Daphne du Maurier, Mistress of Suspense

I have no idea how many FoG readers are familiar with author Daphne du Maurier. If you do, you probably best know her as the writer for the source material of two Alfred Hitchcock films: "REBECCA" and "THE BIRDS."

In her prolific body of work, du Maurier has written about clairvoyants ("Don't Look Now,") homicidal femme fatales ("Kiss Me Again, Stranger"), and dysfunctional marriage ("The Apple Tree").

The majority of the time, they end in tragedy, or at least with a very bleak outlook. I like to think of her as the British Stephen King of her day and a true mistress of suspense. As this is the month of her birth (May 13), I thought I'd pay a little homage to this overlooked writer of the macabre.

Du Maurier has been quoted as saying, "I am generally dismissed with a sneer as a bestseller." What I find interesting about her is that she was pigeon-holed as a populist romance writer. To me, she was anything but. As she furthered her career, she grew bolder and bolder at expanding her themes and subject matter, especially in her short stories. Even the film version of "REBECCA," which United Artists marketed as a love story, contains psychological thriller elements and is riddled with paranoia.



Over four decades before Danny and Oxide Pang made the original Chinese version of the film "THE EYE," du Maurier wrote her short story "The Blue Lenses." In it, main character Marda West undergoes eye surgery in which lenses have been implanted. Once her bandages come off, she discovers the everyone she sees has the head of an animal on a human body. We discover, along with Marda, that the animal heads reflect the true nature of these people: the kind-hearted Nurse Ansel is actually a snake, while her beloved husband Jim is a vulture. Dr. Greaves (who has the head of a Jack Russell terrier), operates again to insert new lenses. Not surprisingly, there is a grim twist ending without any promise of hope, but it does leave you to think. This story also reminds me of a popular episode of the original "Twilight Zone" entitled "Eye of the Beholder," though again, du Maurier's short story was published first.

Du Maurier also went on record about her dislike for Hitchcock's adaptation of "THE BIRDS," though it is uncertain why. Maybe changing the setting from her beloved Cornwall (where she lived the majority of the time) to northern California was enough to fuel her objections. Film scholars have certainly discussed the film version to death, drawing parallels between the behavior of the birds and the human characters on-screen. Or is it an analogy of the claustrophobic fear of communism that existed during the 1950s? I like to go along with this statement that du Maurier wrote in the foreword in her anthology "Classics of the Macabre": "Supposing they stop being interested in worms?"

What I have consistently found in du Maurier's fiction writing has been her ability to get inside a character's head and capture that person's experience, whether it be anxiety, love, obsession, or terror. It is still remarkable to me how you never learn the protagonist's name in "Rebecca," yet you are with her every step of her journey. Though I'm not against gore, du Maurier rarely had to include it in the mix. She found value, as I think readers like myself do, in the allusion of storytelling. I find most of the psychology in her work so subtle that you don't realize how involved you are until you try to extract yourself from it. For that, Lady Browning, my hat's off to you.