A Helping Hand: Celia Dale

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Josh and Maisie Evans are Good Samaritans and enjoy lending a helping hand to lonely elderly ladies. It’s fascinating how suburbia so quickly became a place in books and films where white picket fences (or lace curtains), could conceal horrors.

I think it’s the apparent ‘normality’ of the setting that makes it so frightening -the fact that stories like this could be playing out behind the net curtains of seemingly ordinary and caring homes.While the usual elements of a standard crime story will not be found in this novel, what happens here certainly falls within the realm of the genre, and given that this book was written in the 1960s, it remains extremely pertinent in our contemporary world which makes what happens even more frightening.

I can most certainly recommend this one, and my thanks to Valancourt for bringing it back into print. Central to the novel are former nurse Maisie Evans and her husband Josh, a middle-aged couple living quiet lives in the heart of suburbia. I read this in one day and loved it for the way the author was able to depict the horrible ordinariness of a certain kind of evil. Josh and Mai are having a holiday to get over the recent death of Auntie Flo who lived with them, and who left them everything in her will. Moreover, Maisie does everything in her power to carefully discourage any contact between Lena and Mrs Fingal, citing the desire for stability as a cover for her actions.Without spoiling anything, the theme of this book is something that tends to happen quite often today as people are generally selfish by nature. It’s a little like a form of sleep paralysis when your mind starts to wake from a dream but you can’t move your body because it’s still in sleep mode. One of the things Dale does so well here is to let the reader in on what the Evanses are up to, slowly but surely as the narrative unfolds.