Where was Rebecca shot?: Curiosities, puzzles, and conundrums in modern fiction

by John Sutherland

From the novel of the best selling Is Heathcliff a murderer? an ingenious book of puzzles in 20th century fiction. The novel is today stronger than it ever was. 'Classics', boosed by a hugely successful string of TV and film adaptations, now enjoy a mass readership. The aim of this book is to offer sophisticated and readable literary criticism which will sell as well as good fiction and good biography. The book will deal with canonical and popular 20th century literature from Virginia Woolf to J.G.Ballard. Pursuing puzzles, conundrums and anomalies in our favourite fiction and most revered narratives, from high literature to pulp fiction, Sutherland offers an extremely refreshing way of looking at novels which gets 1 closer to the magical ways in which fiction works.

Genres: Books About Books, Nonfiction, Essays, Literature, Literary Criticism

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 1999

About the author

John Andrew Sutherland is an English academic, newspaper columnist and author. He is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London.

Reviews

[Jack Bates]

I just finished Rebecca which is why I re-read this one. The essays in this are all interesting, it's weirdly dated though in places, I suppose because of being on the cusp of the internet etc. (I have the others in the series too, Will Jane Eyre be Happy and Is Heathcliff a Murderer, both worth a read.)

I remember thinking 'well, in the cottage' when I first saw the title but it doesn't mean that. Also as I'd just read Rebecca I noticed there's something wrong in that essay, because du Maurier does state that the 'unknown woman' Maxim identifies as R had been in the water long enough to have 'lost her arms' which is why know one wonders where her wedding ring is.

[Alicia]

Unlike similar literary puzzle books by Sutherland, this one has an Authors Respond section at the back. All very interesting, and amusing.

[Jules Lewis]

This was my choice for the second of fifty prompts in the Ultimate 2015 Reading Challenge, the prompt being 'non fiction'. I read a lot of non-fiction anyway, so my difficulty later in the year may be limiting my choice to just one! I lean towards crime and mystery books, so this book is perfect for me; Where Was Rebecca Shot? is essentially a collection of mysteries. I stumbled across it in a charity shop, and had to buy it; the cover features the word ‘shot’ and a picture of a revolver, after all!

The book picks apart various curiosities of several twentieth century novels, everything from D H Lawrence’s Women in Love to Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. John Sutherland delves into all sorts of mysteries within the texts themselves, like the age of Poirot in Agatha Christie’s Curtain, and the question about Rebecca in the book’s title. In many cases, you will need to have read the book already, or risk some plot spoilers, but there are warnings along the way for major tips.

There are 38 ‘mysteries’ in total, ranging from only a couple of pages (‘How old is Beloved?’), to longer essays. The final chapter records responses from some of the authors, from the helpful to the inscrutable. In answer to Sutherland’s question on Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, ‘Is Jeanette’s Mother Gay?’, author Jeanette Winterson responds as follows:

Dear John Sutherland,
Who knows?
Best wishes, J.W.

It’s a fascinating read, and a great reminder that there’s more to reading a novel than rushing headlong to the final page.

This review first appeared on my tumblr blog.

[Cat.]

More "why" questions, this time encompassing a lot of modern titles, including (much to my dismay) The Firm by John Grisham. Oh, well.

Once again, I'm only going to cover the books I've read, or at least have some familiarity with.

Since I mentioned it, I'll start with:

The Firm--Where are the computers? It is, after all, set in the 90s.

The Heart of Darkness (Conrad) -- The chapter is entitled "L'horreur! l'horreur!" The question is what language is Kurtz speaking throughout the book, and why translate only some of the time?

To the Lighthouse (Woolf) -- Three-deckers. Anyone know what they are? Well, thanks to a previous book by this author, I do! And they stopped being published well before any character in Woolf's book would have been likely to be reading them au courant.

Whose Body (Sayers) -- You couldn't use the word "foreskin" in a novel in the 20s. But how else would one "know" that a naked man was Jewish immediately? Hmmm.

Rebecca (du Maurier) -- Where was she shot? As in locale, not in what portion of her anatomy. This chapter also tries to answer whose body is mistaken for hers originally, what is Rebecca's successor's name, and what happens to Mrs. Danvers.

Lord of the Flies (Golding) -- Piggy’s glasses couldn't have started a fire: he had the wrong sort of vision problems. Oops.

The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway) -- There's really no way to spend 24 hours in one arm-wrestling bout while drinking without having to stop and take a pee. So is the old man embellishing fact? Between that and seeing lions on the beach in Cuba, the man is playing fast and loose with his history.

Lolita (Nabakov) -- What was Humbert's first crime? Ugh, I don't want to read this book...

A Clockwork Orange (Burgess) -- In Burgess' book he mentions a book entitled A Clockwork Orange. Is it the same book? [This is a fascinating chapter for other reasons, among them that the opening scene where F. Alexander's wife is raped is based on a true event from Burgess' wife's life.]

