Catherine Eisner

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Biographical note:  Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Eisner has ‘mastered the twist in the tale and her stories cascade vividly into derangement’ affirms a national review crisply, an insight endorsed by a reviewer stimulated by ‘startlingly inventive and genre-busting tales.’

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844718313
ISBN:  9781844718313
Author:  Catherine Eisner
Title:  Listen Close to Me
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FA
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Sep-11
Extent:  256pp
Height:  198 mm
Width:  129 mm
Thickness:  18 mm
Weight:  384 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 14.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Eisner traces often with darkest black humour the misadventures and behavioural tics of women driven by bizarre and sometimes criminal compulsions. These tales probe the intimate lives and crimes of unreliable narrators to prompt disturbing confidences told in voices from the sidelines we wouldn’t normally hear. ‘Extraordinary writing. Mesmeric reading.’

Main description:  Subtitled Hidden Lives of Love, Madness, Murder, Loss and Deception, this new collection by Catherine Eisner traces often with darkest black humour the misadventures and behavioural tics of women driven by bizarre and sometimes criminal compulsions. An asexual niece becomes the love interest of her erotica-collecting uncle; the mistress of an army Intelligence Officer assumes the modus operandi of a spy to outwit her lover; a cat-obsessed wife of a commodities broker is suckered into a human-trafficking scam in Hong Kong; an eighteen-year-old governess becomes a suspect in a notorious case of serial murder and begins to harbour suspicions about the budding sociopath in her charge, a sinister nine-year-old boy. These are tales that probe the intimate lives and crimes of unreliable narrators to prompt disturbing confidences told in voices from the sidelines that we wouldn’t normally hear. ‘Extraordinary writing. Mesmeric reading.’ Ambit magazine.

Table of contents:
Foreword
Lovesong in Invisible Ink
The Shadow on the Blind
An Unreined Mind—Part 1
An Unreined Mind—Part 2
Listen Close to Me
Graphological Notes on the Script of Characters in the Texts
Acknowledgements

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Foreword

I am very pleased to be invited to contribute a few observations on the graphological features of these texts, particularly as Catherine Eisner is revealed as a true enthusiast for the study of handwriting, and recognises it as an important adjunct to psychological and criminological analyses.

So, it’s refreshing to see specimens of handwriting adding another dimension to a reader’s understanding of character development and, indeed, their yielding insights into hidden motives and desires (see, particularly, Eisner’s ‘In Search of the Fourth Man’, published in Ambit issue 193, in which my own analyses are cited).

The presence of criminology as an allied field is evident in these narratives, which include a case of serial murders, an admission of psychopathic imposture and a number of acts of criminal complicity.

In my own analytical work I have encountered the criminal mind revealed by the strokes of a pen. In my analyses of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, Ian Huntley and Maxine Carr, for example, I have concluded that certain partnerships facilitate the expression of violence and detachment, that produce cruelty without compunction. Each enables the other to act out their buried impulses, which may not have been released as a lone activity. The controlling personalities in these two partnerships were in both cases the male partner, but they were facilitated by their female associate. In the first, Myra Hindley had been trained to express aggression by her father. Her writing shows a coldness and detachment that enabled her to be without mercy in the presence of the distress of the victims, who were exposed to the evil torments meted out. In the case of Maxine Carr, there was immaturity in the middle zone writing reflecting her acceptance of the control that Huntley exerted upon her. Thus she, albeit unwittingly, according to the prosecuting counsel, enabled him to vent his inner anger on two innocent children, as he assumed the power drawn from a moral vacuum in which he admitted no discipline to be imposed.

In many cases the lack of balanced discipline in the lives of young people can create fear and anxiety, which leads them to push back boundaries which are not firmly applied at an early stage in their development. The fear of freedom is an emotion that drives them into a free-fall situation as they flail about and damage what is vulnerable. Everyone needs boundaries and it is a recurring theme that these are lacking in the early experience of those who go on to acts of violence and criminality. Even children from privileged backgrounds can be driven to violence and crime, because they are also in free-fall, with no limits imposed, so no sense of judgement and discernment can be developed.

In the case of the nine year old boy [‘An Unreined Mind’], again he was given no boundaries by his parents, who behaved with no standards or limitations on their sexual behaviour. This was enough to send him into a downward spiral of insecurity and the subsequent letters of disgust and threat that he allegedly sent. The writing shows a muddy and unstructured route, unlike his usual careful hand, which reflected the behaviour of his mother that distressed him so much. His own normal writing was clear and precise so, in his mind, he descended to the level of expression, no doubt first felt by him in his formative years, as the writing seems to suggest.

Handwriting is brainwriting and, as each person’s brain is unique to them, their script is also as the brain directs it. There are over 300 variants within the scientific study of graphology and the art of interpreting what they reveal comes from careful study and long practice. This duo of skills is honed over the years and enables the graphologist to discern the emphasis and expression of individuality in the writer.

I am confident that the texts that follow, which are enlivened by handwritten messages as a minor sub-theme, will prompt the reader to recognise graphology as a circumstantial clue to character, to be evaluated along with behavioural tics, mannerisms, figures of speech, and other socio-cultural indices.

More than this, as the following texts imply, handwriting specimens can, when read aright, signify intention. One does not pretend, of course, that a perceptive handwriting analysis could wholly avert a tragedy by identifying a nascent sociopath, but certainly it’s a powerful tool in diagnosis. Better an early diagnostic impression derived from graphology than for an outcome such as the narrator describes in Catherine Eisner’s ‘An Unreined Mind’: ‘The suspicions which occupied me I could communicate to no one until it was too late. ’

With these reflections in mind, I commend these disturbing personal narratives to you.


Elaine Quigley

Chairman of the British Institute
of Graphologists (2002–2004)

Previous review quote:  entertaining and finely spiced …

Times Literary Supplement

Previous review quote:  Extraordinary writing. Mesmeric reading.

Ambit magazine

Previous review quote:  I've long been an admirer of Catherine Eisner's piquant and highly original fictions in the literary journal, ‘Ambit', and of her singularly rich pictorial and sensuous prose (she's an academically trained painter, I understand). Here at last she is given a very much broader canvas for her character studies of women at the end of their tether, though it's the minute detail of their dysfunctional, drug-dependant (and even criminal) lives I admire so much.

Johanna Behrendt