The Blank Wall

The Blank Wall by Elizabeth Sanxay Holding is a tense and suspenseful thriller. Adapted in 1949 into the movie A Reckless Moment starring James Mason (remade in 2001 as The Deep End with Tilda Swinton), it is a very atmospheric novel with a period feel to it; whilst reading it I envisaged events in black & white celluloid with Cary Grant in Mason's role as Martin Donnelly.

Lucia Holley is a surburban housewife in 1940s America; her husband is serving in WWII and she cares for her teenage children and her elderly father, dealing with the domestic dramas of running a home during wartime, with the help of her loyal maid Sibyl. In the opening chapter Lucia has the problem of the unsavoury Ted Darby to deal with, an older man that her daughter Bee is inappropriately involved with; this problem is solved accidentally by her father, Mr Harper, who "sent him off with a flea in his ear". It transpires a couple of pages later that Mr Harper has actually -and unknowingly- killed Ted Darby and to protect her father Lucia disposes of the body.

The Blank Wall has highly melodramatic moments juxtaposed with moments of domestic hilarity. Whilst Lucia is counting ration points, worrying about the lack of gas for the family car, is frustrated by a broken washing machine, frets that her letters to her husband are too dull, she also has to evade detection by police Lieutenant Levy, engage with blackmailing black marketeers, pawn her jewels in order to pay them and persuade her children that she is not having an affair with the sympathetic criminal, Donnelly. A very suspenseful yet amusing read ensues and I was completely gripped in finding out if Lucia managed to stay calm, keep it together, and maintain her integrity and freedom from prosecution. Uppermost in Lucia's daily efforts is to keep her family safe and she is aided in this by the wonderful Sibyl, who also cooks the illegal meat that Donnelly sends as gifts. Evocative of the time period and the uneasy undercurrent of helplessness in the face of war (especially as a woman), The Blank Wall is not just a fun read but one that is historically intriguing and a precursor for later psychological crime novels. Lucia is a fabulously strong and funny female protagonist, a middle-aged housewife caught up in a surreal case of murder and intrigue, and this is another great and unique Persephone novel.

Some favourite passages, the first central to the plots and themes of the novel:

She got a book and read it in bed, with stubborn determination. It was a mystery story she had got out of the lending library for her father, and she was not fond of mystery stories. Nobody in them ever seems to feel sorry about the murders, she had said. They're presented as a problem, m'dear, her father said. What's more they generally show the murdered person as someone you can't waste any pity on. I'm sorry for them, she said, I hate it when they're found with daggers sticking in them and their eyes all staring from poison and things like that.
Yet how little pity did she feel for Ted Darby! I really did that, she thought amazed. I concealed a body. Anyhow I took it away. And when I came back-after that-nobody could see anything wrong with me-anything queer. Maybe I haven't got so much feeling, after all. Maybe I'm rather too tough.
I'd better be, too, she thought, as she rose and began to dress.

She had never felt anything like this turmoil of the spirit, this anger. He's the one who brought the letters here. He's the one I'm to pay the blackmail to. And he says he did that. For me. Liar. Blackmailer. Contemptible crook. I hate him so...

This my first book read for the R.I.P. IV challenge; although it wasn't by any means scary it was thrilling and suspenseful.