Devil take the Blue-Tail Fly (Classic Crime S.) - Softcover

Bardin, John Franklin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140107347 ISBN 13: 9780140107340

Publisher: Penguin, 1988

Synopsis

Returning to Basil, her husband, after a nervous breakdown, Ellen, a gifted concert harpsichordist, learns that he has fallen in love with someone else

About this title

From the Back Cover:

'We have all had these feelings, more or less, and now and then. The healthier among us try to step back from the brink, try to laugh at what might have happened if we had gone a bit further. The reader of these tales will read in horror - those who can take it. And they will not forget very soon.' Patricia Highsmith

Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly is a complex, surreal psychodrama. Ellen, a world class harpsichordist, leaves a mental institution to go back to New York with her conductor husband Basil. Once home she is tormented with paranoia that Basil is not only seeing another woman but also moving or hiding things to confuse her. After a lunch with her sister she meets a man from her past - a singer who had seduced her when she was a school girl.

Ellen is shocked to see the man, convinced that when she last saw him, he was dead. Slowly Ellen comes to understand that she has an alter ego called Nelle, who is as wild and dangerous as Ellen is calm and professional. Ellen begins to realise that it was Nelle who battered this man over the head, and it is Nelle who continues to create mayhem, as she becomes stronger and more corporeal as Ellen feels she is vanishing.

Bardin was born in 1916 in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he attended the university and engineering college. Bardin's early life was blighted by the death of his mentally ill mother. As a young man he moved to New York, where he worked as a magazine journalist before joining an advertising agency. He published ten novels. He died in 1981.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0140107347
• ISBN 13: 9780140107340
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192