Letter of Intent (1971) by Ursula Curtiss

This is a book that I received in my bookish advent calendar a couple of weeks ago and rather than let it languish on my TBR pile for a month or two I was spurred on to read it by Moira who blogs at Clothes in Books, who enjoyed reading it back in July. It has been a while since I have read anything by Curtiss, my last read from her being in 2020. To date I have only read three books by her: The Deadly Climate (1955), The Noonday Devil (1951) and The Menace Within (1979).

Synopsis

‘The harmless-looking white envelope contained an anonymous letter capable of blowing her carefully constructed world to pieces: “I’ve been waiting for this. If you don’t call off the wedding, I will.” Celia Brett had been a heavy dowdy, inarticulate girl of eighteen when she left home in a New England slum to work for the rich, pleasant Stevensons. Here, behind a mask of innocence, she began her precarious climb up the social ladder and finally blossomed into a poised and sleekly striking woman. But on the way she played her part in two shocking tragedies – and now a third lay lurking…’

Overall Thoughts

The driving force behind this plot is a threatening anonymous letter. I have read quite a few poison pen mysteries, but stories where the letter writer is targeting one person only for the purpose of threatening/blackmailing them in some fashion, I would say, is less common. When pondering what other examples I have read, Keep It Quiet (1935) by Richard Hull came to mind. When reading the blurb I felt it suggested a less conventional plot trajectory, involving this trope and this prediction is fulfilled, I would argue.

If I had to compare this book to the work of another writer, the name that would spring to mind is Pat McGerr, due to the similarities in structure. At the start of Letter of Intent, Celia and reader are faced with two questions. The first is who sent the letter? And the second is will, or how can, they be stopped from executing their threat? The first question is explored through an extended flashback, which constitutes the majority of the book. In this flashback we learn the life history of Celia and how her first employer conducted a primitive Pygmalion project upon her, which she then continued by herself for her own ends:

‘Most of all, hardly aware that she did so, she observed. She took meticulous note of Mrs Stevenson’s smallest behaviour […] Like a naturalist confronted with a new species, she studied the way they walked and sat and maneuvered themselves into coats held for them; their make-up, or largely lack of it that year; their clothes.’

Her plan to gain wealth and social kudos requires deception and lies and at points it is tricky for Celia to protect her house of cards from being blown down. This is the threat that lies behind the anonymous letter and the purpose of the flashback is to enable Celia/the reader to identify the possible people who might have sent the letter.

However, if you have read any of my McGerr reviews, you will know the difficult relationship I have had with mysteries whose plots are heavily reliant on a backstory. The problem can often be, and is here, that the writer is gambling on the reader wanting to invest so much in one character that they want to know their life history. This is a risky strategy in my opinion, and it did not pay off with me. My engagement in the story was low as I didn’t care about the protagonist nor the incidents that filled her life. Her history is told briskly but it did not grab me. We spend so much time with Celia, but she is cold, aloof, brittle even and I at least was not rooting for her.

So far things were not looking good for this mystery, that is until the final two chapters. This is a novel which if you are going to read it, is to be read for those two chapters. It has irony Anthony Berkeley would be proud of and it has a surprising element of emotional engagement for the reader which I was not expecting. I don’t know if this is a book I would strongly recommend. It depends on how much you enjoy extended flashbacks in your narratives. This is a story which is hard to predict, but it also doesn’t have much for the reader to puzzle over.

Rating: 3.5/5