Wed 15 Aug 2007
While I collect Gothic romance paperbacks, I certainly have not read most of them. Yet, that is. So when I get an inquiry like the following, I’m seldom of very much help. It’s a long shot, I know, but I’m posting the question here, just in case someone stops by sometime and recognizes the book right away. You never know.
Leave a comment or email me directly, and I’ll pass the word along to L.B.
PS. And as I said in my first reply to her, several of Wilkie Collins’s books were published in paperback as Gothics. This was early on in the craze for them, before a crew of authors had been established to write new ones and publishers were growing frantic trying to jump on the gravy wagon. Anything that could be published as a Gothic was, back in those days. All they had to do was to put a new cover on it, one with a girl in the foreground, running from a spooky manor house in the background.
Here’s her question:
The setting was summer, modern day. The husband takes his beautiful young wife (Rikki) to the shore for the season — Rikki had some type of medical condition (breathing, asthma?). A woman is hired to stay with the family (there may have been a young child?) while the husband is back in the city at work; this woman becomes the protagonist of the story.
As the story develops it turns out Rikki is a jealous psychopathic liar, who senses early on her husband has more than platonic feelings for the woman (they both share a passion for Sinatra music, etc.) — the implications are the marriage was strained at the story’s outset. The climatic scene towards the end has Rikki on the telephone with someone, cleverly creating a “scene” where she’s screaming the protagonist is about to kill her, during which Rikki actually trips and falls (I think her death was the result of electrocution).
Does any of this ring a bell for you? I’ve tried Googling some of the key words — most of the results are for some type of heavy metal music. I may not have given you sufficient information, but this is all I can recall of the plot.
— L. B.
August 20th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Similar to the movie The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.
August 20th, 2007 at 7:54 pm
Not having seen that particular movie, I looked up the plot synopsis on http://www.imdb.com:
“Peyton Flanders seemed to be the perfect nanny, but secretly she was out to wreck the lives of the family she was supposed to be helping. Before becoming the nanny, Peyton had a miscarriage, and blamed it on Claire (the mother). Claire suspects nothing, having never met Peyton before.”
There are similarities, but to me, the details don’t sound the same. In terms of nannies in gothic novels, both good and bad, there must be tons of variations on the theme.
I’ll certainly pass the word along to L.B., though. Thanks, Bob!
September 6th, 2007 at 1:07 pm
It sounds something like the book and movie called Leave her to Heaven starring Gene Tierney and written by Ben Ames Williams. An oldie.
September 6th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
The theme of the jealous wife is there, all right, but I don’t remember the “other woman” who’s hired perhaps to watch a child. Another movie I have to watch again, sometime.
The funny thing is, a coincidence you might say, is that I just saw the book at Borders this evening, in the form of a great-looking trade paperback (Chicago Review Press, 2007). Is something happening, like a remake of the movie — done once for TV as “Too Good to Be True,” with Loni Anderson — that I don’t know about?