This week: an absorbing historical novel generously leavened with crime.

Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors, Canongate 2023

First lines: A story, like a bird of the mountain, can carry a name beyond the clouds, beyond even time itself. Willie Maugham said that to me, many years ago.

Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors is a wonderfully satisfying and multi-layered historical novel. It transmutes the final tale from W. Somerset Maugham’s 1926 Casuarina Tree — ‘The Letter’, based on the Ethel Proudlock murder case — into gleaming literary gold.

It’s 1921. English writer Willie Somerset Maugham is staying at his old friend Robert Hamlyn’s home, the beautiful Cassowary House in Penang. Robert warns his wife Lesley that Willie is notorious for mining everyone he meets for his writing, often depicting them in scandalous detail in his books. But we soon learn that Willie is hiding a secret of his own: his marriage is in disarray, and his secretary and travel companion Gerald Haxton has long been his lover, at a time when homosexuality is still deemed a crime.

Told from the perspectives of Willie and Lesley, the novel focuses extensively on the Hamlyns’ lives in 1910 and 1921, and paints a vivid portrait of Penang, whose unique culture is shaped by Malay, Indian, Chinese, Siamese and European influences.

Two 1910 events particularly pique Willie’s authorial interest: Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat Sen’s visit to Penang to raise funds for his cause, and the Kuala Lumpur trial of Mrs. Ethel Proudlock for the murder of a man rumoured to have been her lover. Lesley had personal connections to both, and she and Robert also have secrets she’s guarded in the intervening eleven years. So just how wise is it to confide in Willie, rumoured to have honed his information-gathering skills as a spy in the First World War?

I absolutely loved this novel’s depiction of the writer’s sometimes nefarious art; how complex relationships evolve over time; and the ways individuals seek to survive and/or liberate themselves from repressive social norms. The House of Doors also offers an intriguing new take on the Proudlock case, adding a significant element to Maugham’s Casuarina Tree story.

The House of Doors was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023.