Yet the author does more than that: she captures perfectly the speech patterns and erratic behavior of someone who might indeed be deluded about reality. Piper brilliantly portrays the paranoia and terror of Blanche facing all those usually kindly but incredulous people she encounters over the course of a long and harrowing night.

Part of this preference is due to those different plot decisions but most of it’s due to the telling. Despite my liking for the screen version, I have to say that I really prefer the novel. The movie made a good number of changes from the novel, aside from shifting the venue to London from NYC, and leaves quite a different taste in the mouth. Will Blanche be able to surmount the high walls of universal disbelief and locate her little girl before anything dreadful happens to the child? Or will Blanche be clapped in Bellevue? To cap it all, Blanche’s mother, who’d of course be able to vouch for Bunny’s existence, has gone back to RI on urgent business and can’t easily be contacted. Meanwhile further circumstances - involving happenstance, bad luck, conspiracy, malice - accrue to reinforce the skeptics’ opinion. (They’re complicated even more by the fact that he’s already in a relationship with said principal!) Everything points to the fact that the cops, Newhouse and others are right. That’s the conclusion, too, of the psychiatrist the nursery’s principal introduces to Blanche, Dennis Newhouse, although he promptly starts to fall in love with her, which complicates matters. The cops - especially after they discover Blanche’s apartment bears no trace of Bunny - come to the conclusion that Blanche is deluded, an unfortunate who, unable to have a child, has, so to speak, dreamt one into existence. Worse than that, no one seems to have the slightest memory of her ever having been there, or indeed of Blanche having made the arrangement. But, arriving to pick up Bunny at the end of the child’s first day at the nursery, Blanche discovers she’s gone missing. She finds a job quickly enough, then finds a nursery to look after Bunny during working hours. Unmarried mother Blanche Lake comes to New York from Providence, RI, with her own, disapproving mother and her two-year-old daughter, Bunny. Now that I have, it’s in my mind to track down more of Evelyn Piper’s works, you bet. I’m not sure why I’ve left it so long to lay hands on its 1957 source novel. Although the critics were in general less than impressed by it, I much enjoyed Otto Preminger’s 1965 creepy psychological thriller BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING, with Carol Lynley, Laurence Olivier, Keir Dulleia, Martita Hunt, Noel Coward and all.

Bunny Lake Is Missing by Evelyn Piper