Forgotten Book - Nightmare

Nightmare is a novel by Anne Blaisdell, but the author - who went on to enjoy a highly prolific career - is better known as Dell Shannon (not to be confused with the American pop singer) and as Lesley Egan, and her real name was Elizabeth Linington. Linington (1921-88) was a pioneering female exponent of the police procedural, but this book, which is one of her earliest, and dates from 1961, is very different. I gather that it was later published under the name Lesley Egan, as - apparently - were some later books which appeared in the UK under the Blaisdell name; her bibliography seems quite complicated.

Nightmare was published in the UK by Victor Gollancz, and the jacket was dominated by a wordy encomium from Nancy Hale, of whom I must admit I'd never heard - it turns out that she was a highly regarded short story writer of the time. The story is set in Wales and concerns an attractive young American woman, Pat Carroll, who decides to splurge her inheritance on a trip to Britain. She plans to meet the mother of her dead fiance, Stephen, but before doing so she bumps into a writer called Alan Glentower, who takes a shine to her.

She agrees to meet Glentower again, but her visit to Mrs Trefoile does not go well. The old lady (not that old - just about sixty!) turns out to be a religious fanatic who decides to imprison Pat so as to preserve her purity and who is assisted in this task by two servants whom she has been blackmailing for years. I didn't find the premise especially convincing, but the author does handle it effectively, ratcheting up the tension chapter after chapter. As a dark novel of suspense, it works pretty well. And the Welsh setting is captured competently; I only noticed one tiny bit of dialogue that struck me as pure American. On this evidence, Linington was certainly a very capable storyteller.

Nightmare was filmed in 1965 as Fanatic, which has the less than subtle alternative title of Die! Die! My Darling and benefited from a script by Richard Matheson as well as from an eclectic cast including Tallulah Bankhead, Donald Sutherland, Stefanie Powers, Peter Vaughan - and Yootha Joyce. And the 2010 Broadway play Looped is, I gather, based on Bankhead's performance in the film.