Torn between Two Lovers

The novel LES DIABOLIQUES was based on

When I was either twelve or thirteen, I watched an ABC Movie of the Week called Reflections of Murder. The previews for it were creepy and gave no indication of what the movie was actually about, but it had “murder” in the title and as a lifelong crime fiction fan, I wasn’t going to miss it.¹ It also looked like it might have supernatural elements to it, as well—making it for sure a “don’t miss” for me. The cast was Sam Waterston, Joan Hackett, and Tuesday Weld, and the premise sucked me right in: Sam was married to Joan, who was in delicate health and wealthy and owned the private school where she taught music; Sam was her horribly abusive husband and the headmaster; and Tuesday Weld was the art teacher who was also his mistress. He was also horrible and abusive to Weld; so the two women decide to kill him. (This was also back before no-fault divorce; women were often chained to their abusers as property till death they do part—so no-fault divorce took one of the best murder motives away from crime writers.) It got really creepy and freaky when the body—they’d drugged and drowned him in the bath tub before sinking his body in the school pool—disappeared; and students claim to have had interactions with Waterston who is supposedly dead, and it just gets creepier and creepier—until the big twist comes at the end. The movie added on a macabre postscript, too, which was awesome.

I’d not known at the time it was an American-language remake of a classic French suspense film called Les Diaboliques; I’ve not seen it, to date; although it’s available on Max (Reflections of Murder is on Youtube) I’ve not gone ahead and watched it…but I think I might. I most definitely did not watch the 90’s Sharon Stone remake.

But what I’d never known was that the original French film was based on a classic French novel of psychological suspense called She Who Was No More, by the writing team of Boileau-Narcejac (turns out they also wrote Vertigo, which became the classic Hitchcock film). I got a copy once I was aware of it, and finished reading it this weekend.

It was marvelous.

“Can’t you keep still for a moment, Fernand?”

Ravinel halted in front of the window and drew the curtain to one side. The fog was getting thicker, forming yellow halos round the clusters of lights on the quay and green ones round the lamp posts along the roadway. Sometimes it thickened suddenly, drifting past in wreaths of smoke, at others it turned into a fine drizzle of glistening drops. Bits of the Smoelen’s forecastle, the portholes lit up, would come into view for a moment and then be blotted out. Now that Ravienl was standing still he could hear music from a record player. He could tell it was a record player because each piece lasted about three minutes, after which there was a pause while the record was changed. The sound came from the Smoelen.

“I wish it weren’t there,” muttered Ravinel. “Anyone on deck might see her coming. If they saw her enter the house…”

“Nonsense,” answered Lucienne. “Mireille won’t do anything to make herself conspicuous. Besides, it’s a foreign ship. Why should foreigners take any notice of her?”

One of the most interesting things to me about the book—as opposed to the TV film (I cannot speak to the original French film or the execrable Sharon Stone remake; don’t come for me, even the previews were bad)—was that while Reflections of Murder told the story from the abused wife’s POV, the book is from the husband’s. Also, in the book they don’t all work at a private school owned by the wife; it’s a sordid little bourgeoisie murder story, short and quick and nasty, like the best of James M. Cain (it put me in mind of The Postman Always Rings Twice). The husband had taken out a substantial life insurance policy on his wife, and he and his mistress Lucienne have decided to kill her for the insurance so they can move to Antibes and she can open a practice there. The book is very subtle, like the best of Cain, and there’s this eerie dreamy feeling to the writing and the voice; I saw the entire thing in black-and-white, and the influence of American noir on French culture (especially in novels) is very clear.

This gender swap in both conspiracy and execution—flipping from wife/mistress teaming up to kill husband to husband/mistress killing the wife—made more sense; when watching Reflections that first time I never quite trusted the mistress and thought the wife was kind of foolish for doing so. The book also starts without any lead up or set-up or even any real back story; Ravinel and Lucienne are going to kill Mireille, and that’s all we need to know. It’s for the insurance, more than anything else, and it did seem to me that Lucienne was the driving force behind the plan; which I never really quite grasped. The entire time I was reading it—it really is dream-like, hazy and a bit foggy; the authors were fantastic at mood and voice—I kept wondering why he was so on board with the plan. Hes a traveling salesman, Lucienne is his stay-at-home wife, and Lucienne is a doctor. I never quite grasped the hold she has over him, to the point where he’d be willing to murder his wife, but we don’t really need to know. All that extra stuff that I would have included was left out, and I can’t say the book and story suffered much for it at the time of reading; it is only now, reflecting on it and writing about it, that I am seeing all of this. It reads very quickly, as well, and is rather short. The story follows the same beats as Reflections—the murder is committed, the body dumped to look like an accident only to disappear, and then Mireille starts showing up, but not to Ravinel in person. He gets a special delivery letter from her, in her handwriting—postmarked after the murder, and then keeps finding notes. Her brother reports having been visited by her after the murder happened, and on and on. Is she still alive? Was she not dead after all? The guilt and terror of being caught keeps whirling around in his head to the point where he feels like he is losing his mind. There are several twists to the book, and while they are relatively famous, I won’t spoil the book or film for you here.

I really enjoyed the book’s subtlety and the way it played its cards so deftly and cleverly; even though I knew one of the twists already, it still surprised, and that’s pretty impressive.

I’ll definitely need to check out their novel Vertigo.

1. The ABC Movie of the Week produced some seriously shitty made for TV movies, but they also produced some great horror/crime gems that also attracted some major talent to appear in. The Night Stalker was another one of these made-for-TV movies that became iconic. Researching the back story for this post also led me to see that it’s available to stream on Youtube, which I should rewatch (a lot of these movies are on Youtube; the picture/sound quality is often bad).