Malicious Minimalism: Three Suspense Novels by Celia Dale

Reading one of Celia Dale’s suspense novels is like breathing rarefied air. The prose is lucid and precise, the psychological understanding sharp but never belabored. These are minimalist novels, mostly uncluttered by extraneous incident or opinion, and Dale uses that spareness to heighten the impact of evil. There’s so little noise that we’re more awake to the sound.

Dale—whose career as a novelist ran from 1944 to 1988—found material in crimes and situations other authors would dismiss. There are untold numbers of psychological thrillers where terrible things happen to children; there are very few where terrible things happen to the very old. In defiance of that, Dale wrote at least two: Sheep’s Clothing, her last, and the agonizing A Helping Hand (1966).¹

Both are stripped almost bare of traditional crime novel stakes. Sheep’s Clothing does have one out-and-out killing, but it’s an accident. It’s hard to say what the law would think of the slow, dehumanizing slide towards death in A Helping Hand, but the culprits are careful enough that we don’t know, in the end, if they were helped along by a little withheld medication or if they simply ruined an old woman’s life and then impatiently waited out her last days.

I hope that last description, in particular, shows that while the books may not always have the most sensational crimes, they’re incredibly sensitized to human cruelty. It probably helps, in fact, that Dale is giving us intimate indignities we don’t often see in fiction. I don’t know about you, but my tastes have mostly inured me to dozens of hacked-up bodies—novelistic serial killers too often seem caught in endless cheap escalation, with their authors trying to hit you with big body counts and byzantine, esoteric tortures². I’ve had less exposure to the mundane awfulness of, say, a caregiver repeatedly setting her up to wet the bed and humiliate herself. I have no calluses for that.

All this gains power because you can’t reject the reality of Dale’s world. Everything here exists on a human scale, even the acts of malice and disregard that hit like atrocities. Many of the crimes come from greed, and not even particularly ambitious greed: they’re workaday schemes hatched by people with a certain cunning, that’s all. Confront them with what they’re doing, and they’d only shrug. It’s a living.

In A Helping Hand, middle-aged couple Josh and Maisie Evans build up a solid but unremarkable nest egg by getting well-to-do elderly women to live with them as “paying guests.” The women are unhappy with their remaining family, easily drawn to Josh’s courtliness and former nurse Maisie’s matter-of-fact skills. Once they move in, though, they find their independence and privacy dwindling. Kept mostly in one room, discouraged from too much exercise or time outdoors, they decline into weakness, confusion, and misery. Don’t worry, the Evanses are picking up their pensions for them—and encouraging them to make their wills, leaving everything to good old Josh.

The crime in Sheep’s Clothing is even more routine, not requiring so much contact with a single victim. Grace and her younger, more docile companion Janice visit older women of modest but comfortable means, pretending they’re there to give them a minor but pleasant boost in their benefits. Then they drug them and rob them of their most cherished possessions: “all the small things that had had any value: the brooch, the shoe buckles, the heavy old bangles and rings from the drawer in her bedroom, the musquash cape she’d worn at her wedding, the silver-backed clothes-brush Aunt Nell had left her; her good shoes she never wore because they hurt her ….” It’s the perfect crime, Grace says complacently, because it will take the women days, even weeks, to be sure of everything that’s gone missing. If they report it, what will the police do? Most likely nothing, not when faced with a slightly confused, ashamed old woman saying she’s sure she remembered where she left something. And that’s if the victim reports it at all, because most of them won’t. They don’t want, after all, to seem incompetent or unfit to live on their own.

Of the three Celia Dale novels I’ve read, only A Dark Corner has a crime that comes from psychological disturbance rather than amoral (and sometimes spiteful) self-interest. And that novel’s Mr. Didcot is, again, human-sized: your know-it-all uncle as sexual predator, alternating between lectures about his great pseudoscientific, pseudo-historical “Project” and attempts to rope his terrified lodger Errol into attempts to feel up drunk and drugged young women in his study. He kills two women—causing an accidental overdose in one and smothering the other when she wakes up in the midst of his examination of her—and Dale understands that that’s horrifying enough. (She gets more mileage out of Mr. Didcot showing Errol a girl’s pubic hair through her tights than most authors could get out of a graphic rape scene.)

The ordinariness of it all begets its own kind of claustrophobia. Eventually, you understand that you’re confined to the real world, and that any intervention will be risky and hemmed-in by human uncertainty. In A Helping Hand, a goodhearted character, eventually recognizing the Evans as not only neglectful but terrifying, wants to intercede … but she’s in the country illegally, and Maisie Evans knows it. Errol in A  Dark Corner is Black, and Mr. Didcot leverages the police force’s racism against him: who does Errol think they will believe? And Errol loves Mrs. Didcot, his surrogate “Ma,” and doesn’t want to hurt her by revealing who her husband really is. In Sheep’s Clothing, we get an actual official investigator, a man possessed of both competence and moral clarity—and he still misses things and must end the novel wearily sure that when justice inevitably comes, it will have its own ache and loss. Everyone’s actions are circumscribed. Ultimately, Dale seems to say, we have to try to be kind and courageous, but we can’t do it under the illusion that it will always lead somewhere.

These three books aren’t perfect, although A Helping Hand comes extremely close. Sheep’s Clothing is a little too sprawling, lacking the stiletto sharpness of the earlier two books, and certain elements of its setup try too hard to be clever. And while I give A Dark Corner considerable points for being a 1966 suspense novel offering a frank and often insightful look at racism, not every part of that presentation is handled as gracefully as I would like. (Though I should note it’s still much, much better than many white authors of—and even after—the time would manage, and mostly excellent overall.) The books can also be hard to widely recommend, because the very quality I appreciate about them—that ability to perceive and evoke the visceral moral and emotional weight of petty evils—makes them persistently downbeat, upsetting without necessarily being exciting.

But no one else has ever written like this. Raymond Chandler once said that Dashiell Hammett “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for a reason, not just to provide a corpse,” and Dale reminds me a little of that quote, if not of Hammett himself. She gives the crime novel back to the kind of all-too-real criminals the genre usually ignores, and she evokes their sordid and selfish world with almost unbearable clarity and even, on occasion, a sense of grace. She doesn’t dismiss any kind of loss or horror as insignificant or uncompelling. Her books pay attention, and they make me pay attention too, even when I don’t like the things I see.

1. Recently reprinted, along with A Dark Corner, by the always superb Valancourt Books. ↩︎
2. The podcast We Hate Movies jokes about modern superhero and action movies always trying to have the stakes of “seventy-five 9/11s,” and modern serial killer books and movies are always trying to have the jaw-dropping effect of seventy-five Hannibal Lecters. ↩︎