Readers won’t be similarly lost however because the twist in the tale is signalled fairly early on.

He senses something is very wrong, that “there was a trap somewhere” but is at a loss for an explanation. Ravinel is certain that she died - he was there when it happened - but can’t explain various sightings of a woman who looks exactly like his wife. The final stage is meant to be the discovery of the body with Ravinel playing the part of the shocked, grieving husband.īut this is where the scheme falls apart. They roll her in a carpet and drive throughout the night to dispose of her body back at the marital home in Paris. The pair lure Mireille to an apartment in Nantes and drown her in the bathtub, making her death look like an accident. The pair have hatched a plan to murder Mireille, make a claim on her life insurance policy and use the two million francs payout to set Lucienne up in a practice in Antibes.Įverything goes to plan initially. He’s been having an affair with Luciene, a doctor who’d treated his wife a few years before the book opens. The plot concerns a traveling salesman called Fernand Ravinel who leads a mundane existence with his wife, Mireille. This last version was the one I read for the 1954 Club. Since then it’s had two further changes of title: It was published as The Fiends by Arrow Books in 1957 and as She Who Was No More by Pushkin Vertigo in 2015. Published in 1952 as Celle qui n’était plus, it had its English language debut in 1954 as The Woman Who Was No More.

She Who Was No More was the first psychological thriller from the writing duo of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac to be translated into English.

Vertigo by Boileau-Narcejac