Basic Black With Pearls

Helen Weinzweig (1915-2010) was born Helen Tenenbaum in Radom, Poland, and emigrated with her mother to Toronto when she was nine. As a teenager, she spent two years in an Ontario sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis; asked about the experience, she later recalled, I read myself silly for two years. In 1940, Helen married the Canadian composer John Weinzweig and for the next three decades dedicated herself to promoting his career while raising their two sons and organizing and working at a cooperative nursery school in Toronto. In 1968, her first short story, Surprise!, was published in Canadian Forum; no story or novel she wrote was ever rejected by a publisher. Her first novel, Passing Ceremony, was published in 1973, followed by Basic Black with Pearls in 1980, which won the City of Toronto Book Award. A short-story collection, A View from the Roof (1989), was nominated for the Governor General's Award. A founding member of the Writers' Union of Canada, Weinzweig also wrote stage and radio plays and taught at writers' workshops in her later years.Sarah Weinman is the editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense and the author of the forthcoming nonfiction book The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World. Weinman's work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Guardian, and other publications. She lives in New York City.