An exhilarating story from the author who mainstreamed lesbian pulp fiction.
When Mary Drew and Martha meet at a posh school in England, the connection is instantaneous. Both are lonely in the new space and both spend their days stuck inside their vivid imaginations, so it's no surprise that they began a passionate and intense relationship. But such passion leads to their ultimate downfall, ruin...and murder.
Vin Packer, a pen name for Marijane Meaker, is credited for the creation of the lesbian pulp fiction drama. Her stories hold no judgement on her characters, even if every other character in her novels look down upon the protagonist. Evil Friendship showcases her talent for writing characters in gay relationships, who have complex issues and difficult relationships. And no ending is neat and tidy.
Marijane Meaker (born May 27, 1927) is an American novelist and short story writer in several genres using different pen names. From 1952 to 1969 she wrote twenty mystery and crime novels as Vin Packer, including Spring Fire which is credited with launching the genre of lesbian pulp fiction (although few of Packer's books address homosexuality or feature gay characters). Using her own observations of lesbians in the 1950s and 1960s, she wrote a series of nonfiction books as Ann Aldrich from 1955 to 1972. In 1972 she switched genres and pen names once more to begin writing for young adults, and became quite successful as M.E. Kerr, producing over 20 novels and winning multiple awards, including the American Library Association's lifetime award for young-adult literature (Edwards Award). She was described by The New York Times Book Review as "one of the grand masters of young adult fiction." As Mary James, she has written four books for younger children.
Regardless of genre or pen name, Meaker's books have in common complex characters that have difficult relationships and complicated problems, who rail against conformity. Meaker said of this approach, "I was a bookworm and a poetry lover. When I think of myself and what I would have liked to have found in books those many years ago, I remember being depressed by all the neatly tied-up, happy-ending stories, the abundance of winners, the themes of winning, solving, finding — when around me it didn't seem that easy. So I write with a different feeling when I write for young adults. I guess I write for myself at that age."
I rlyy enjoyed this book and I didn't expect to like it this much, I liked Mary n Martha relationship they rly felt like they were one character but in different body, it had a dark academia vibe to it as well and I think the ending was just perfect, kinda wanna have a second book when they r older. rlyy recommend.
I actually am hesitating between 4 and 5 stars for this one. I had no idea until I got to the end of this book that it was written in 1958. It is so strongly written and imagined--and then taking into account it was written in 1958--that I feel like giving it five stars for its author's bravery. In any case, I realized quickly that the book is based on the Parker-Hulme case in New Zealand. I've read Parker and Hulme by Glamuzina and Laurie and I've seen Heavenly Creatures but I feel this book does the best job of bringing a reader into the heads of the two girls, almost making us live their fantasy lives. I found the representation of this in Heavenly Creatures weird and off-putting and I felt it explained nothing. The Evil Friendship, though, is heartbreakingly clear about the girls' shared resistance to giving a name to their attraction and the role that tension plays in leading them to their tragic actions. It's a fascinating and troubling case.
Vin Packer (Marijane Meaker, *1927) gilt seit Veröffentlichung ihres Romans „Spring Fire“ als Begründerin der lesbian pulp fiction. Allerdings ist diese Genre-Bezeichnung stark irreführend, denn THE EVIL FRIENDSHIP (1958) ist ein durchaus gut geschriebener und spannender psychologischer Roman.
