Daphne du maurier It was a writer of great mysteries and delightfully unnerving thrillers. And I bring her here today because in a way she seems to me one of those great forgotten creators, at least to the general imagination of some lovers of great mystery bestsellers who cannot even imagine how this woman opened unsuspected narrative paths in the twentieth century. A time in which it was surely overshadowed by its practically contemporary Agatha Christie, the greatest of the mystery.
However, his social status allowed him to delve into that literary career that he always dreamed of as a vital foundation. And on occasion Daphne achieved sounded successes and even Hitchcock pulled from Daphne's literary repertoire to script more than one of his films.
The novels and stories of this British author so quickly delve into the unfathomable recesses of the soul that, like Dr. Jekyll, they hide on many occasions from the spectator Mister Hyde who longs for his opportunity to surrender to evil, as he invites us to walk through one of those realities assaulted by a point between gloomy and fantastic. Not forgetting his particular fondness for spy stories that also produced interesting stories.
Top 3 recommended books by Daphne du Maurier
Rebecca
This story made Manderley an emblem. For the English who, after its publication, faced the war and the biltz, the Nazi bombings that devastated so many places similar to the one imagined by the author, that place between a castle and an aristocratic mansion.
But it is also that Manderley pedigreed as a place that, for many other readers around the world, also evoked lost places, abandoned paradises, childhood.
In addition, the story has that dark point of the author that, added to the naturally tragic or melancholic aspect, abounds in a theme about the phantasmagoric very in vogue at that time.
The arrival of Maxim Winters' second wife arouses the misgivings of the owner of the house, a Rebecca who, although she is no longer there, still feels clinging to that space in search of a time so happy for her that she is not even led to the another world, you can stop inhabiting it.
My cousin rachel
Philip owes everything to his older cousin Ambrose. In a sometimes ambiguous relationship, Ambrose shelters Philip whenever he is orphaned and abandoned at a tender age.
The relationship made almost new patriarchy vanishes when Ambrose dies suddenly in Italy. And of course, Philip must take action on the matter of inheritance. Because much to his regret, shortly before he died, Ambrose married Rachel.
His new cousin and Philip himself are among more or less certain regrets to account for what their beloved Ambrose left in life. Philip suspects Rachel and the fatal speed of events, until he meets Rachel and is fascinated by her magnetism.
Maybe it was just that, that Ambrose was also amazed the first time like him. Or, in the worst case, it is an attraction that inevitably leads to doom ...
The Jamaica inn
The most southwestern peak of old England presents a bucolic setting of Celtic inspiration that in Daphne's hands acquires a more misty touch in that strange calm of a place that seems in some of its places seems to be oriented to the end of the world.
In one of these spaces, the author located the Jamaica inn, promising that the inn existed. In the middle of a journey through the most soulless area, and despite it full of water and life, of this magical county, Mary Yellan travels to meet her last living relative.
The young woman could imagine that at last she found a place and a home in a world that had been left empty. But sometimes it is better to be alone ...
Because the inn run by her last relatives more than meets the fame that the coachman who takes her there already presages. The most gloomy and claustrophobic of this author's stories. A true psychological thriller not without blood and full of narrative tension.
As I would like to get Posada Jamaica and Mi Prima Raquel, I read them many years ago and unfortunately in Argentina you can't get old novels