When I have a hankering for psychological suspense but don’t want weak characters, implausible scenarios, and repetitive interior monologues, I reach for Daphne Du Maurier.
Du Maurier, whose beloved 1938 novel Rebecca has never gone out of print, was a master of suspense—and in my humble opinion an early commentator on the conflicts of modern-day womanhood. Building on the gothic traditions of the past, she created fresh, grounded takes on people thrust into uncomfortable, often mystifying situations. Always there is mystery (and sometimes a crime), and always she imbues her characters and their worlds with a nagging uncertainty as to what or who is real.
Take Rebecca. A naïve young woman gets swept up in the promise of a charmed life with Maxim De Winter, a wealthy older man from a prominent English family. But once she marries him and settles into Manderley, her new home, she feels a darkness hanging over the place and begins to suspect that all is not well. What unspoken history lies hidden there? What happened to Rebecca, Maxim’s first wife? And exactly what is up with creepy Mrs. Danvers?
Du Maurier spins an equally murky mystery in My Cousin Rachel, in which the well-heeled and sheltered young Philip Ashley allows his late cousin’s wife to move into his country manor and comes to regret it. Who, really, is Rachel? What are her motives for being there? And did she murder Philip’s cousin?
Nature provides the unsettling dilemma in her short story “The Birds,” in which all manner of winged creatures begin attacking the residents of a coastal English village in a series of inexplicable and ever more savage assaults. What’s causing this outrageous behavior? And how will they make it stop?
Elsewhere in Du Maurier’s canon, you’ll find a couple lost in an oddly menacing Venice, a widower whose apple tree might be possessed by his dead wife’s spirit, and an orphaned woman caught up in the dark, inscrutable world of smuggling in Cornwall.
There is a reason why Alfred Hitchcock, the master of cinematic suspense, chose to turn some of Du Maurier’s stories into movies. Like Du Maurier, Hitchcock delighted in spinning an elusive mystery while keeping both his characters and his audience off kilter.
Next time you want real, plausible humans thrust into situations they can’t quite understand and which threaten to undo them, reach for Daphne. She won’t disappoint.