[In the review below, Yardley describes The Last of the Duchess as an odd, dark story that is both witty and perceptive.]

This peculiar but beguiling book is the account of how its author, a British journalist and novelist who now lives in the United States, tried to obtain an interview with the Duchess of Windsor in the last years of that controversial woman's long life. She failed, but she managed to hook up with a woman even odder—if one can imagine such—than the duchess herself.

That woman was Suzanne Blum, universally known as Maître Blum, the octogenarian French attorney who seized control of the duchess's life after the death in 1972 of the duke—the onetime King of England, Edward VIII. By 1980 she had the duchess locked away in the Paris house that the French government had given to the exiled Windsors and permitted no one to visit her. It was variously rumored that the duchess had shrunk to the size of a baby, that her skin had turned black, that she was in fact dead.

Whatever the case, it developed that Lord Snowdon wanted to photograph her in whatever state she might have attained. This was proposed to the Sunday Times of London, which in turn proposed that Caroline Blackwood, herself well connected in the circles that surround the British crown, write an accompanying article. This would entail an interview, which in turn would entail approaching the formidable Maître Blum, the "bellicose old eminence grise who was lurking behind the stricken Duchess."

Thus Blackwood set off on her mission. She wrote this account of it at the time but withheld it from publication, "for obvious reasons," until after Maître Blum's death, which took place a year ago. The Last of the Duchess is a chronicle with no real narrative line and no particular surprises, either. One reads it because Blackwood is witty, understated and perceptive, and because the fascination that the duchess exerted in life has not entirely evaporated even now, nearly a decade after her death, even at a time when the British crown has been sullied far more than it ever was by Wallis Warfield Simpson and her little duke.

Much of the fascination of this particular book lies in the unfathomable mystery at its center. How did the duchess allow herself to be sequestered—imprisoned, really—in isolation, and how did Suzanne Blum achieve such total mastery over her? We know that the duchess was incompetent at financial matters and thus would have welcomed so self-confident and celebrated an adviser as Maître Blum, but it is one thing to turn over one's books to an outsider and quite another to relinquish one's entire existence.

"If the Duchess sometimes regained consciousness," Blackwood speculates, "she must [have felt] that few people were as abandoned as she was, few people had been left so completely alone in the dark." What emerges as Blackwood makes her inquiries and draws conclusions from them is a "very symbiotic relationship" in which the duchess and her attorney "were totally dependent on each other." She writes: "Wallis Windsor owed her life to Maître Blum, and Maître Blum had fused her identity with the Duchess to such an intense degree that she seemed to feel that her own life had little emotional validity apart from her role as the sole custodian and adorer of Wallis Windsor."

Blackwood implies but does not directly claim that Maître Blum may have nursed sexual as well as emotional feelings about the duchess, feelings presumably both unrequited and unfulfilled. Whatever the case, Maître Blum went beyond mere adoration to self-aggrandizement of a sort, selling off the duchess's baubles and treasures for reasons that remain mysterious, given the duchess's considerable wealth. To Blackwood it "seemed unfair that at the end of the Duchess's life, Maître Blum should zoom in and appropriate all the Duchess's gains without having lived through any of the vicissitudes by which they had been acquired," a telling and important point.

But if Blackwood's tale has its undeniable dark side, it is also a comedy. After all, as one of the innumerable British grand dames to whom she talked put it, "There's something so comic about … the idea of that horrible old lady being locked up by another horrible old lady." When it comes to Maître Blum, "horrible" is pure understatement. As portrayed herein she is a monster of the first rank, a gnomish Rasputin in spoken of by all "with an awe that was curiously akin to pure terror." The descriptions of Maître Blum in her dreary mausoleum of a house, a sniveling protege in attendance, are immensely amusing, though Blackwood lets the humor speak for itself.

Blackwood sees the story of the duchess and Maître Blum, she says in her preface, as "a lesson for those who are vulnerable to being overprotected" as well as "a real study in the fatal effects of myth." Perhaps so. But it's also, as told herein, simply a very good if very odd story, and it will be welcomed by all connoisseurs of the outre.