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One across6/19/2023 ![]() ![]() This story is a psychological one, as all Ms. How can Stan have Maud's money - and he'll need it soon as he's involved in a shady, get-rich scam in which he owes his partner some big bucks - and get rid of Maud at the same time? (And of course, get away with it!) It's all out there in black and white as Stanley and Maud snipe at each other, back and forth, day after day.īut when Stanley learns how much money Maud has socked away, and supposedly will leave to Vera only if she divorces him, things ramp up quickly. There are no snide stares or under-the-breath remarks between Stanley and Maud. The story of Stanley, married to Vera, and son-in-law to Maud Kinaway, an overbearing, domineering, highly-opinionated churl of a woman who wants nothing more than to have Vera leave Stanley and go live with her in a cozy little cottage. I remember some of the films being almost horror films like gothic noir and this had for sure some pointers to it.Weird, short, highly entertaining. Taking into account when this was written it was for sure very unusual and not at all what readers were used to. Then end was as it had to be from the start even unusual and not easily predicted. Never came across a murder with so many stupid errors though if it’d been successful what a catastrophe for society it would have been. Like a child not knowing consequences of actions yet. Murderer by accident more than by pure viciousness. Of course he was useless and loveless and pain for his wife and relatives but so hapless. The main actors in the story are bit very likeable least of all Stanley and still I could not help feel some pity. The times are doom and dark far from any glory and the actors in the story so stereotypical it seems but not all is as it seems. Ms Rendell describes all this with an unerring eye!Īll the language used to describe ordinary people and ordinary lives and ordinary events which were so different and special for those living them. On the positive side this book is packed with comic and macabre moments, authentic dialogue, and a peep into an almost forgotten but not all that distant period when houses had no kitchen appliances, girls were poorly educated and lacking in any life skills other than keeping house and waiting on a husband, mobility was almost exclusively by bus, women in their 60s looked like old hags, with their false teeth and permed curls, and there were only two channels on TV. I found all this bleakness very frustrating. You get no sense that she’ll try to develop in other ways. And you feel that even the wife, whom we see sailing off to something resembling a brighter future, is saved through luck rather than judgment, to be cared for by an old beau in the exercise of her housewifely skills. Whereas our anti hero here does not have an intelligent idea or make a single move that is not blatantly stupid throughout the whole of the book. Now, I know there are those who claim that crossword solving is just a mindset or learned skill and does not denote intelligence but I can’t agree with that: I have never come across someone able to do broadsheet crosswords who is actually a stupid person. The luckless husband’s one and only skill is his ability to do The Telegraph crossword in record time and even, eventually, to compile them. That probably says a lot about women’s roles at the time, but doesn’t help add up to a very satisfying narrative. Even the daughter of the “rich” woman hardly commands much sympathy because she almost courts drudgery and bullying - you keep wanting to shake her out of her bovine passivity. ![]() Simplistically, it’s always nice to have someone to root for but here you couldn’t care less what happens to them and can’t wait for their early removal from the page. It’s difficult to enjoy a novel whose characters are, almost without exception, unremittingly awful. The equivalent, apparently, of just over a quarter of a million today, that sum hardly seems to warrant all the risks, including being charged with murder, until one realises (or remembers) just how impoverished many people’s lives were in the late 60s/early 1970s. This is, essentially, the story of a lazy, feckless husband’s schemes to get his hands on his mother-in-law’s legacy of £20,000.
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