Forgotten Book - The Evil Wish

Jean Potts' reputation hasn't survived quite as well as that of one or two other authors of psychological suspense of her era, but she was a highly accomplished writer whose career began auspiciously with the Edgar-winning Go, Lovely Rose. I liked that book, but I felt that The Evil Wish, which I read recently, was superior. Published in 1962, it's quite excellent and deserves to be better known.

The storyline is essentially simple. Two unmarried sisters, Lucy and Marcia, live with their father, Dr Knapp, in a house in New York City large enough to accommodate a number of tenants. The doctor is a man of charm, but he's also domineering and selfish, and his daughters are little better than unpaid servants. Lucy doesn't work, and has a history of mental breakdown. Marcia has a job, and serious problem with alcohol.

Dr Knapp also has an eye for the ladies, and his latest affair is with a nurse, Pam Caldwell. Unfortunately for the daughters, he plans to marry Pam in secret, and then turf them out of the house. When they get wind of this, in their desperation they play about with ideas, mostly rather impractical, about murdering either Pam or their father. Then Fate intervenes, and Dr Knapp and Pam are killed in a car crash.

This proves to be anything but a happy ending for the bereaved daughters. Potts is interested in the idea of their moral culpability, the consequences of their "evil wish", even though they have committed  no crime. Both Lucy and Marcia display increasingly self-destructive patterns of behaviour and when an unscrupulous photographer called Chuck comes into their lives, disaster beckons...

This is an exceptionally well-written book. The characterisation of the daughters is first-class and the prose sinewy. There aren't any likeable people in the story, but that doesn't really matter. I was gripped from start to finish.

Forgotten Book - Go, Lovely Rose

The late Robert Barnard was a great admirer of Jean Potts' novels. As well as being a novelist of renown, Bob was a savvy critic; over the years, he recommended quite a few writers to me, and I don't think any of them have ever disappointed. But it's taken me a long time to get round to reading Jean Potts. When I did, I decided to start with her debut novel, Go, Lovely Rose.

The novel was first published in 1954, but it's a very mature piece of writing for a beginner; no doubt this is due to the fact that Potts had served a literary apprenticeship as a writer of short stories before trying her hand at a full-length story. It proved to be a good move: Go, Lovely Rose won an Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Rachel Buckmaster returns to the small town of Coreyville, where she and her brother Hartley grew up, following the death of Rose Henshaw. Rose had been living in Rachel's family home, thanks to a mystifying provision in the will of Rachel's late father. Mystifying because Rose was a nasty piece of work. Rachel had been glad to escape her influence, and she fears that Rose's spiteful nature may have driven Hartley to pushing the old woman down the cellar stairs. For Rose's death means that the siblings can now cash in by selling the house.

Soon it becomes apparent that Hartley was not the only person with good cause to wish Rose ill. Rachel finds herself caught up in a teasing mystery, and Potts builds the suspense with an expertise remarkable in a first time novelist. When she died in 1999, Ed Hoch (who was, like Bob Barnard, a very perceptive judge of these things) praised her gifts of characterisation, and her ability to evoke authentic small-town middle-America settings. These qualities are on display in her impressive debut novel. I'm not sure if she ever surpassed it in her later work, but I have more of her books, and I enjoyed this one enough to be determined to give them a try.