(Da es sich um einen Krimi handelt, hier der Hinweis: Die folgenden Passagen enthalten SPOILER)
Im Zentrum stehen die jungen Außenseiterinnen Mary Drew Edlin und Martha Kent, die beide Chillam, eine Boarding School in der englischen Kleinstadt Weerdale, besuchen. Allerdings gehören sie zu den wenigen Schülerinnen, die nicht auf dem Campus übernachten, sondern als "day girls" nach Schulschluss nach Hause gehen. Sie haben nur oberflächliche Kontakte zu ihren Mitschülerinnen und auch die altmodischen Lehrmethoden sind nicht geeignet, die beiden fantasie- und gefühlvollen kreativen Mädchen an die Schule zu binden. Kaum sind sich Mary Drew und Martha in Chillam begegnet, als sie sich auch schon als Außenseiterinnen erkennen und eine immer enger werdende Beziehung eingehen, die sich vom kindlich Schwärmerischen zu einer homoerotischen Bindung entwickelt. Vin Packer beschreibt den Zeitraum vom Herbst 1955, als sich die beiden Neulinge in der Schule kennen lernen, bis zum verhängnisvollen 8. Juni 1956, dem Tag der Ermordung von Mary Drews Mutter, abwechselnd aus Sicht der Mädchen und der Zeugen im zwei Monate später geführten Mordprozess. Die Handlung ist angelehnt an den Parker-Hulme-Mordfall, der 1954 in Neu Seeland stattfand. Bis heute ist dieser Mord eines "Killer Couples" Gegenstand zahlreicher schriftstellerischer und filmischer Adaptionen geworden. Genannt seien hier Joel Serias skandalöse Verfilmung „Und erlöse uns nicht von dem Bösen“ (die ich herausragend finde, allerdings lehnt sie sich nur sehr lose an das Vorbild an) und Peter Jacksons „Heavenly Creatures“. Obwohl die Handlung alle skandalträchtigen Elemente vereint, die es für einen typischen Pulp Krimi braucht – Mädchen in der Adoleszenz, lesbische Neigung, Mord -, ist THE EVIL FRIENDSHIP formal, sprachlich und auch inhaltlich anspruchsvoller als die meisten Genre-Brüder und -Schwestern. Vin Packer stellt dar, wie es zu dem grauenhaften Mord gekommen ist. Die Details werden stimmig und erfreulich klischeefrei präsentiert, die Befindlichkeit der jungen Mörderinnen wird nicht küchenpsychologisch behauptet, sondern ergibt sich aus den einzelnen Szenen, die fast eine kammerspielartige Qualität haben. Trotz - oder vielleicht gar wegen? - des extremen Entschlusses, den die Mädchen fassen, um ihre Trennung zu verhindern, hat man das Gefühl, einer Tragödie beizuwohnen, deren Ausgang angesichts der Unbedingtheit ihrer Gefühle füreinander schon früh feststeht.
Ähnlich den Brontes erschreiben und erspielen sich Martha und Mary Edlin eine epische Fantasiewelt um Liebe und Leidenschaft. In den von ihnen gemeinsam entwickelten und fortgeschriebenen Geschichten drücken ihre Figuren stellvertretend die Gefühle zueinander aus und großartig sind die Passagen, in denen Vin Packer die Zuneigung der Mädchen zueinander oszillieren läßt zwischen Rollenspiel und tatsächlicher Liebe. Und zwangsläufig muss jeder Druck, den Schule ("Significant relationships are not allowed at Chillam") und Eltern auf die sensiblen verliebten ausübt, Mary Drew und Martha nur um so fester aneinanderbinden. Anders als im Pulp-Roman deutet Vin Packer viele intime Gefühle und Handlungen, die man großartig exploitationmässig ausbeuten könnte, nur an (z.B. als Martha sich im "Rollenspiel" am Oberschenkel mit einer Klinge ritzt; das blutige Laken ist symbolträchtig genug).
Aber Mary Drews und Marthas Empfindsamkeit darf nicht darüber hinwegtäuschen, dass sie nicht nur gestohlen und erpreßt, sondern schließlich auch gemordet haben, um nicht voneinander getrennt zu werden und gemeinsam nach Amerika zu fahren. Und am Ende dieses Romans hat sich nicht nur die Jury die Frage zu stellen, ob und welche Rolle Homesexualität am Zustandekommen dieses Verbrechens im weiteren Sinne gespielt hat und ob die beiden Mädchen möglicherweise gar nicht schuldfähig sind; eine Frage, über die nicht nur die Sachverständigen streiten, sondern deren Beantwortung Vin Packer dem Leser überläßt.
Like most people, I originally discovered the Parker Hulme case through Heavenly Creatures. The case is such a fascinating and unusual one, it's been covered by an almost unprecedented number of books, both fiction and non fiction. I'd heard of The Evil Friendship, but since it was an old lesbian pulp, reasoned it must have fallen out of print years ago. That's reckoning without Kindle's uncanny ability to breathe life into seemingly dead genres!
In this instance, they really shouldn't have bothered. Perhaps it's my fault for expecting more of what is essentially a trashy dime store novel, but it somehow took an interesting subject and made it banal. Parker and Hulme are reimagined as English schoolgirls, but the author had clearly never set foot in England, using blatant Americanisms on every page. Turning the mother's lover into an American seems to be a desperate attempt to explain this away, but he really doesn't stand out from the other characters. I particularly hated the name 'Mary Drew' for the Parker character- not only does it sound gratingly cutesy, but I seriously doubt any British girl of the period would have been saddled with such a name. The author doesn't seem sure whether she has her eye on her setting or her audience, which over time proved exceedingly irritating.
Indeed, it was difficult to decide what was more galling. Her slavish adherence to the facts, seeming to quote trial transcripts verbatim, or the bizarre turns the narrative took when she went her own way? Mary Drew's sudden decision to sleep with a hideous groundsman in their local park was by far the most glaring; although the real life Parker lost her virginity to an older boy, at least it was somebody she knew rather than spur of the moment. At other times I wished she could have focused on minor characters instead - Rush, the dashing egoist of a head girl, whose many conquests included the Games mistress, was far more dynamic than the so called heroines!
