I thought that this story on balance was less well-executed than the title story but was carried along by the story-telling and brilliant scene-setting. In Not After Midnight the setting is Greece and a similar mixture of the gothic, the paranormal and the sinister is cleverly blended with classical mythology.

I didn’t find the others quite up to the same standard, but they all have something to commend them.

This is without doubt the best story of the collection and I suspect has aged far more gracefully than the film. The blind sister says that she can see John and Laura’s dead daughter and that the girl is happy but has an urgent message for her parents: they should leave Venice. They meet elderly twin sisters, one of whom is blind and apparently prone to something akin to fugue states in which she receives messages from the after-life. John and Laura, a comfortably off couple in early middle age are holidaying in Venice where they are grieving the recent death of their young daughter from meningitis. The title story will be familiar to many from the Nicolas Roeg film of 1973 starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland – a quintessentially 70s film perhaps more known for its atmospheric photography of Venice and its erotic love scenes than it is for any faithful rendition of du Maurier’s source material. Their length was in their favour, I thought This particular volume seems to represent her longer short stories there are only five in the book – Don’t Look Now Not After Midnight A Border-Line Case The Way of the Cross and The Breakthrough – but at forty to fifty pages each they make a substantial volume. The first thing to say is that while I knew du Maurier as a prolific novelist it had never struck me that she was almost as prolific a short story writer, with at least half-a-dozen collections to her name. Shamefully, it never crossed my mind to actually read one of her books, but recently I found a secondhand copy of the handsomely jacketed Penguin Modern Classics edition of Don’t Look Now & Other Stories and in a very belated attempt to address this omission I read it over the weekend. At that time Penguin published every title and while du Maurier was perhaps no longer at the height of her popularity her books still sold in dependable quantities alongside other popular Penguin authors such as H.E. When I was a bookseller I must have handled hundreds, possibly thousands, of Daphne du Maurier’s books. Posted on Don’t Look Now & Other Stories by Daphne du Maurier

Don't Look Now by Daphne du Maurier