mentor and an unwillingness to believe that Grevil killed himself (as their father had done years earlier). A physicist turned archaeologist, Grevil had been en route to England from an expedition in Java when his body was found in an Amsterdam canal. Lacking evidence of foul play, the authorities assume suicide, particularly since a “Dear John” letter was in his jacket pocket. Philip’s only leads are the woman’s name on that note and the knowledge that Grevil arrived in the Netherlands with a man named Jack Buckingham, since vanished, whom he had befriended in Indonesia. The English police suggest to Philip that he seek the aid of a shady, erstwhile undercover agent whose international contacts could prove useful. In company with this man and alone, Philip confronts emotional and physical trials during his quest, which also becomes a journey of self-discovery. Eventually, he attains the answers he sought, the revelation coming in the course of a climactic confrontation with the elusive Buckingham, who admits that he abandoned Grevil to murderers. Philip’s odyssey ends with his respect for Grevil reinforced, and their father’s suicide is placed in the proper perspective: simply a long-ago tragedy with no bearing on the present.

Marnie

The protagonist-narrator of Marnie is a more typical Graham protagonist: a psychologically disturbed loner of ambivalent morality. Margaret “Marnie” Elmer is twenty-three years old and has lied and robbed for years. Every few months she sheds an identity with a hot bath and a stiff drink and then departs for a new city and a different life. Two stable elements in this fragmented existence of aliases are visits to her mother in Torquay and to a horse in Cirencester, the only living things with whom she has formed lasting relationships. Marnie cannot fall in love, and sex repels her, but under duress she marries Mark Rutland, her employer. When Mark discovers that she has stolen the firm’s payroll and has fled, he replaces the money, locates her, and insists on marriage, vowing not to betray her. Inevitably, Marnie’s carefully obscured past returns to haunt her, and Mark increases the pressure on her to allow him to orchestrate a long-term resolution. A conflict in the family business complicates matters, however, and the novel concludes with a series of unexpected twists that place Marnie, once the quintessential loner, firmly under the control of others.

In a tale filled with irony, the most poignant example is that Marnie, who had devoted herself to hiding her personality and past from others, was doing precisely what her mother had done (without her daughter’s knowledge) for years. Whereas Marnie rejected sex, however, her mother invited it, and then, in desperation, murdered an illegitimate son. Marnie’s warped psyche, then, had been shaped by dimly recalled childhood experiences that she futilely attempted to change or expunge from memory. Thus she realizes that her mother (whom she had supported with her ill-gotten money) had been deceiving her for years and also had hidden the facts of her life. The ultimate irony, though, comes at the end of the novel, when the men whom she reluctantly had come to trust betray her.

Graham combines—more successfully than in any of his other suspense novels—a graphic psychological portrait with a compelling narrative in Marnie. In large measure, the tension of the unfolding plot is increased by the reader’s developing empathy with the narrator. Marnie’s consciousness is the distorted prism through which everything is revealed. She is a free spirit who nevertheless is trapped; a calculating victimizer who herself becomes a victim; and an attractive, personable, and intelligent woman who, sadly, is unable to enjoy continuity and security. At the conclusion, however, while being deceived into a confrontation that may be her undoing, Marnie achieves a catharsis of sorts. In one sense, she is defeated; in a more important sense, however, she succeeds in overcoming a major obstacle to leading a normal life.

The Walking Stick

The Walking Stick also has a pretty young woman as its protagonist-narrator, and she too is a loner, an introvert whose personality has been determined in great measure by her childhood bout with polio. A cane has become the emblem of Deborah Dainton’s physical impairment, distinguishing her from everyone else and making her as fragile as the antiques about which she is an expert (she works in the porcelain department of a fashionable London auction house). When she finally is won over by the approaches of Leigh Hartly, a struggling artist, Deborah finds herself drawn into a netherworld of deceit and crime. Having fallen in love despite the defenses she had constructed around herself, she agrees to participate in a daring robbery of the auction house, playing a central insider’s role at critical stages of the complex intrigue. Deluded by love, she permits herself to be used by a calculating rogue and those in whose debt he labors.

What Deborah learns after the Whittington robbery, however, is that she had been set up from the very start. The initial meeting with Leigh, the requests for dates, the developing romantic involvement—all had been part of the grand scheme for a million-dollar theft that could have succeeded only with her assistance.

The lameness that Deborah regards as distinguishing herself from others is for the most part overcome when she and Leigh are living together, for the psychological and emotional benefits of the relationship apparently improve her physical well-being. In the aftermath of the robbery and the subsequent revelation of Leigh’s deceit, however, Deborah again seeks the support of her walking stick. Having experienced another way of life, without her cane, Deborah apparently cannot return to the former one. The work concludes with her plans for suicide and for betraying her accomplices to the police.