Laura - Vera Caspary

Laura was Caspary's break into the big time. It came out in 1943, having previously been serialised in a magazine, became a Otto Preminger movie in 1944 and a stage play the year after. It is a hard-boiled crime of passion novel with all the qualities of the best literary fiction.

Waldo Lydecker is a New York writer of literary fiction. He is fat, snobbish and affected, with a silly beard and an ebony cane. He is our first story-teller, for Caspary has emulated the Moonstone device of multiple first-person narration. Lydecker is besotted with Laura, as is every man she ever met. Lydecker was seeking to introduce her to art and society, so when she is found dead in her apartment, shot in the bewitching face, Lydecker is the second person Detective Mark McPherson calls on, after Laura's fiance, Shelby Carpenter. Laura and Shelby were due to be married the next week. She had planned a final solo holiday but before she left was due to dine with Lydecker.

The plot is astonishing. My jaw genuinely dropped at the big twist. Caspary drip-feeds the clues like a research scientist breeding bacteria. Everything you need to know is there, none of it apparent without hindsight. The novel is short, exquisitely so, but every word is loaded with meaning. And the style, like the cover art on this Vintage edition, is superb. The following is from Detective McPherson, the fish out of water in the refined circle inhabited by Lydecker, Laura and Carpenter:

Even professionally I've never been inside a night club with leopard-skin covers on the chairs. When these people want to insult one another, they say darling, and when they get affectionate they throw around words that a Jefferson Market bailiff wouldn't use to a pimp. [...] It takes a college education to teach a man that he can put on paper what he used to write on a fence.

The Haunted Hotel - Wilkie Collins

The Haunted Hotel (1879) is late Collins, strikingly modern in some ways, hopelessly Victorian in others. The plot is complex, bordering on soap-opera. Lord Montbarry has broken off his engagement to Anglo-Irish rose Agnes Lockwood and gone and married the racily exotic Countess Narona. His family, the many males of whom wanted to marry Agnes themselves, disown him; London clubland turns its back on him. So His Lordship does a bunk to Venice where he holes up in ancient palazzo with the Countess and her brutish brother. He falls ill and dies. Everybody blames the countess.


Meanwhile Agnes's former servant, whose husband just happens to have been the Montbarrys' courier in Venice, also disappears. A thousand pounds compensation from the late lordship arrives in the post. One of Montbarry's younger brothers, a minor son in search of a fortune, joins a partnership which buys the Venetian palazzo and turns it into an upmarket hotel. The son of the new Lord Montbarry marries his sweetheart. Where better for a honeymoon than Venice? Heck, why doesn't the whole family pitch up there? Agnes, obviously, is more or less family. Of course she should go with them.


Just one problem. The room in which the original Lord Montbarry died seems to be haunted. Will Agnes unravel the mystery of the missing courier?


Its a short novel but one in which Collins rolls out his full repertoire of literary tricks and traits. As in The Woman in White we have an occult mystery with elements of the detective story, a genre Collins more or less invented in The Moonstone. The narrative unfolds in a variety of voices and forms: letters, first and third person narration and - my absolute favourite - the technicalities of the mystery are revealed in a scenario for a play manically penned by the deranged and dying Countess.


Great fun.

Wilkie Collins - Peter Ackroyd

This is a very short biography of Collins.  Collins himself was very short but extraordinarily productive, thus in 183 pages Ackroyd can only delve deeply into the best sellers - The Woman in White and The Moonstone.  He nevertheless manages to cover the others in a way that sparks my interest in reading them, which I assume was one of the aims.  Ackroyd can do this because he is such a fine writer.  He summarises the plots of these enormous potboilers in a paragraph or less yet always hits the salient point.  Mention of a blind girl who falls in love with a man who's turned himself blue certainly caught my attention.  I only wish the index was good enough to help me establish which book this was.

I've always been interested in Collins.  I bought Catherine Peter's The King of Inventors when it first came out in paperback in the early Nineties.  I no longer have it because it was a clunking great brick of a book, over-detailed and colossally dull, even though that was the first book I came across which discussed Collins' extraordinary love life (never married but maintained a longterm cohabitant and fathered a family with another woman whom he housed separately).  Ackroyd naturally includes this aspect of Collins' life but doesn't provide enough detail about the women involved.

The fact is, this is a poorly published book (to look at it, you'd never guess it came out in 2012) in which Ackroyd canters charmingly through other people's research.  It's an introduction, at best an overview, a taster to encourage the interested to look elsewhere.