Charlotte Armstrong (1905–1969)

Crime fiction has many shapes. Taking Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief as an example - the entirety of the novel’s action takes place in and around an adjoined hotel room where an absolutely unhinged woman is babysitting a 9-year-old girl. A series of missed connections and coincidences result in potentially the worst possible thing happening to a loving, pointedly positive family. Whether or not it happens is the core of Mischief’s tension.
Part of what impresses so much about this tension is that it is pulled off with a minimum of on-page violence or grotesquery. Much of Armstrong's work leans into lengthy and engaging dialogues and descriptions of facial expressions except for one knock-down prize fight in the latter half. We are so keyed into the potential “state of things” on the various fronts of the characters that the degree of suspense the novel pulls off is practically stomach-wrenching at times. Filmed as Don’t Bother to Knock with Marilyn Monroe, Mischief has aged remarkably well.
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Murderer in the Turret?
Review of the Mysterious Press/Open Road Kindle eBook edition (2012) of the Amereon Ltd. hardcover original (1965)

This was quite an unorthodox book in the crime/mystery genre for several reasons. The culprit(s) are revealed quite early, but everyone is oblivious as to how twisted they are, except for the heroine investigator Edie. Edie takes it upon herself to not only shield the main suspect, but to also solve the crime of an attempted murder in the mansion of her relatives the Whitmans. The title room only comes into it because that is where she is hiding the suspect. The police are at first reluctant to believe her explanations, but finally the craziness will out and all is revealed.

See cover image at https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/...
The front cover of the original 1965 Amereon Ltd. hardcover edition. Image sourced from Goodreads.

I was perhaps not as taken with The Turret Room as my GR friend Sportyrod, so I encourage you to read his 5-star review.

I discovered The Turret Room by Charlotte Armstrong from reading Christopher Fowler's excellent The Book of Forgotten Authors (2017) which I recently reviewed and rated as Five Stars. Charlotte Armstrong is the 2nd of the "Forgotten Authors" that I have investigated after first reading books by Gladys Mitchell.

Fowler describes Armstrong's style as follows:

She had abandoned a detective series to start this new style of writing, which largely avoids the whodunnit angle to portray women locked in psychological warfare with the members of their extended families and male-dominated workforces. Naturally she deals with stereotypes of the time, but the thrill comes in seeing her constrained protagonists gradually become empowered.

Trivia and Links
The Turret Room was not adapted for film, but several other Charlotte Armstrong books were. She also wrote for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television program.

Fowler cites her book Mischief (1951) which was adapted as the 1952 film Don't Bother to Knock directed by Roy Ward Baker and starring Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe. Two French movies by director Claude Chabrol were based on books by Armstrong. These were Merci pour le Chocolat (2000), based on The Chocolate Cobweb (1948)) and La Rupture (1970) based on The Balloon Man (1968).

Fowler also recommends Armstrong's Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense for both the title story and The Other Shoe.… (more)