The stifling atmosphere of this book is made even more stark by the references to German invading forces moving ever closer to Paris and the later depressing descriptions of the post-war state of that beautiful city. Several years later he impossibly catches a glimpse of her once more, setting him on his previous destructive path. Even his eventual friendship with this woman does little to tone down his increasingly bizarre means to remain close to her. His innocuous task, carried out as a favour to an old friend, to follow and observe the friend’s wife who is behaving oddly and thought to be suicidal, swiftly spirals into stalkerish obsession with this ethereal creature. This is less a classic crime thriller and more a claustrophobic, psychological melodrama dripping in behaviour so obsessive it drives the main character, Flavieres, to the brink of madness. Vertigo is a particularly disturbing one and based almost frame by frame on the chapters in this book (although the ending is different) by French crime writing duo Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac. Flicking through the “films you must see” lists identified a Hitchcock sized gap in our knowledge of his back catalogue which we worked hard to plug. Our LoveFilm subscription was well used during these years. A few years ago when my children were much younger and we were too skint and tired to go out much, we started catching up with classic movies and foreign language films we’d never, but should have, seen.
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