She’s also meticulous in her detailing of everyday life, Miss Mayfield’s thoughts and experiences, the local countryside, the struggling village community.

There are unexpected bursts of gloriously wry humour and Miss Mayfield is a surprisingly rounded, highly sympathetic character - Lofts is particularly adept at representing the vulnerability of a woman so utterly alone in the world. I was completely caught up in Lofts’s story. So, Miss Mayfield slowly morphs into a Miss Marple-like amateur detective determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.Īlthough it’s creaky and overwrought in places, particularly the concluding scenes, and there are some admittedly preposterous plot twists. Then the discovery of a strangely-disfigured, wax doll, alerts Miss Mayfield to the possibility that something sinister is afoot in this picture-postcard village. But there’s something not quite right about this place, the local children are identikit blondes, like something out of The Midwich Cuckoos and there are hints of nefarious happenings behind closed doors. Walwyk village is gorgeous, Miss Mayfield’s provided with luxurious housing and high wages, she’s even adopted by an exceptionally-attentive, affectionate black cat. Then she’s offered a seemingly miraculous opportunity to reinvent herself as the head of a remote school in the East Anglian Fens. The impoverished Deborah Mayfield has returned to England after twenty years doing missionary-style work in Kenya, ill-health and isolation has left her struggling to find a foothold in a now-unfamiliar landscape. Since championed by writers like Grady Hendrix, Norah Loft’s quirky, occult mystery has attracted a cult following in pockets of the horror-reading community, cited as an influence on canonical folk horror The Wicker Man.īut it’s markedly different in style and flavour from standard, commercial horror of its era, less overblown, almost understated in places, and centred on a marvellously unlikely heroine, spinster and schoolteacher Miss Mayfield. First published in 1960 as The Devil’s Own under the pseudonym Peter Curtis, at a time when Dennis Wheatley’s lurid tales of devilish deeds were hugely popular and occult horror was increasingly fashionable, it inspired a Hammer Horror feature The Witches starring Joan Fontaine and scripted by Nigel Kneale of Quatermass fame. The Little Wax Doll reads like a lost collaboration between Barbara Pym and Agatha Christie albeit with embellishments more suited to pulp horror.

The Little Wax Doll by Peter Curtis