The writer uses author W. Somerset Maughan’s visit to Malaysia in the early 1920s to explore love, marriage, race and crime in British colonial society.
Tan Twan Eng is an internationally recognized writer of historical fiction. His latest book, “The House of Doors,” has just been published by Bloomsbury. “The Letter,” a short story by W. Somerset Maughan, was inspired by the 1911 trial of Ethel Proudlock, a teacher’s wife living in Malaysia who shot and killed a man at her home while claiming self-defense.
Maughan is a part-time narrator in the book, which fills in the details of his visit to Penang in the early 1920s , his interactions with British colonial society and his identity as a not-quite-out queer man in the time after Oscar Wilde was sent to prison for gross indecency. I found him fascinating. I did a lot of research on him, and I found that he lived a long life. He was almost 100 years old when he died. When he first started traveling in the early 1900s, he was traveling on steamships. Towards the end of his life, when he traveled to Japan, he flew on a jet plane. So he’s seen a huge span of our modern history. I felt that he would make an interesting observer of events as they happened.