“Marnie” by Winston Graham (post 4): Young, attractive, serial embezzler, using a series of false identities, both knows and doesn’t know what she is doing

Margaret “Marnie” Elmer, the first-person narrator, is a 23-year-old serial embezzler, who commits her crimes under a series of false identities. She gets employed as a cashier or bookkeeper, each time using a different name, then robs the safe and disappears.

She had started stealing in childhood. “Twice I’d been caught stealing when I was ten…The second time I got into trouble when I was ten my mother had beaten me with a stick, and I still have one mark on my thigh where she dug a bit deep” (1, p. 275) (Marnie, pages 249-527, is the second of three Graham Winston novels in this edition).

Marnie’s father had been killed in 1943, when she was nearly six. Marnie went to school only until age 14, but had been considered very bright.

At her current job, one of her bosses says, “Has anybody told you before what a pretty girl you are?” Marnie replies, “I don’t remember” (1, p. 278).

She has been known at this job as Mary Taylor, a widow (she has never been married). For the first time since age ten, she has been caught stealing, for which she berates herself:

“She really had been a bit of a fool, Mary Taylor, getting so involved. Mollie Jeffrey had had much more sense…When that man Ronnie Oliver had rung up Marion Holland just after she’d helped herself to a large sum of money from the office…I’d said never again. Don’t be a fool, getting entangled. So Mollie Jeffrey had taken that advice to heart. But Mary Taylor had forgotten it…This was the worst and most incautious ever” (1, p. 322).

“It isn’t always so easy to know the truth about yourself…I often have two thoughts—one belongs to the person I’m trying to be now, the other belongs to the kid from Devonport. And she’s still a back-street urchin. I mean, you don’t suddenly grow out of knowing what it’s like to be hungry and knocked around and treated like dirt. You don’t honestly. I mean, you may think you have, but then when you find yourself holding a thousand pounds in pound notes, well, you suddenly discover you want to bolt down the next dark alley…” (1, p, 335).

1. Winston Graham. The Forgotten Story [1945]. Marnie [1961]. Greek Fire [1957]. London, Chapmans, 1992.