The shifting ground of power dynamics between those who serve and those who are served has always offered rich-pickings to writers of psychological thrillers. These are the relationships that become a little too-close-for comfort, where a stranger enters a home or place of work, making themselves indispensable until they are embedded into the lives of the person who has employed them. On the surface the relationship seems a pragmatic one: a nanny hired to look after the children; a housekeeper to run the home; an assistant to do the same in the office; or an adviser who seems content to stay in the shadows but who, from that dark place, comes to exert a potent influence. Yet beneath the bright, bustling efficiency of the employee, their apparent willingness and stoicism, is an individual with their own needs and desires, desires unseen by those who believe they are in charge. The master, or mistress, allows themselves to be seduced into believing their servant is loyal to them above all else. Their devotion, it seems, is blind. It is an act of vanity on the employer’s part. They have become complacent, over-confident in their own power. And now they are in danger. Yet, they have only themselves to blame. After all, they invited the stranger in.
Today, this might be called a relationship of co-dependency. Not healthy. Not to be recommended. Each partner depending on the other to fulfill a need in them. The one in charge requires someone to do their bidding and the servant is an emblem of their power. For the subordinate, there is a need to be needed. They make themselves indispensable, flourishing in the growing dependence on them, of their superior. They become defined by the needs of the other. In the end, these relationships are about trust. Without trust, there can be no betrayal. No wonder this is fertile ground for fiction with a dark side.
As a little girl, I remember being glued to the creeping black and white specter of Bette Davis as The Nanny in the film of that name. A smiling woman welcomed into the heart of a home, who seemed more trusted than any member of the family—certainly the mother believed nanny, more than she did her own child. As a child myself, this terrified me and I couldn’t take my eyes off that small, cathode television screen. Those images and a sense of dread stayed with me, and I suspect that is when the seed for my novel, The Secretary, blew in and settled. I didn’t know back then that The Nanny was a novel before it was a film, written by Merriam Modell in 1964 under the pen name, Evelyn Piper. Modell/Piper wrote novels and short stories—her chosen subject, domestic conflict. Bunny Lake Is Missing was another that haunted me when I watched it as a child, Modell’s work again irresistible to film-makers of the time.
The thriller cannon is littered with such delicious specimens—the trusted servants who conceal themselves behind the guise of wanting only the best for their master or mistress. Their presence appears benign, and yet their creeping influence can be toxic. They are the ultimate weapon of stealth. The godfather of them all is surely Iago, the trusted adviser to Shakespeare’s Othello, who whispers poison in his master’s ear—the master who, to his own cost, never doubts him. Iago, as a character, appears to be a force of pure malevolence, yet that seems unlikely, and less interesting, than seeing him as a loyal man who has been overlooked, his pride injured, his status undermined, and his lack of power brought home to him. And so he seeks revenge and it is through this journey, that he finds his power.
Emerging from Iago’s shadow is a rich cast of faithful retainers, characters created in fiction who carry his torch. Although their motivations may vary, what these men and women all share is the trust bestowed on them by their employers. For they are employed—paid for their obedience—yet these relationships are not about money.
Mrs Danvers, the housekeeper in Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, is kept on after the death of her beloved mistress Rebecca, but we know she is not doing it for the regular salary. She is there as gatekeeper to Rebecca’s memory—preserving her place as mistress of Manderley. Mrs Danvers—we never learn her first name—is Rebecca’s avenging angel, a servant whose duty first and foremost is to a dead woman. She is the archetype of blind loyalty, devoted to Rebecca, a charismatic creature who defines Mrs Danvers’ existence. The efficient and experienced housekeeper directs her malevolence towards those she deems have wronged Rebecca—the newlyweds. Her power lies in subverting the social order of Manderley by intimidating the new Mrs. de Winter until she behaves like a servant, doing as she’s told by the housekeeper. It is uncomfortable reading but irresistible—the shame, the humiliation.
In The Servant, a 1948 novella by Robin Maugham (later adapted into a film with a screenplay by Harold Pinter), the same subversion of class is played out. In this case the servant is a butler—Hugo Barrett—hired to look after the privileged Tony—I’m not sure we ever discover his surname. Unlike Mrs Danvers, Hugo Barrett is a parasite living off his master. There is no loyalty, there is no devotion, only the appearance of servitude. And yet Barrett is trusted. By indulging his master’s every need the butler cultivates a dependency in him, and so is able to exert his influence and power over Tony. He isolates him from his friends, then leads him into physical and moral ruin. Perhaps, Tony only had himself to blame. He did invite Barrett in. He did trust him. And he did make the mistake of thinking he had a right to be served. This is a post-war novel about class upheaval with a sting in its tail. These stories are not always about class, though. The constant within them is the slippery nature of power.
We know all about Eve. Eve Harrington. She wants everything Margo Crane has. Fame. Success. Glamour. Better known as a film, again with Bette Davis, All About Eve was originally a nine page short story in Cosmopolitan magazine. The Wisdom of Eve written by Mary Orr in 1946. Unlike her role in The Nanny, Davis plays the victim this time, not the villain, falling prey to a scheming, sociopath who she hires as her secretary. Someone who will look after the things she simply can’t be bothered to do. Eve appears an innocent. A sincere young woman, alone in the world who Margot first befriends, then employs. Eve is a brick, putting up with Margo’s fits of temper, always good-humored and eager to please. What she really wants, though, is the freedom to please herself. What Eve shares with Mrs Danvers, Barrett and Nanny, is her position of trust, and her painstakingly acquired knowledge of the intimacies of Margo Crane’s life. She uses these weapons with pre-meditated precision, leaving trust a twisted, gnarled wreck.
Perhaps, these relationships feel like a thing of the past, the powerful assuming their superiority, blind to the needs and desires of their subordinates, but they are not. From The Nanny written in the 1960s, comes 2018’s The Perfect Nanny by Leila Stimani (titled Lullaby in Europe.) This international bestseller is set in present day France, and mines the same seams as its predecessors: loyalty, trust, and the perils of taking for granted those entrusted with all we hold precious. A working couple take a stranger into their home. They pay her to look after their children. It is not just freedom to work, she brings them, but a chance to recover their own independence and identities—time and space away from their children. They come to depend on her, the lines between them, as employers, and her, as employee, become blurred. It is less comfortable, in the modern world, to present as the one with power. A pretense that class no longer exists. There is a veneer of friendship. But they’re not friends, not really and, the nanny, of course, is far from perfect. She is damaged and vulnerable, and her master and mistress know so little about her. She remains a stranger to them, yet she is in their home every day of the week. They see her, yet they don’t.
In the end what makes these relationships such fertile territory for psychological thrillers, is the nightmarish quality they all share. The discovery that the ordinary, everyday world, is not quite as it seems. The trusted and faithful one, so quiet and humble, chosen for their dedication, turns out to be the most dangerous person in the room.
***
