‘So, why not pass the hours with some story-telling? The perfect thing for a late October evening.’
As autumn progresses and the nights draw in, our primal fears reassert themselves, no longer suppressed by the sun filled, light filled summer.
Elly Griffiths’ latest novel, The Stranger Diaries, plays on these fears in an intoxicating mix of the modern crime novel and the traditional Gothic tale of terror.
Following two phenomenally successful crime novel series, the Dr Ruth Galloway mysteries and the Stephens and Mephisto mysteries, it may seem that Griffiths has taken a risk by writing her first standalone crime novel.
There is no risk. The Stranger Diaries is representative of an author writing at the peak of their powers. In setting, characterization and narrative structure the novel relentlessly confronts the reader with an unsettling juxtaposition of modern and everyday preoccupations, from social media to Strictly Come Dancing, with the innately Gothic, as previously repressed secrets and desires break through to undermine the comfort and security to be derived from the modern and the everyday.
In taking this approach Griffiths is following in the footsteps of the greats of Gothic literature, notably M R James and Wilkie Collins. In particular it is Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White that provides the most evident influence. From the violation of Marian Halcombe’s diary by Count Fosco to the use of a narrative structure that is evocative of compelling judicial testimony, Griffiths takes Collins’s domestication of the Gothic and gives it a twenty-first century edge. Her evocation of M R James’s ghost stories is more subtle but equally important and effective. Griffiths creates her own version of James, R M Holland, to remind us of the power of stories. It is Holland’s tale of terror, The Stranger, that underpins the novel’s narrative structure and creates an uncanny sense of the inevitable as fact mimics fiction, as the accumulating murders mirror the fictional deaths. This simple yet relentless device ensures that the novel’s tension never dissipates.
Ultimately The Stranger Diaries is a celebration of literature and stories, and of the power of what lies beneath. As Griffiths reminds us, Wilkie Collins once wrote ‘nothing in this world is hidden forever.’ This simple yet inescapable maxim stands as a manifesto for all great crime fiction and for the Gothic genre as a whole.
Precarious Gothic 