Jamaica Inn

Jamaica Inn Review

Daphne du Maurier was twenty-eight years old when Jamaica Inn was published in 1936 — two years before Rebecca would make her famous — and the novel already demonstrates the atmospheric command that would define her career. It is, in some respects, her most conventionally exciting novel: a Gothic adventure thriller with a strong protagonist, a vividly rendered landscape, a genuinely menacing villain, and a mystery whose solution involves not just criminal conspiracy but something darker about the relationship between knowledge and complicity.

Mary Yellan arrives at Jamaica Inn on the Bodmin Moor having promised her dying mother that she would go to live with her aunt, Patience Merlyn. The inn she finds is nothing like the comfortable family refuge she imagined: it is cold, shuttered, and ruled by her uncle Joss, a giant of a man whose alcoholic rages keep his wife in a state of permanent terror. The inn is not a legitimate business but a front for something Mary cannot initially identify — the sounds at night, the locked room, the carts that arrive in darkness and leave before dawn. When she understands that Joss is a wrecker — someone who lures ships onto the rocks and murders the survivors for their cargo — the novel’s moral stakes become clear, and Mary’s position as a witness who cannot leave becomes increasingly dangerous.

What distinguishes the novel from straightforward adventure fiction is the landscape. Du Maurier’s Bodmin Moor is not a backdrop but a presence — the miles of open moorland, the unlit roads, the sudden fogs, the sense of a place that is genuinely indifferent to human survival. She had ridden across the moor in bad weather the previous year, getting lost in fog, and the physical experience is in every page. The moors create a feeling of inescapability that makes Mary’s situation more claustrophobic than any locked room: she is free to walk the landscape, but the landscape itself is a prison.

The novel belongs to an era of adventure fiction that treated female protagonists with more complexity than either contemporary romance or the action genre typically allowed: Mary is brave, intelligent, and capable of physical action, but she operates within real constraints of class, gender, and economic dependency that du Maurier does not pretend away. Her attraction to the ambiguous Jem Merlyn — Joss’s brother, whose relationship to the wrecking operation remains unclear — is rendered as the genuine complication it would be, not as the romantic resolution that lesser writers would have provided. Jamaica Inn is du Maurier before Rebecca, and it shows a writer already in full command of her atmosphere.

Wrecking as Historical Reality

The wrecking trade — luring ships onto rocks by false lights and murdering survivors for their cargo — was a real practice in Cornwall’s maritime history, though its scale was historically debated. Du Maurier’s decision to use it as the basis for her novel’s crime gives the thriller a moral gravity that distinguishes it from pure adventure fiction. These are not abstract wrongs; the scenes in which Mary witnesses the aftermath of a wrecked ship, the bodies on the beach, the cargo being loaded onto carts, are rendered with a directness that prevents the reader from treating the enterprise as merely exciting.

Joss Merlyn as a wrecker is both a product of his landscape and a commentary on it. The Bodmin Moor that du Maurier renders so powerfully — the open moorland, the isolated farms, the sense of a place at the edge of the known world — has always existed outside the normal reach of law and social control. Wrecking is not a deviation from the moor’s character but an expression of it: the same indifference to human fate that the landscape demonstrates.

Alfred Hitchcock and the Adaptation

Alfred Hitchcock filmed Jamaica Inn in 1939, with Charles Laughton as Joss Merlyn and Maureen O’Hara as Mary. Hitchcock later expressed dissatisfaction with the film, feeling that the novel’s mystery was compromised by the need to cast a major star (Laughton) as the villain, whose identity the plot then had to reveal early to justify the billing. This is a structural problem the novel does not have: Joss is never the novel’s secret, only one layer of a criminal operation that goes higher than the inn.

Du Maurier’s greater Hitchcock collaboration — Rebecca, filmed in 1940, and The Birds, filmed in 1963 — tends to overshadow the Jamaica Inn adaptation in the critical record. But the 1939 film captures something of the novel’s atmosphere, even where it simplifies the plot. More than eight decades after its publication, Jamaica Inn remains du Maurier’s most purely exciting novel — the one that reads fastest and delivers the most consistent pleasure of narrative suspense.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Du Maurier’s atmospheric thriller is rooted in the specific landscape of Cornwall, which she renders as a character in itself — the moors, the fog, the coast that swallows ships and secrets with equal appetite. An adventure novel with the atmosphere of a nightmare.

Wreckers on Bodmin Moor

Jamaica Inn (1936) sends the orphaned Mary Yellan to a desolate coaching inn on Bodmin Moor, where her aunt’s brutish husband leads a gang of wreckers luring ships onto the rocks to plunder them. Du Maurier drew on the real, bleakly isolated inn she had stumbled upon while riding, and the moorland itself becomes the novel’s true antagonist. Alfred Hitchcock filmed it in 1939, the last picture he made in Britain before leaving for Hollywood.