Rebecca (novel) glamorous, dark-haired Jan Ricardo. The suspicion that Tommy remained attracted to Ricardo haunted Daphne." In "The Rebecca Notebook" of 1981, du Maurier "'remembered' Rebecca's gestation … Seeds began to drop. A beautiful home... a first wife... jealousy, a wreck, perhaps at sea, near to the house... But something terrible would have to happen, I did not know what..." She wrote in her notes prior to writing: 'I want to build up the character of the first [wife] in the mind of the second... until wife 2 is haunted day and night... a tragedy is looming very close and CRASH! BANG!
The House on the Strand the phone but suddenly finds he is unable to grip it. The ending is left open: is Dick dead, paralysed or simply collapsing? Daphne du Maurier said of it: "What about the hero of "The House on the Strand"? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don’t really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don’t you?" The House on the Strand The House on the Strand is a novel by Daphne du Maurier. First published in the UK in 1969 by Victor Gollancz, with