DOUGHTY, Louise

PERSONAL: Female.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—c/o Author Mail, Carroll & Graf Publishers, 19 West 21st St., Suite 601, New York, NY 10010.

CAREER: Author and journalist.

WRITINGS:

Crazy Paving, Touchstone (London, England), 1995.

Dance with Me, Touchstone (London, England), 1996, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1999.

Honey-Dew, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998, published An English Murder, Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 2000.

SIDELIGHTS: Novelist Louise Doughty's Crazy Paving was called "a cracker of a novel for beginning the New Year," by a Books reviewer. It also marked the beginning of Doughty's career as an author. The novel is set in London. The public transportation system is collapsing, but three office workers, Joan, Annette, and Helly, somehow manage to get to work, where they share Richard, their tyrannical and corrupt boss. The action includes bombings by the IRA; meanwhile, Helly's grandparents are threatened with eviction by Richard. New Statesman contributor Mary Scott complained that "we hardly have time to form opinions about characters as the pace is so fast. . . . Sound-bites of text scurry, gasping, one after the other. Incident is piled upon incident. New characters turn up, then disappear with breathless haste." But London Observer reviewer Geraldine Brennan called the characters "refreshingly real" and termed Crazy Paving a "richly ironic metropolitan tragicomedy."

Dance with Me is a combination psychological thriller and ghost story. The narrator, Bet, has only known Peter for three weeks, but she inherits his fortune when he dies in a car accident. When she becomes a suspect in his murder, Bet attempts to learn the truth about Peter's past with the help of his best friends, Alex and Sophie. Another woman in Peter's life was Iris, a poor, abandoned woman with a son. She discovers that the building where she works, which had been an insane asylum during the Victorian period, seems to be haunted by former residents. Bet and Iris meet in an explosive ending that reenforces the suspicions that have been building. "The denouement is still a shock," lauded New Statesman reviewer Judy Cooke, "although the topic of pornography, and women's complicity in it, has been running through the whole book. Much of the fun of Dance with Me lies in the author's ability to baffle the reader in this way; she establishes the realities of a situation only to overturn them." A Books contributor called the novel "compelling and disturbing." And a Publishers Weekly reviewer commended, "Doughty's final twist is agile and shocking."

Doughty went home to Rutland, England's smallest county, to write her murder mystery Honey-Dew, which was reprinted as An English Murder. An elderly couple, the Cowpers, are found murdered in their home in the village, and their teenage daughter Genna, who is missing, is a suspect. The central character is the Cowpers's neighbor, journalist Alison Akenside. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that "how the offspring respond to their respective heritages forms the core of the novel."

Doughty commented in a Books article that her characters include "some of the hardy perennials of the English rural murder: a mad old lady, a malicious cat—all that I was missing was the vicar." Doughty explained that the mad old lady "is writing a murder novel in the grand tradition of the many tweed-clad ladies who seem to have excelled at this particular art." Patricia Craig wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that "a snail-trail of bloodshed, some of it in the form of 'Golden Age' ornamentation, crosses and recrosses the line of action in the novel. . . . As pastiche, Honey-Dew is not entirely all of a piece; it is hard to determine the points at which it is constructed, not exactly as a contribution to the thriller genre, but rather as a comment on it." Craig concluded by saying that the novel "starts too many hares, and trails too many red herrings, to achieve coherence as a piece of subversion." A Books reviewer described Honey-Dew as a "black comedy . . . with an unusually downbeat ending." Doughty is adapting the novel for film.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Booklist, May 1, 2000, Ilene Cooper, review of An English Murder, p. 1616.

Books, January, 1995, review of Crazy Paving, p. 4; September, 1996, review of Dance with Me, p. 23; spring, 1998, Louise Doughty, "Murder Most Genteel," p. 11.

New Statesman, February 3, 1995, Mary Scott, review of Crazy Paving, p. 41; February 23, 1996, Judy Cooke, review of Dance with Me, p. 45.

Observer (London, England), April 16, 1995, Geraldine Brennan, "Running toward the Devil's Kiss," p. 19; May 9, 1999, review of Honey-Dew, p. 14.

Publishers Weekly, December 20, 1999, review of Dance with Me, p. 57; April 17, 2000, review of An English Murder, p. 56.

Times Literary Supplement, April 3, 1998, Patricia Craig, "On the Snail-Trail," p. 25.*