The Long Shadow by Celia Fremlin

The Long Shadow is certainly a Christmas story with a difference. It is a genuinely chilling psychological thriller that will have you shivering as you read it and not because it is set around Christmas. 

 

When Imogen is awoken by and answers the ringing telephone in a dark and empty house she does not expect to be accused of murdering her husband by a man she met at a party who is on the other end of the phone.  But she is and as she tries to cope with guests arriving in her home for the Christmas festivities strange things are taking place. Who put the half bottle of whiskey beside Ivor’s favourite chair and why does it appear that someone has been going through his papers as well.?  More importantly why is this man continuing to phone and insist that Imogen is guilty of killing her husband? As Imogen grapples with her house being filled with her husband’s relatives over the festive period she is also finds herself questioning not only her own sanity but her relationship with her husband.  Did she really know him?

 

Faber & Faber are as part of their Faber Classic Crime for 2018 re-issuing Celia Fremlin’s The Long Shadow which was originally published in 1975. It is a shame that she is not as well-known as she should be as she certainly knows how to write chilling story that leaves you with an incredibly creepy feeling and The Long Shadow is certainly a Christmas mystery with a twist.  It is a fascinating and intense story with a plot that that leaves you with the feeling that a lot has been hidden by many the characters. There is also a sense of claustrophobia that that surrounds everyone and everything.  It is also an insightful study of human behaviour, sorrow, avarice, reprisal and narcissism by all.

 

I admit that reading it now does on the one hand show how dated it is but, this does not take away from the fact that The Long Shadow is domestic noir at its finest and Celia Fremlin certainly knows how to show a reader the darker side of an ordinary domestic setting. As psychological thrillers go The Long Shadow is incredibly atmospheric a riveting read and just as relevant today as when it was first published.   One does not have to wait until Christmas to read this stylishly written thriller.

The Thrill of Domestic Suspense

Today as part of Kate Moretti’s The Vanishing Year blog tour, author Kate Moretti talks about The Thrill of Domestic Suspense.

When I started writing suspense, I realized I was more attracted to the kind of drama that occurs inside your own home. For a while, I thought this was maybe just called family drama, but I’d had a hard time finding books that fit this narrow-seeming genre. A handful of Dean Koontz, some romantic suspense authors like Lisa Gardner, JD Robb, Karen Robards were selling by the zillions but their books were more about sexual tension and life and death.  

Then GONE GIRL happened.

I read Gone Girl, and like most of America went whoa. It’s not that the genre had never been done, it’s not even that the idea of a missing woman was even all that revolutionary. Gone Girl did three things to really make the book community sit up straight. 1. It was incredibly well-written, and the social commentary was excoriating. Brutal and accurate, as evidenced by the controversial Cool Girl passage. 2. It brought the danger inside the house. With only one live POV and a diary, we got a very skewed version of what the Dunne’s marriage was like. This kind of dichotomy was compelling and suspenseful. 3. It turned the damsel in distress on its head.  This accounts for at least 50% of the success of this book, in my mind. Not that no book has ever tried to have a female villain, but very few have done it so brilliantly and coldly.

In 2011, I started writing a book called Binds That Tie, which is a couple in a trouble marriage that accidentally kill a man and instead of calling the police, they bury the body.  It was alternative point of view, and a few people told me, “you can’t write women’s fiction from a man’s point of view”. So I doubted what I was writing was women’s fiction. But I didn’t have a name for it.

Now, in 2016, the market is exploding with the kind of books that I adore. Deeper psychological implications, untrustworthy narrators, plot twists, and creative structure (think All the Missing Girls, by Megan Miranda). I read a glut of books this summer, from Emma Cline’s The Girls, to Lisa Jewell’s The Girls in the Garden, The Widow, by Fiona Barton, Pretty Girls, by Karin Slaughter, and the upcoming The Marriage Lie, by Kimberly Belle. All of these books had a single thread in common: they focused on the dangers in our own ordinary lives, our own neighborhoods, and in many cases, our own homes. For me, this kind of story ups the ante: the suspense feels immediate and very personal.

Sarah Weinman calls these stories Domestic Suspense. I don’t know if she coined the term necessarily, but she’s certainly had a hand in re-popularizing it. I’ve tried to figure out why we, mostly as women, seem so drawn to this genre. I think we’re drawn to this idea that we could be our own protagonist. We’re not FBI agents or homicide detectives (although some are, I’m sure!), we’re not in Witness protection, we’re just ordinary women. We have kids and families and PTA meetings and carpool and girls nights out and bachelorette parties.

The appeal isn’t the external threat of danger.  These gripping, fantastical stories could happen to us. And that’s the thrill of it.

 

More information about the author and her website can be found here.  You can also find her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter @KateMoretti1

The Vanishing Year by Kate Moretti is published on 27^th September by Titan Books

Zoe Whittaker is living a charmed life. She is the beautiful young wife to handsome, charming Wall Street tycoon Henry Whittaker. She is a member of Manhattan’s social elite. She is on the board of one of the city’s most prestigious philanthropic organizations. She has a perfect Tribeca penthouse in the city and a gorgeous lake house in the country. The finest wine, the most up-to-date fashion, and the most luxurious vacations are all at her fingertips.  What no one knows is that five years ago, Zoe’s life was in danger. Back then, Zoe wasn’t Zoe at all. Now her secrets are coming back to haunt her.  As the past and present collide, Zoe must decide who she can trust before she—whoever she is—vanishes completely.

