The Man Who Loved His Wife (1966/2013)

Now that Patricia Highsmith has at last received the recognition she always deserved, it occurs to me that the next female thriller writer whose greatness needs to be acknowledged is Vera Caspary. Thanks to the Feminist Press’ indispensable Femmes Fatales series, that process is well underway. After having brought both Laura and Bedelia back into print, in 2013 they published Caspary’s lesser-known 1966 novel, The Man Who Loved His Wife (1966) and it’s an absolute gem. The title is both deeply ironic and neutrally descriptive. Fletcher Strode is married to the beautiful Elaine, who is nineteen years younger than him. At first blissfully happy together, after Fletcher has a laryngectomy and loses his voice, his sense of masculinity becomes so compromised psychologically that his relationship with Elaine deteriorates and he becomes morbidly suspicious of her. He starts to keep a diary detailing his suspicions and inevitably, when he dies under mysterious circumstances, that diary becomes the focus of the police’s own suspicions about Elaine. Caspary shows a wonderful ability to understand Fletcher’s psychological torment so that he is both pitiful and aggravating to the reader. Courageously, after investing so much time and attention in her lead character, Caspary kills him off in order to devote the final part of the book to her other characters. This allows us to better understand Elaine’s situation (Caspary is scrupulous about examining this relationship from both their perspectives) and to sharpen our dislike of Fletcher’s despicable daughter and son-in-law, who both have their own reasons for wanting to see Elaine convicted of murder, and who may even be guilty of the crime themselves. The fact that so much is left unresolved at the novel’s conclusion shows that Caspary’s interest is not in guilt and innocence as defined by the legal process by rather in the everyday cruelties ordinary people can inflict on each other out of a tangled combination of all-too-understandable motives.