Books by Winston Graham normally fall into the category of straight novels with the discipline of suspense—long, meaty, serious and shrewdly calculated, with strong emphasis on story telling and surprise. Few men handle this have-it-both-ways form more skillfully; and Graham himself has never done it better than in "Marnie."…

This is the first-person life story of one of the most unusual of recent heroines: a young girl who is a cold-blooded professional embezzler, the pretty little office girl who defrauds one company after another in a series of successive identities as carefully worked out as those of a polygamist. It is a tale of crime and pursuit and retribution, but by no means a simple one. With what seems (at least to a male reviewer) a phenomenally successful use of a woman's viewpoint, and with a rare and happy balance of psychoanalytic and novelistic method, Graham makes...