Mischief
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A child is left in the care of a disturbed babysitter in “surely one of the finest pure terror-suspense stories ever written” (The New York Times). Bunny’s parents shouldn’t have brought her to New York City, but her father has an important speech to make, and her mother couldn’t bear to be away from their darling nine-year-old daughter. And when her mommy and daddy leave for the speech, Bunny will stay in the hotel with a babysitter, sound asleep and perfectly safe. What could possibly go wrong? The sitter is Nell, a plain young woman from Indiana. She puts Bunny to bed and amuses herself in the other room, making prank calls and trying on Bunny’s mother’s jewelry. So far, all is well. But Nell’s dull expression conceals madness, and something is broken inside her mind . . . From one of the greatest female crime writers of the mid-twentieth century, an Edgar Award winner and six-time finalist, Mischief is “a fine, chilly combination of horror and suspense” (The New Yorker).
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Crime fiction has many shapes. Taking Charlotte Armstrong's Mischief as an example - the entirety of the novel's action takes place in and around an adjoined hotel room where an absolutely unhinged woman is babysitting a 9-year-old girl. A series of missed connections and coincidences result in potentially the worst possible thing happening to a loving, pointedly positive family. Whether or not it happens is the core of Mischief's tension.
Part of what impresses so much about this tension is that it is pulled off with a minimum of on-page violence or grotesquery. Much of Armstrong's work leans into lengthy and engaging dialogues and descriptions of facial expressions except for one knock-down prize fight in the latter half. We are so keyed into the potential “state of things” on the various fronts of the characters that the degree of suspense the novel pulls off is practically stomach-wrenching at times. Filmed as Don't Bother to Knock with Marilyn Monroe, Mischief has aged remarkably well.
