![]() In a New York hotel, he reviews letters that have arrived for him in the mail. He thinks of a woman named Marion, who is waiting for him in Chicago, and plans to write letters home as if he were Hermione in order to cover his tracks. He drives off alone, secure that he will get away with his crime. He hides until they leave then cleans up the body, disposing of it in pieces in a hole that he had claimed was being dug for a wine cellar. While he is in the basement, the Wallingfords stop by to say farewell. He strips naked to clean up the mess and has to go to the cellar to turn on the water supply, which his wife had shut off as part of her preparations for travel. Carpenter calls his wife upstairs and murders her as she leans over the bathtub, bashing in her skull with a length of lead pipe. The Carpenters are about to leave for America and their friends insist that they must be back in England for Christmas. Hermione Carpenter host a party for their friends. "Back for Christmas" was first published in The New Yorker on Octo(I am using the version collected in the 1961 Bantam paperback edition of Fancies and Goodnights sources report that Collier rewrote some of the stories in this volume for republication in book form, but I do not know if this story was one of them). The first episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents to be adapted from a Collier story was "Back for Christmas." In this series of nine articles, I plan to examine each of the episodes of the Hitchcock series either adapted from a Collier story or adapted by Collier from the work of another author. Like His Monkey Wife, many of his short stories exhibit a misogynistic theme, though Paul Theroux wrote that it is "such a wickedly cheerful kind it is irresistible." Collier's stories were adapted for radio and later for television, as early as a 1946 episode of Lights Out. Five of his short stories were adapted by other writers for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, while Collier himself adapted three stories by other writers: two for Alfred Hitchcock Presents and one for The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Collier did not adapt any of his own stories for the Hitchcock TV series. ![]() ![]() Other screenplays included The African Queen (1951), which was credited to James Agee and John Huston but on which Collier and Peter Viertel also worked, and I Am a Camera (1955), which later inspired the Broadway musical and film, Cabaret.Ĭollier is best known for his short stories, many of which were collected in Fancies and Goodnights (1951), which won an Edgar Award and an International Fantasy Award the following year. Collier moved to Hollywood in 1935 when he was hired to write the Katherine Hepburn film, Sylvia Scarlett he continued to write screenplays and, eventually teleplays. In this novel, the protagonist is tricked into marrying a chimpanzee and discovers that life with her is preferable to life with the vapid women he meets. He began his writing career as a poet, then had some success with his first novel, His Monkey Wife, published in 1930.
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