On the night of 23 April 1911, Ethel Proudlock took her husband’s revolver and shot a man dead at her house in Malaysia. She claimed the victim, William Steward, had arrived unannounced and attempted to kiss her. But her trial pointed to a deeper story, one that lifted the lid on the culture that spawned it. Proudlock was a member of Kuala Lumpur’s expat community, a conservative outpost nicknamed Cheltenham-on-the-Equator. Her rumoured infidelity, combined with her concealed mixed-race background, made her a pariah. The killing was seen as almost the least of her crimes.
The Proudlock scandal would later be refitted to form the basis for The Letter, an acclaimed short story by W Somerset Maugham, that pitiless chronicler of so much human frailty. It now provides the prompt for Tan Twan Eng’s The House of Doors, an ambitious, elaborate fiction about fictions that beats back to the humid heyday of empire and instals the bestselling author as a flawed player in the drama. “We will be remembered through our stories,” Maugham declares at one point. He speaks with the bland self-assurance of a man who invariably writes the final draft.
