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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Daphne du Maurier. It’s been a few years since I’ve read and loved Rebecca and have had Don’t Look Now and Other Stories on my reading docket for some time. It contains five tales published together in 1971: Don’t Look Now, Not After Midnight, A Border-Line Case, The Way of the Cross and The Breakthrough. The very first is the very best. The law of diminishing returns applied the more I read, with the collection taking a nose dive at the end of the second story and never recovering.

In Don’t Look Now, a married couple named John and Laura holiday in Venice, recovering from the death of their daughter who suffered a meningitis infection. At a restaurant, they're beguiled by a pair of middle-aged identical twin sisters, one of which appears fixated on John. He determines that twin to be blind. Laura follows the other one into the restroom and returns to confide to her husband that the blind twin had a vision of their daughter standing behind them. She added that John also has second sight but fails to realize it. Finally, the twins issue a warning that the couple will be in danger if they remain in Venice, none of which John takes seriously.

In Not After Midnight, a prep school headmaster named Timothy Grey holidays on the Greek isle of Crete. Rejecting his chalet due to his desire for privacy and for a view of the surf so he can paint, Timothy discovers his new accommodation was recently vacated by a man who drowned while swimming at night. His only real vexation is an obnoxious American guest named Stoll and the man’s silent wife. He gradually begins to spy on the couple. Adding to the intrigue is a card he discovers in the chalet written by the drowning victim, which reads “Not after midnight�� and 38, the number of the chalet belonging to the Stolls.

In A Border-Line Case, 19-year-old actor Shelagh Money has returned home to look after her ill father. She's concerned that his condition might not improve quickly enough for her to accept her first major theater role, playing Viola in Twelfth Night. Her father appears on the road to recovery, reminiscing about an old navy pal named Nick Barry who he fell out of touch with. Suddenly confronting Shelagh with a look of horror, he dies. Feeling the need to reconcile her late father’s relationship with the man he was thinking about when he died, she travels to Ireland to seek the reclusive Commander Barry out.

It's always the same when you come face-to-face with death, the nurse told her, you feel you could have done more. It used to worry me a lot when I was training. And of course with a close relative it's worse. You've had a great shock, you must try and pull yourself together for your mother's sake ... My mother's sake? My mother would not mind if I walked out of the house this moment, Shelagh was on the point of saying, because then she would have all the attention, all the sympathy, people would say how wonderfully she was bearing up, whereas with me in the house sympathy will be divided. So death, Shelagh decided, was a moment for compliments, for everyone saying polite things about everybody else which they would not dream of saying at another time. Let me run upstairs for you ... Let me answer the telephone ... Shall I put on the kettle? An excess of courtesy, like mandarins in kimonos bowing, and at the same time an attempt at self-justification for not having been there when the explosion happened.

In The Way of the Cross, British tourists from Little Bletford congregate in Jerusalem, where the vicar who was scheduled to lead their tour of the Holy City falls ill and is replaced by a young minister. In The Breakthrough, an electrical engineer is loaned out by his employer to the salt marshes near Saxmere, where he discovers an eccentric scientist is working on a project to harness the lifeforce at the moment of death.

Don’t Look Now and Other Stories is grand in that each of the tales involves a British tourist or tourists who grant themselves a much-needed change of scenery only to encounter more than they bargained for. It’s sublime packaging on the part of du Maurier, or perhaps very disciplined, considering all of the stories were published the same year. Don’t Look Now is the best, an eerie exploration of the clarity and mystery of a psychic vision, or what happens when you’re provided an answer without understanding the question. It uses foreshadowing to build suspense very well. This served as source material for an offbeat thriller starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie released in 1973.

Du Maurier establishes atmosphere and parses out detail supremely well in all five of the stories, particularly Not After Midnight, which should serve as a warning that while on holiday, never ignore local superstition. She promises more than she’s able to ultimately deliver in this story. A Border-Line Case runs off the tracks at the halfway mark rather than the very end, failing to provide the necessary intrigue for all of the build-up. The Way of the Cross is self-indulgent nonsense that goes absolutely nowhere. The ideas sifted through in The Breakthrough don’t even hold up. But the overall effect, combining psychological realism with a love of the past, is one that definitely makes me want to read more from the author.

Daphne du Maurier was born in 1907 in London, England. Her father was a prominent stage actor and theater manager and her mother—until her retirement in 1910—also an actor. Some of Daphne’s early work was published in the weekly British magazine the Bystander. Her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published in 1931. One of its fans, a World War I veteran named Frederick Browning who’d risen to the rank of major, wooed du Maurier and they married a year later. They had three children and Lady Browning continued to publish under her maiden name to great success. Jamaica Inn, Rebecca, Frenchman’s Creek, Hungry Hill and My Cousin Rachel, and her short stories The Birds and Don’t Look Now would all be adapted to film. Du Maurier rarely granted interviews for print or television and resided for much of her life privately in Cornwall, where she died in 1989.



Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes
-- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith