Helen Eustis, author of Edgar Award-winning ‘The Horizontal man,’ dead at 98

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Helen Eustis, an Edgar Award-winning mystery writer who later translated works by Georges Simenon and other European authors, has died. She was 98.

Eustis’ son, Adam Fisher, said Thursday that she died Jan. 11 at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City of natural causes.

Eustis’ “The Horizontal Man” was a crime story about a murdered English professor that won the Edgar in 1947 for best debut novel. “Horizontal Man” will be included this fall in a Library of America anthology of 1940s-’50s crime fiction by women.

She also wrote “The Fool Killer,” adapted into a 1965 movie of the same name starring Anthony Perkins, and the children’s story “Mr. Death and the Redheaded Woman.” She received an O’Henry Prize for the short story “An American Home,” published in 1947.

Her translations include Simenon’s “When I Was Old” and Edmond Charles-Roux’s “To Forget Palermo.”

A native of Cincinnati, she attended Smith College as an undergraduate and based “The Horizontal Man” in part on her time there. Eustis was married and divorced twice. She is survived by her son, her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, and by three grandchildren.