A psychological crime novel by the author of the Poldark series. Margaret (Marnie) Elmer is a charming liar and a thief who steals from her employers, moving on each time to avoid arrest. When she starts working for a family printing firm she gets caught and blackmailed into marriage by one of the partners, Mark Rutland.

Early in the novel, set in England, Marnie takes a job as an usherette at the Gaumont cinema in Oxford Street, Manchester before moving on to the nearby Roxy Cinema as a box office assistant. She has a colleague who was ‘writing a play, hoping I suppose to be another Shelagh Delaney.’ (Born in Salford, Delaney is best known for her 1958 play A Taste of Honey; a film adaptation starring Rita Tushingham and directed by Tony Richardson was released in September 1961).

In the sequence below, after much pre-planning, Marnie feigns illness to the cinema manager Mr King and steals most of the weekend’s box office takings (£746) from the ‘record-breaking Santa Clara’ which was booked for three weeks, ‘following the new fashion’.

Notes:

The Gaumont, 44-50 Oxford Street Manchester, was viewed as one of the finest cinemas in the city. It closed as a cinema in 1974 and the building demolished in 1990. There was a Roxy Cinema at the time but this was situated in Hollinwood, Oldham.

The screen rights to Marnie were bought just a week after publication in the US but Winston Graham only found out later that they were purchased by Alfred Hitchcock. For his controversial 1964 film version starring Tippi Hedren and Sean Connery, the story was re-located to the US.