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By Root 5642 0

The key to the story then becomes the third sister Marian, stronger and shrewder than the others, and it is she who, as a fully `active' heroine, eventually outwits the two villains and puts them to rout. Sir Percy's awful secret, which Marian also discovers, is that he had been born out of wedlock, and is not really a baronet at all. While trying to destroy the evidence for this, he accidentally burns himself to death. Fosco is murdered by an Italian secret society which he has betrayed. In plot terms, the story is thus a combination of Mystery and Overcoming the Monster, and Marian presents us with an unusual pre-modern example of a feminine `monster-slayer. The way the `anima-figure' in the story develops through three stages, from the original helpless victim Ann into her final manifestation as the tough and resourceful, but still feminine Marian may recall those folk-tales such as The Three Billy Goats Gruff, where we see a hero-figure progressively becoming stronger through three incarnations, until he is powerful and mature enough to overcome the monster.

2. Another Hollywood director who conspicuously relied on elements of the Mystery plot in many of his films was Alfred Hitchcock. Rear Window (1954), for instance, was a straightforward detection mystery in which the hero, a magazine photographer (played by James Stewart) confined by injury to his New York apartment and seeking diversion by spying on his neighbours, is convinced he has seen one of them committing a murder, although there is no sign of the body. Despite initial scepticism, first from his girlfriend, then from his friend in the New York police department, his deductions eventually prove correct and the murderer confesses. A more complex mystery inspired Hitchcock's most popular film, Vertigo (1958), in which the hero `Scottie' (again played by Stewart) is a San Francisco policeman forced into retirement because, following his failure to stop a colleague falling from a roof, he suffers acutely from vertigo. He is commissioned to investigate the strange problem afflicting the wife of a rich friend, who seems to imagine she is the reincarnation of a beautiful and tragic nineteenth-century ancestor who had died young. Stewart falls in love with the wife (Kim Novak) and is led by her to an old Spanish mission station south of the city, which she seems to recall from her previous life. When she ascends the church tower, he is slow to follow her because of his vertigo and sees her falling to her death. Traumatised by his inability to prevent this tragedy, he undergoes hospital treatment but then thinks he sees the dead woman's near-exact double (also Kim Novak). He woos her and gradually comes to suspect that she is the same woman. Having dressed her in the same clothes, he takes her back to the same church. By now he has unravelled the mystery. He had in fact been set up by the husband to provide cover for a murder. The woman he saw falling from the tower had been the man's real wife; the woman played by Kim Novak was his mistress. On the first occasion, when she climbed the tower before him, the husband had already been hiding up there, ready to throw his wife (dressed in identical clothes) off the tower. He had relied on an attack of vertigo to ensure that Scottie would not have been able to climb high enough to see the truth of what happened. He and his mistress had then, unseen, made their escape. When the hero takes the mistress back up the tower, to confront her with the part she had played in this murder, she is so dismayed that, quite accidentally, she falls to her death. But it is never explained why the hero was not asked to identify the original victim's body, at which point the truth would have come out much earlier. But then of course there would have been no story.

3. Another great work of literature based in part on the Mystery plot was Dostoyevsky's final novel, The Brothers Karamazov. We know from the opening paragraph of this long book that it is to be a murder story, involving the death of Fyodor Karamazov, a rich, bullying, debauched