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"Do you think it's possible to live again, Monsieur? ...I mean...is it possible to die and then...live again in someone else?"
Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 Vertigo is one of my favorites since film school, and so cracking open the novel was just a matter of time. Originally penned by France's hottest thriller duo for Hitchcock himself in 1954, the novel D'entre Les Morts (The Living and the Dead) disorients and frightens through a nightmare of twists and turns.
Gevigne, a shipping magnate, asks his old friend, police officer Flavieres to follow his wife, Madeleine. She's been acting strangely as she approaches her twenty-fifth birthday—so strangely that her husband is convinced she is possessed by a ghost of her ancestor, one who killed herself—at age twenty-five. The next morning, Flavieres follows her as she frequents an old cemetery to pray at the grove of this deceased relative. And from there he stumbles into a maze of mysteries that blur the lines between the living and the dead—a maze that leads to a tower at its center. [JG]
Gevigne, a shipping magnate, asks his old friend, police officer Flavieres to follow his wife, Madeleine. She's been acting strangely as she approaches her twenty-fifth birthday—so strangely that her husband is convinced she is possessed by a ghost of her ancestor, one who killed herself—at age twenty-five. The next morning, Flavieres follows her as she frequents an old cemetery to pray at the grove of this deceased relative. And from there he stumbles into a maze of mysteries that blur the lines between the living and the dead—a maze that leads to a tower at its center. [JG]
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Boileau-Narcejac is the nom-de-plume of Pierre Boileau (1906-89) and Thomas Narcejac (1908-98), one of France's most successful writing duos, whose careers spanned four decades and led to over fifty thrillers. I want to read their debut, She Who Was No More, which inspired French filmmaker's Henri-Georges Clouzet to adapt it to screen as Les Diaboliques.
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