As lesbian pulps go, it was definitely a miss rather than a hit. If you've a few hours to spare and don't fancy exercising your brain cells, you might like it, but one hundred and fifty plus pages of haphazard prose and coyly suggested misdemeanours were quite enough for me. Thank God for Sarah Waters and modern authors who can actually write!
Inspired by the Parker-Hulme case - New Zealand’s answer to Leopold and Loeb - this 1956 paperback tells the lurid story of two teenage girls who form a strong bond and, when threatened with separation, conspire to murder the mother of one of them.
This book is an example of constraints of form, or commercial constraints, preventing the story from really opening up its wings and taking flight. There’s potential, amid the lurid stereotyping (the vicious lesbian gym teacher, the distant fathers and hand-wringing mothers) for a really interesting look at what might drive two girls to plunge themselves deep into mutual fantasies. But there’s not enough space to fully explore the dynamics of what the school headmistress distastefully labels their “Significant Relationship.”
The two girls, Martha Kent and Mary Drew Edland(*), explore their sexual feelings for one another via role-play, acting out scenes from the fantasy stories they write together. But a rift opens when their scenes become too emotionally intimate, when Mary Drew (who is the bolder and less fearful of the two, to the extent that their personalities and voices are distinguished at all) breaks character and attempts to love Martha as herself. When this happens, fights break out between the girls, often violent ones. Later, they incorporate the violence into their fantasies, and it becomes a part of their in-character lovemaking.
This is all quite psychologically intricate. But every time the book gets close to exploring an aspect of it with nuance, it has to rush off into the next sensational scene. If instead of a 170-page drugstore paperback, with its quotas of sordid passion and melodrama, this story were told in two or three times the space and with a more delicate touch, it could be a study with haunting depth.
But it is what it is, and as such it is at times frustratingly rushed and even verging on silly. The most outrageous acts committed by the girls - one involving sex with a borderline vagrant whom Mary Drew picks up in a park, and the other the murder itself - are, unsatisfyingly, the least believable, inadequately explored and motivated. No time is taken to build suspense and insight around these acts - the girls think of them, and then they go and do them.
I would love to see this story adapted over again, in a style like that of Sarah Waters, just as pulpy but strongly voiced and psychologically thorough. She would take 800 pages to do it - can’t you just see it? Affinity’s dark psychology, Fingersmith’s unbreakable bond between damaged teenagers, The Paying Guests’s gruesome murder - all the elements are there.
But The Evil Friendship isn’t that book, and that isn’t its fault. It is what it says it is on the box. Plus, it hints at those veins of insight that take it a bit beyond the stuff it must have shared shelf space with in its day, nearly all of which is gone and forgotten.
(*) I read this book in an audio edition, with a narrator putting on a less-than-excellent fake British accent, so I might not have all the names spelled correctly.
Mary Drew and Martha are teenage girls at a posh English school, both of them lonely, both of them fueled by vivid imaginations. When they meet, the connection is instantaneous and intense, and it isn't long before they develop a "significant relationship". The passion they have for each other eventually leads to ruin, and murder.
Vin Packer is the pen name of Marijane Meeker, one of the unsung heroes (heroines?) of the paperback original heyday of the '50's, and is credited with starting the so-called "lesbian pulp" movement of that era. These are books that explore in an honest way homosexual relationships, and they walk an interestingly fine line. THE EVIL FRIENDSHIP is a good example of Packer's approach to the genre-- the modern reader will feel sympathetic, I'm sure to Mary Drew and Martha, even as the other characters condemn them. And I'm equally sure that the mindset of readers in the '50's fell more in line with the other characters.
But Packer is very careful not to pass judgment on her protagonists, or any other character in the book for that matter. There's something almost sly about this; you get a sense that, deep down, Packer's own sympathies lay with Mary Drew and Martha, despite the horrible outcome of their "evil friendship".
This is a suspenseful story, and surprisingly touching.
Unreal characters make for an ultimately failed plot. Novel begins with murder trial and alternates between trial testimony in the "present" and narration of events in the "past". Ambitious novel, but it just doesn't work. Not worth reading.
I came for the creepy, was-there-or-wasn’t-there a supernatural element (Google it), friendship that inspired a creepy mural drawn by Parker decades later on another continent story (Google that too) and found lesbian pulp.
Which, it’s OK in that regard though often rushed/abrupt at times.
Not necessarily a must-read for those interested in the Parker-Hulme case.