A Helping Hand: Celia Dale

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It’s such a pleasure reading one of your reviews when you find a book you are so enthusiastic about! Josh and Maisie Evans are a seemingly ordinary middle-aged couple on holiday in Italy, where they meet Mrs. We meet Josh Evans, cheerfully squalid, with a fondness for ‘busts’ and bikinis; and Maisie, a lifelong nurse, in whose mouth the word ‘dear’ has the ordinary deadliness of a kitchen knife. As Graziella bonds with Mrs Fingal, encouraging the old lady to build up her strength by walking again, she senses that something is decidedly off.

Even after finishing the book, you find yourself smiling, but also feeling uneasy with what you just read. It’s an icily compelling tale of greed and deception, stealthily executed amidst carefully orchestrated conversations and endless cups of tea. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.With Maisie’s background in nursing, the couple like to offer ‘a helping hand’ here and there, acting as caretakers to people in need, especially those with no relatives or other support. This retired couple have a very lucrative racketeer where they take care of old ladies while they steal her pension and finally their will. Soon after, they are on holiday in Italy, and encounter the disgruntled Lena Kemp and her aunt Cynthia Fingal. Dales first book appeared in 1943 but it was her later novels where she branched out in to the realms of psychological crime. Only Graziella, the innocent pregnant woman from Italy, can bring some light into this dingy, oppressively bland suburban setting.

This time it looks like an old copy has been scanned and retypset by computer (mistaking e's for c's, missing off the first speech mark, and so sticking in the second in a section of narrative, mistaking 'fl' for a capital H. 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.

Celia Dale excels at presenting gentle tales of ordinary people who do extraordinary, wicked things while still living happily in normal society. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. She’s settled into our little home so well that I think it’s really only kind to leave her to her own little ways and routines.

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. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. I don't think the style is anything too special, but it's good and it works and honestly, that's the most important thing.It all starts well, in high summer, but as the winter draws on the widow loses all agency and ends up being kept in bed all day, unable to do anything for herself. It’s fascinating how suburbia so quickly became a place in books and films where white picket fences (or lace curtains), could conceal horrors. She presents a suburban setting, seemingly ordinary and mundane, but the tension builds, the sense of unease is soon apparent, but it’s all done with subtlety.