "one of those too-rare juvenile fantasies with delightful appeal to the adult connoisseur." It also received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews.