240p
'A suburban matron, harassed by wartime domestic problems - her husband is overseas - finds herself implicated in the murder of her young daughter's extremely unattractive beau' (The New Yorker).
An outstanding example of the psychological thriller genre, 'worthy of the great Patricia Highsmith herself,' as Lady Antonia Fraser said in the Spectator. The Blank Wall (1947) was filmed as The Reckless Moment in 1949 and as The Deep End in 2001, starring Tilda Swinton. In 1950 Raymond Chandler asked his English publisher, 'Does anybody in England publish Elisabeth Sanxay Holding? For my money she's the top suspense writer of them all. She doesn't pour it on and make you feel irritated. Her characters are wonderful; and she has a sort of inner calm which I find very attractive.'
This tense and fast-paced novel is about maternal love and about the heroine's relationship with those around her, especially her children and her maid. The Daily Telegraph said that 'the mix of the everyday and the extraordinary is deft... A most welcome return to print' and the Observer called it 'a classic of suspense fiction.'
The Blank Wall is available from Persephone Books
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Set during World War II, The Blank Wall is the story of Lucia Holley, whose husband Tom is serving in the Pacific, and who lives with her elderly father and two teenaged children: 17-year-old Beatrice (a.k.a. Bee) and 15-year-old David, both of whom sometimes seem older than their years but at other times very adolescent in their behavior. They are renting a home in Horton County, state unspecified. It would appear to be New York because several of them take the train into New York City for various reasons.
Bee has gotten involved with Ted Darby, a man twice her age with an unsavory past. Lucia's efforts to stop them from seeing one another seem futile. When Darby turns up dead in the boathouse on the rental property, Lucia is sure her father killed him and takes it upon herself to dispose of the body to protect him from the police and her children from scandal.
I spent two or three hours debating whether or not to reveal anything more about this psychological suspense novel (it's not a whodunit) whose theme is sacrifice, but after writing out a few more plot points, I wound up deleting them rather than spoil surprises for the reader—and there are a number of surprises as additional characters, some menacing, make their roles known. According to her son-in-law, who wrote a prefatory note to the Academy Chicago edition I read, Holding began her career writing literary fiction, but switched to the more lucrative mystery field after the 1929 stock market crash. With two daughters to support, she needed the greater income mystery-writing generated. Like Holding's equally excellent The Innocent Mrs. Duff, this is very much a character-driven novel, and the character delineation is superb: complex and multi-dimensional, resulting in a compelling page-turner I have no hesitation about recommending.
—Barry Ergang, July 2013
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