JP Delaney on Why are houses so often the heroes?

There are, obviously, lots of good books that aren’t about houses. But, my goodness, there are even more that are. Brideshead, Pemberly in Pride and Prejudice, Alconleigh in The Pursuit of Love, Top Withins Farm in Wuthering Heights, Green Gables, Hill House… There’s something about making a house central to a story that brings together landscape, history, and the personality of the owners, past and present – all useful elements for psychological fiction, in particular. 

Everyone’s favourite fictional house is Manderley in Rebecca, famously based – at least, in terms of its setting – on Menabilly in Cornwall. Du Maurier first stumbled on it, abandoned and almost derelict, as a teenager, trespassing in its grounds. Later, stationed in Cairo with her husband during the war, her thoughts turned back to it as she dreamt Rebecca into life. That the success of Rebecca – and, in particular, Hitchcock’s film version – made her wealthy enough to negotiate a twenty-year lease on the dilapidated property she had, at that point, barely stepped foot in, is one of life’s extraordinary ironies.

Du Maurier’s relationship with Menabilly was always a romantic, almost obsessive one. In her autobiographical essay ‘The House of Secrets’ she describes how, after she saw it for the first time, ‘the house possessed me from that day, even as a mistress holds her lover.’ (The reversal of gender is revealing: du Maurier sometimes attributed her ‘writing energy’ to ‘Eric’, an alternative persona she dubbed ‘the boy in the box.’)  Her daughter Flavia noted her habit of occasionally kissing its stone walls: ‘When she turned, her slightly flushed face had a look close to ecstasy.’ And du Maurier herself wrote to a friend, ‘I do believe I love Mena more than people’, and compared having to leave it when her lease expired to the screaming of a pulled-up mandrake. When she was sick with pneumonia on her deathbed, by then exiled to the nearby Dower House, she manged to haul herself up and go out in a storm, just so she could gaze on Menabilly one last time.

My new psychological thriller, The Move, was directly inspired by du Maurier’s relationship with Menabilly, though I chose to transplant her domophilia to Hampshire. Rosemary and Paul Finch, both in their eighties, are downsizing from their beloved Trade Cottage after many happy decades there. Paul has terminal MND and will soon be in a wheelchair; their son Jamie and their grandchildren are all in America; and the house is starting to get too much. At the viewing, they hit it off with a nice family with young children who are looking to make the move out of London, even going so far as to accept an offer that isn’t the highest bid, so keen is Rosemary for them to have it. (Another nod, perhaps, to a fictional house story, in this case E.M Forster’s famous plot device in Howard’s End.)

And for Kate and Matt Crowther, the move is initially idyllic. Sure, it’s a little strange to discover, the day they move in, that Rosemary and Paul have chosen to leave most of their antique furniture behind – but then again, it wouldn’t fit into the ultra-modern passive house which, it transpires, they’ve built just at the end of Trade Cottage’s garden, close enough for them to pop round whenever they want. And it’s great that they want to look after the children when Kate and Matt are in London; to teach Tilly how to ride and Will how to shoot, and to help Kate and Matt throw housewarming parties so they can meet the rest of the village. Rosemary in particular is so welcoming that it takes Kate a little while to realise there’s something almost obsessive about her need to maintain Trade Cottage’s aura of picture-perfect loveliness just as it always has been – and that her own children’s time there, twenty years previously, might not have been quite the Swallows-and-Amazons paradise Rosemary paints it as.

Because that’s another great thing about houses: they have facades, and facades can be deceptive. Remember Cowslip’s warren in Watership Down? On the face of it, it’s wonderful – the farmer even leaves food nearby. It takes even Fiver a little while to work out that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Writing about houses, of course, immediately brings you close to the Gothic tradition. In the classics of the genre, there’s usually an isolated, ancient, crumbling manor, full of shadows and unexplained noises, presided over by a brooding, damaged master, as stuck in the tragic past as his dwelling place is. To this fearsome abode comes an innocent, usually a young woman; both the house’s potential victim, and its saviour. It’s an archetype that stretches all the way from Wuthering Heights to Beauty and the Beast.

Personally, I like to play around with the trope, to defamiliarize it. In The Girl Before I made my crumbling mansion a tiny minimalist house in London, and my brooding master its obsessively minimalist architect. (In a nod to my influences, I called the digital home controller ‘Housekeeper’.) In The New Wife, it’s a dilapidated finca on Mallorca that turns out – when the young man who has inherited it from his estranged father visits – to have been gorgeously renovated by his father’s third wife and her daughter, who he’s there to evict. And in The Move, it’s a Grade-II listed country property that, even run down, requires the heftiest of mortgages to purchase, and is crying out to be turned into an Airbnb.

When du Maurier titled her essay ‘The House of Secrets’, she put her finger on another aspect of houses which makes them such fertile ground for writers. Houses have pasts, and those pasts are sometimes hidden. Again, there’s an archetype: in Bluebeard’s Castle, there was one single room that his new bride was forbidden to enter. Needless to say, she does. In The Girl Before, it’s a service cupboard containing a dusty old sleeping bag and a pair of women’s pyjamas. In The Move, it’s a smugglers’ cellar, latterly used by teenage boys as a kind of nightclub, not unlike the ‘Club H’ Princes William and Harry created for their friends at Highgrove. It contains an ancient sofa, complete with some rather suspicious-looking stains.

Perhaps the final aspect of houses that makes them so good to write about, though, is their relatability. We all live somewhere, and that somewhere is our sanctuary; the way we choose to furnish it, an expression of who we are. Our homes are where we should feel most safe – and when that safety is threatened, we might all react in ways it takes a novelist to predict.  

