SOURCE: "The Duchess and Her Keeper," in Washington Post, March 22, 1995, p. C2.

In the review below, Yardley describes The Last of the Duchess as an odd, dark story that is both witty and perceptive.

This peculiar but beguiling book is the account of how its author, a British journalist and novelist who now lives in the United States, tried to obtain an interview with the Duchess of Windsor in the last years of that controversial woman's long life. She failed, but she managed to hook up with a woman even odder—if one can imagine such—than the duchess herself.

That woman was Suzanne Blum, universally known as Maître Blum, the octogenarian French attorney who seized control of the duchess's life after the death in 1972 of the duke—the onetime King of England, Edward VIII. By 1980 she had the duchess locked away in the Paris house that...