Curtain (Christie) -- How old was Poirot when he died? And who removed so much of the time-stamp from this book before it was published? Sutherland doesn't really answer the latter question, only saying that whoever did it missed a few tidbits. Christie, the original alternative history queen!

The Odessa File (Forsyth) -- Forsyth accurately predicted (or rather, he asserted) that there were millions of dollars in gold confiscated by the Nazis still sitting in Swiss bank accounts. The book was published in 1972 and set 10 years earlier. It wasn't until 1996 that the World Jewish Congress demanded a full accounting from Switzerland and it was found that there actually was a high amount of business that had been done between the Reich and Swiss bankers.

First Blood (Morrell) -- What is the deal with Rambo's knife? How has it become the centerpiece in the movies--and culture--when it's really not mentioned in the original book? And where has Rambo been since the end of the war (the book was published in 1972, the movie was released in 1982)?

Neuromancer (Gibson) -- The chapter is called "Who invented cyberspace?" I think he chose the wrong verb; Gibson clearing named it, but we all know Al Gore invented it (I joke, I joke).

The Bonfire of the Vanities (Wolfe) -- Where is Tottenham Park? And are they playing cricket or rugby? Considering how specific and detailed Wolfe's descriptions are of New York, the fact that he got the small bit of the story set in London so totally wrong is a major gaffe.

Original Sin (James) -- In her most recent books, James' murderers seem to be expunging their fury at the end of their lives. Why not kill when they are younger?

Death is Now My Neighbour (Dexter) -- What is Morse's first name? He finally reveals it in the final book in the series. But why was it chosen? And when did Dexter decide that was his name? From the beginning of the series, or was he just a good puzzle-solver, using a name that fits all the clues set out in the series?

The English Patient (Ondaatje) -- I get the sense that Sutherland doesn't think much of this book. His issue is the timing of all the prewar events. I loved the book (and the movie), so this didn't bother me, except that I agree with his quibble about flying a plane that has been buried in sand for a decade.

The Remains of the Day (Ishiguro) -- Another one I loved. Sutherland wonders, in light of Mr. Stevens' interest and knowledge of foreign affairs, why does he seem so completely unaware of what was going on in the world while his story is being told.

Beloved (Morrison) -- "How Old is Beloved?" Oh, please, Mr. S. She’s a ghost. She can be any age, at least in Morrison's version of ghostdom. This isn't a mystery. Or rather, if it is, then the mystery is the whole book!

Sutherland adds a chapter in which he contacts the available authors and asks them these questions. Some respond, some don’t, which is almost as fascinating as their answers.

[Simon Mcleish]

Originally posted on my blog here in September 2000.

The third of John Sutherland's collections of short essays on literary puzzles looks at modern (twentieth century) literature, from Henry James' The Wings of the Dove to Jeanette Winterson's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. Each essay, taken by itself, is thought provoking and interesting, even if you have not read the novel under discussion (though they are probably a bit too revealing to read if you don't want to know what happens before reading).

To read them through in one go, as I have done, reveals a certain repetitiveness. A large number of the essays are concerned with discrepancies in the treatment of time, such as the non-mention of the Suez crisis in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and possible resolutions of these difficulties. (In this case, Sutherland suggests it is deliberate and ironic on the part of the novelist, emphasising his central character's ignorance of the fact that his cherished patriarchal world is about to be finally destroyed as the incompetence of establishment figures as Eden is demonstrated incontrovertibly.) The repetition does serve to show just how much readers are willing to accept from a novelist in terms of manipulation of time without even noticing it.

Since many of the novels discussed are relatively recent, Sutherland has been able to approach some of the authors for responses to his essays. In fact, most seem to have chosen not to comment, which is understandable. (I suspect that many authors get tired of others reading things into their work which were not deliberately placed there, and would want to echo Samuel Beckett's "No symbols where none intended".) Most of the response section, in fact, consists of the view of those who worked on screenplays of the novels; this is a good idea, since the literal detail of film means that problems not immediately apparent to a reader have to be urgently solved.

The most interesting essays are those which are not purely literary, such as the discussion of Rambo knives and the different reactions to them by British and American audiences of the film of First Blood, or the literary origins of erotic auto-asphyxiation. The most enjoyable is an entertaining roundup of the Hitchcock style cameo appearances made by Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge and Martin Amis in their own novels.

[Judith Rich]

I love this whole series.

I think my favourite moment in this one may be the reply he received from Alan Sillitoe! Hmm....

[Lucy]

Less interesting than his classics conundrums to this reader, anyway, but written in his energetic and enthusiastic style. I did enjoy his essays on 'Heart of Darkness' and 'The Secret Agent'.