             

The Move by J P Delaney (Quercus Books) Out Now

New beginnings can be deadly . . . Kate and Matt Crowther are finally moving out of London, in search of a better life for their young family. Trade Cottage seems to be the house of their dreams - and they immediately hit it off with the sellers, Rosemary and Paul Finch, who brought up their own family there. When Kate and Matt move in, they're pleased to discover the Finches still very much in evidence: offering advice, introducing them to the local community, and becoming honorary grandparents to Will, 11, and Tilly, 9. But when the Finches take exception to Kate and Matt's renovations, relations with the neighbours sour, and Kate and Matt find themselves subjected to a vicious campaign of hate. But Kate isn't giving up her dream home without a fight. And it turns out Trade Cottage has secrets of its own to reveal - secrets that may endanger the very family Kate has moved there to protect . . .

More information about JP Delaney and his books can be found on his website. J P Delaney can also be found on Facebook. He can also be found on Instagram @jpdelaney

Second Wife Syndrome by Julia Crouch

Like most (all?) crime writers, I love Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca. 

When Du Maurier was working on the novel, she told her publisher Victor Gollancz that it was ‘a sinister tale about a woman who marries a widower ...Psychological and rather macabre’. While I am in no way claiming parity with one of the great classics of twentieth century fiction, Rebecca was, in no small way, one of the inspirations for my new novel, The Daughters.

I love Rebecca’s nameless flawed narrator: the young second wife, an ingenue, who has no idea what she is getting herself into, the house of monsters she is entering. The pressure she feels to fill Rebecca’s perfect shoes and her lack of insight into her own role for Maxim are at once infuriating and heartbreaking. She is, as Olivia Laing says in her Guardian article, Sex, jealousy and gender: Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca 80 years on, ‘raw as an egg’. 

In The Daughters, I take the young second wife out of Mandalay, place her in a contemporary Muswell Hill eco-house and give her a modern, feminist twist. My Carys, therefore, is a professional woman who has got where she is by hard work, not birth or chance. She is mixed-race, northern and working class and when she meets her much older future husband Bill she is starting out in a profession (architecture) where finding anyone with just one of those attributes is a rarity, let alone all three combined into one person. She is also living with a woman at this point, so her decision to have a relationship with Bill is a very active choice on her part. 

Indeed, where the second Mrs de Winter’s passivity is one of her driving forces, Carys is all about action. She cares. She works hard to help her younger stepdaughter Lucy through the trauma that still reverberates after her mother Alice’s supposed suicide twelve years earlier. 

So far, so likeable and perfect for Carys.

But there are Alice’s shoes to fill, both literally – Carys wears Alice’s dog-walking boots to walk Alice’s dog – and metaphorically. Like the first Mrs de Winter, Alice was on the surface a class act. A pioneering GP who set up a revolutionary health centre in Hackney combining NHS and complementary therapies for the local low-income families, she was also an accomplished artist and keen botanist. on top of all this, she was also a loving and caring mother to her daughters, Lucy and the older Sara (there was a lost baby boy in between the girls). Everybody loved Alice. She is a tough act to follow.

To make things even harder for Carys, I also watch her through Sara’s eyes. Sara is – if you squint and give me a long piece of rope – the Mrs Danvers of the plot. She is just a couple of years younger than her stepmother, which is an potentially incendiary situation in itself. But, when, at the beginning of the novel, we learn that Sara has discovered there are questions about Alice’s supposed suicide, that the coffin she and her little sister wept over at the funeral was in fact empty, the existing cracks in the relationship between Carys and Sara expand into ravines. 

So what did happen to Alice? 

And what, Sara wonders, was the sequence of events leading up to Carys and Bill getting together? She has always thought that her stepmother moved into the family home with unseemly haste after Alice’s death. But now she smells a big stinking rat about everything that happened back then.

Is Carys the perfect being she presents to the world?

While the questions about the circumstances around Alice’s and Rebecca’s deaths are raised at different narrative points, the idea that both of the dead first wives may have been too good to be true is at the heart of each novel. Also, both the second Mrs de Winter and Carys are seen by members of their new households as arrivistes – the first because of her utter lack of sophistication, the second because of her colour, class and accent. Indeed, Carys meets Bill when she is on student placement at the celebrated architecture practice he runs. Both women marry in and marry up. 

I can’t say any more, because – and this is one of the great drawbacks of discussing crime fiction – that would involve spoilers. But I hope that you will go some way to enjoying The Daughters just as much as I do Rebecca, and that you will find the ending just as unexpected and twisting.

The Daughters by Julia Crouch (Bookouture) Out Now

My father said my mother killed herself. My sister says he’s lying. The day of our mother’s funeral, my little sister Lucy and I clung to our father’s side. He promised he’d get us through it, and we believed him. But then I discovered that the coffin we wept over was empty. Dad says he was trying to protect us – that he thought it would be easier to grieve if we didn’t know our mother’s body was never found. His new wife says she just wants to help us move on from the past. Then Lucy has a flash of memory that leaves her shaking. Our father. A woman she doesn’t recognise. A knife… She insists she knows something about the day our mother died, but it’s buried too deep to see clearly. What happened to our mother? I need to find the truth. But I have no idea who I can trust. And what if the answer puts my life in danger?

More information about Julia Crouch and her work can be found on her website. You can also find her on Twitter @thatjuliacrouch and on Instagram @juliageek. She can also be found on Facebook.