Forgotten Books Friday - The Long Shadow

British author Celia Fremlin (1914-2009), was the daughter of a
doctor and the sister of nuclear physicist John H. Fremlin. She studied
classics at Somerville College, Oxford, but after her mother died in
1931, she was expected to look after her father. Instead of being
content to just stay at home, she took jobs in domestic service, which
was unusual for a middle-class woman at that time. She said it was to
"observe the peculiarities of the class structure of our society," and
those experiences later found their way into her later writing.

Much
later, in her sixties, she began to take long walks at night by
herself  all over the back streets of London, partly for research and
partly to prove a point. Her conclusion was that to make the dark
streets lose their terror, "We don’t need more policemen on the beat. We
need more grandmothers." Those experiences were compiled into a TV
program about challenging people’s fears of urban streets at night and
many observations also wound up in her books.

Her life may have
seemed like domestic bliss on the surface, but it was filled with its
share of tragedy that would be at home in any crime novel:  Not only did
she lose her mother at age 17, but her youngest daughter committed
suicide, as did Fremlin's husband, rather than live a disabled life
after a heart attack. She also outlived her second husband and her other
two children, and went slowly blind in her later years, spending her
last days in a nursing home, which was a bit ironic, considering she
became an advocate for euthanasia late in life.


Fremlin's first mystery novel was The Hours Before Dawn
from 1958 which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel and established her
style of mystery/horror set mostly around the lives of married women in
the 1950s. Some feel that The Long Shadow was an equally fine
work, and H.R.F. Keating even included it in his 1987 listing of the 100
best crime and mystery books. It's the story of the Imogen Barnicott,
third wife of a celebrated, cruel and egocentric professor, who, despite
her unhappy marriage, had never plotted her husband's murder—yet after
his supposedly accidental death, she receives a mysterious phone call
accusing her of that very thing. Add to that strange happenings like new
messages left lying around in his handwriting, work on an unfinished
manuscript of his that continues to be written, and shadowy figures seen
in the house, and Imogen not only begins to doubt her husband is dead
at all, she begins to believe she just might take his place.

Celia
Fremlin used to say that she wrote the sort of book she wanted to read,
in which a mysterious threat hangs over someone and escalates chapter
by chapter; or as, H.R.F. Keating recalled her saying, "to put a plot
that is exciting or terrifying against a background that is domestic,
very ordinary, humdrum." She used this to great effect in The Long Shadow
and others, slowly building an atmosphere of suspense and terror out of
the excruciatingly mundane, using the contrasts as a literary canvas
like Dali and his surrealistic art.

Her character observations
managed to be cutting and yet have a touch of dark humor, as well, as
this passage from Imogen's experience at a party a well-wishing friend
had encouraged her to attend:

Worst of all,
perhaps, was the apparently unending procession of people who,
incredibly, still hadn't heard, and had to be clobbered with the news in
the first moment of meeting. Had to have the smiles slashed from their
faces, the cheery words of greeting rammed back down their gullets as if
by a gratuitous blow across the mouth. There they would be, waving from
across the road, calling "Hi!" from their garden gates, phoning by
chance from Los Angeles, from Aberdeen, from Beckenham...One and all to
have their friendly overtures slammed into silence, their kindly voices
choked with shock. One after another, day after day, over and over
again: sometimes Imogen felt like the Black Death stalking the earth,
destroying everything in her path.

Fremlin's
books are filled with astute perceptions that no doubt bear the imprint
of her first-hand research into human behavior, as Imogen's stepson
Robin advises her about taking on boarders:

I'd
choose Depressions rather than Anxiety States...From the point of view
of a landlady, Depressions are good because they lie in bed until midday
and don't eat breakfast. Whereas Anxiety States want grapefruit—All
Bran—the lot."

In addition to her 20 novels and nonfiction books, the last dating from
1994, she wrote short stories, poetry and articles and was a member of
the Crime Writers Association for many years. The Long Shadow, The Hours Before Dawn, and her other fiction certainly deserves a closer look.