Everything that that letter implies – that Helene didn’t know Frank was ill, that this is the brutal end to a very warm friendship (though not a love story by any means), and that there is nothing that Helene can do because she is so far away from Frank’s wife and family – is unsaid.
The last letter in the book is written by a secretary (who didn’t know Helene), to tell her that Mr Doel died some weeks ago from peritonitis, and does she still want to order that book. These so horrify Helene that, as their friendships develops, she begins to send food parcels to the shop staff. It’s now a restaurant.įrank inadvertently reveals details of daily life in post-war austerity London in his letters, where rationing was still in place after the Second World War. Frank is more decorous and restrained, but any English writer would be in contrast to such a sparky American. She and the shop’s manager, Frank Doel, began a correspondence that is so lively on her part that it jumps off the page. She was a passionate Anglophile, and wanted to have real English books that she could afford rather than pay a fortune for horrible American reprints. In 1946, an impoverished book-lover scraping a living in New York, Helene Hanff started to order obscure books of English literature from the London firm of Marks & Co. It was so successful because it is a book of instantly readable, delightful, funny, moving, revealing, instructive and downright normal letters. It became a TV series and a highly successful West End play (but flopped on Broadway). 84 Charing Cross Road was published in 1970, and was an instant success. She spent her life trying to become a Broadway playwright, and ended up writing a best-selling novel about her relationship with a London antiquarian bookshop from the 1940s to the 1960s. Today’s letter in the first Really Like This Book’s podcast A-Z series is H, and today’s author is Helene Hanff (1916-97), oh blessed be her name.
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