Forgotten Book - Dream of Fair Woman

I've discussed several books by Charlotte Armstrong on this blog over the past eight years or so. Armstrong (1905-69) was an Edgar-winning suspense novelist whose books often had strongly visual ingredients, making them popular sources for film and TV adaptation. My favourite of her books is Mischief, which is relatively straightforward, but genuinely gripping.

Armstrong had a number of other strengths as a writer. She didn't repeat herself - all the books of hers that I've read are very different from each other, and they often have intriguing ideas at their heart. And she had the knack of using her stories to make interesting social points. She took risks as a writer, and I find that admirable. Unfortunately, if perhaps inevitably, those risks didn't always come off.   

Dream of Fair Woman is, I think, a case in point. The book was originally published in 1966, towards the end of her career, although the copy I read was (like some of her other books) published in the interesting paperback reprint line Keyhole Crime, which flourished for a while in the early 1980s without ever really establishing a distinct identity, perhaps because the choice of authors and titles was so curiously random. 

The story begins with an intriguing premise. A mysterious but very attractive young woman rents a room with Peg Cuneen, but she is clearly unwell and soon finishes up in hospital in a coma. Who is she? This is the question that confronts Peg's son Matt and young Betty Prentiss. Betty fancies Matt, but he pays her less attention than she deserves, being fascinated by the woman in the coma who never speaks. Eventually it becomes clear that Armstrong has some interesting points to make about the role of women in society, including the way that women may be taken for granted by men. 

The trouble is that the plot - which involves identical sisters - is fairly barmy, and I began to lose interest early on. I got the impression that Armstrong had a good central idea for a book, but found it difficult to structure the material satisfactorily. And that meant that I cared about the characters much less than I should have done.