Putting it Together: Selecting the Stories in Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives by Sarah Weinman

(photo credit: Michael Lionstar)

An anthology may have a great concept or an ideal news hook, but if the stories themselves aren't top-quality, the whole thing falls down. That's why, when Akashic first published Brooklyn Noir all the way back in 2004, it proved to be such a success: there were so many excellent stories set around the borough (where I've lived for the last three years) that it bolstered the very simple idea of short noir fiction rooted to a particular city or urban area. And there's simply no way the publisher could have kept the Noir series going, now dozens of volumes strong, without hundreds of quality stories.

As such, when I began on what is now Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives, I knew I had a lot of work ahead of me. Would I be able to include this fabulous story by one of my favorite writers? Would I be able to find a fabulous story by one of my favorite writers? And could I find an appropriate story at all? Would a tantalizingly brief listing of a story by a possible candidate turn into a blazing gem a new audience could discover anew? There were so many different levels of inquiry I had to balance – and that's sticking solely to matters of content, not finance.

The first order of business was seeing which stories had recently been reprinted in other anthologies. I started with those because they were in print, generally easy to find, listed the relevant rightsholders, and their electronic files were readily available (which would make my publisher happy.) So I must thank Denise Hamilton for including Margaret Millar's stellar “The People Across the Canyon” in LA Noir 2 and Elizabeth George for doing the same with Nedra Tyre's stealth disturber “A Nice Place to Stay” in A Moment on the Edge: 100 Years of Women in Crime Fiction.

It's no fun, though, to repeat too many stories from anthologies past. So in a few instances, I would find a different story by another oft-anthologized author. Shirley Jackson's “Louisa, Please Come Home” and Patricia Highsmith's “The Heroine” were part of respective short story collections, but not reprinted elsewhere for some time. George included stories by Charlotte Armstrong, Dorothy Salisbury Davis and Joyce Harrington, but I ended up going with different ones: “The Splintered Monday”, “Lost Generation” and “The Purple Shroud”, respectively, because they seemed better suited to Troubled Daughters' domestic suspense theme. A different story by Dorothy B. Hughes appeared in Otto Penzler's Best American Noir of the Century,  but I went with “Everybody Needs a Mink”, a lighter-hearted, sly take on suburbia and living beyond one's means.

Other candidate authors required a lot more hunting. It took a long time to find an appropriate story by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, which seemed odd to me, as she was one of the key authors I knew I must include, based on novels like The Blank Wall and The Old Battle-Ax. But it wasn't until I followed some blind alleys to find myself poring through a bound volume of the long-gone American Magazine from the summer of 1949 that I found “The Stranger in the Car” – a novella, yes, but in perfect keeping with my chosen theme. It took almost as long to find something suitable by Vera Caspary, as she did not publish that many short stories, preferring to publish novels or write screenplays (or treatments.) But “Sugar and Spice” fit the bill for its exploration of the deepening jealousy between two women who, frankly, ought to have known better.

That left room for some unexpected surprises. While poring through a stack of old Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine issues last summer, I found “Mortmain” by Miriam Allen deFord, a writer I knew of dimly but not enough to know her reputation in the crime fiction world. I later learned she was better known for her science fiction stories and anthologies, her feminist radicalism and passion for social justice, and for writing true crime, but was also a vastly underrated mystery short story writer – which “Mortmain” demonstrates brilliantly. A similar “aha” moment happened at the Center for Fiction in New York City, where I spent several days poring through numerous old anthologies. In one of the annuals I found “Lavender Lady” by Barbara Callahan, which floored me on a first read and then again when finalizing the lineup.

The final tally of fourteen stories is as good as I could make it. But of course, there were authors I wished I could have included but could not because of suitability issues, publishing good stories too early or too late for my chosen time period, or other reasons. But there were certainly enough writers of domestic suspense to fill several volumes, not merely one. It's up to readers to decide if they wish to see more, though!

Sarah Weinman is the news editor for Publishers Marketplaceand writes the monthly “Crimewave” mystery and suspense column for the National Post. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Observer, Slate, and the New Yorker online, among other publications.  

For more information, check out sarahweinman.com or domesticsuspense.com

One of the most anticipated collections of stories is published today, 27 August 2013.  The collection entitled - Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense.   The collection is edited by crime critic Sarah Weinman and is a salute to the real femmes fatales of the domestic suspense genre—and the deceitful children, deranged husbands, vengeful friends, and murderous wives they unleashed.

Weinman asks: Where would today’s bestselling authors like Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, Sue Grafton, or Tana French be without the pioneering women writers who came before them and created the psychological thriller?  In this new anthology, including hair-raising stories by Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, Vera Caspary, and more, Weinman brings together fourteen tales by women who—from the 1940s through the mid-1970s—took a scalpel to contemporary society and sliced away to reveal its dark essence.