I have always been fascinated by stories about twins, doubles, or doppelgängers. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Daphne du Maurier’s The Scapegoat, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Dostoyevsky’s The Double, and Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, to give a few examples, have fascinated readers through the ages, and I’ve always wanted to try my hand at writing a story with a similar theme.
The disturbing thought that each of us might have a double somewhere in the world spans across cultures and centuries, and the very idea seems to threaten our belief that every individual is wholly unique. But for a writer, the idea of a twin or double –either out in the world or lodged within our psyche — is rich with possibilities for exploring the many different ways that ‘doubleness’ might manifest, including a physical or imagined doppelgänger, an assumed identity, a fugue state, or split personality.
A Doppelgänger, (German: ‘double goer’), in German folklore, is a wraith or apparition of a living person, as distinguished from a ghost. The concept of the existence of a spirit double, an exact but usually invisible replica of every man, bird, or beast, is an ancient and widespread belief. To meet one’s double is a sign that one’s death is imminent. The doppelgänger became a popular symbol of horror literature, and the theme took on considerable complexity. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)
In my mystery/suspense novel, The Double, a prize-winning neuroscientist and Cambridge don named Vidor Kiraly is sent to an isolated psychiatric clinic in the Swiss Alps, following a violent attack on a stranger at an awards ceremony. When the clinic’s director, Dr Gessen, begins to suspect his reluctant patient is not who he appears to be, a cat-and-mouse game ensues as he attempts to discover he truth. The stakes are raised when one of the patients at the clinic goes missing, and Gessen has reason to doubt Vidor’s self-proclaimed innocence.
