Candied with a coating of flies

UNDERRATED The case for Irene Handl's novels

Daphne du Maurier found it "compulsive", Margaret Drabble thought it "oddly haunting", Nol Coward saw genius in it and Doris Lessing said she couldn't remember another novel remotely like it - "it is so good and original".

The Sioux appeared in 1965, followed in 1972 by its sequel, The Gold Tip Pfitzer. Their author was no enfant terrible nurtured on creative writing courses but a 62-year-old character actress - Irene Handl. What surprised critics was the gap between the stereotyped roles in which Handl specialised (loveable cockney landladies, eccentric mediums) and her savagely individual fiction.

The novels are set in a world of Creole racing driver millionaires, octoroon servants, children fed on peach slices soaked in champagne and pet monkeys with jewelled collars. An Englishman, Castleton, marries into the rich and amoral Benoir family ("the Sioux"), which made its fortune in the slave trade. And old habits die hard.

Castleton's wife Marguerite, beauty and queen bitch, is 26 and already on her third marriage. In her bureau she keeps a whip once used on household slaves. It comes in useful when she wants to beat her nine-year-old invalid son George into submission. ("I don't spoil him... I love him far too much to let him make a nuisance of himself.")

Alternately bullied and feted, George is dying of leukaemia. The pivot on which all the relationships turn, he's known variously by the clan as Momou, L'ill Marie, Puss, Dauphin, Little Rubbish, Your Flirt and Woozy.

If it sounds camp, that's because it is. Characters natter in Ol' Kintuck ("P'tit m'sieu gettin' to look more like Madame votre mre ever' day"), and even old Castleton addresses his brother - a colonel - as "old darling" and "old dear".

Reading The Sioux and The Gold Tip Pfitzer is like eating one marron glac too many: something between sweetness and nausea. Even nature is shown as cloying and rotten - "the rocking wands of hundreds of buddleias... candied with a coating of flies". Handl's material is melodramatic, but there's more to it than Lace. When George dies, welded to his elegant mother - his adored oppressor - by blood and mucus, the scene is genuinely moving.

Handl's style is instinctive and fresh rather than tutored. ("I never stayed at any school more than half an hour. I never learnt a thing.") Both books consist almost entirely of dialogue and interior monologue, and Handl delineates character through rhythm. ("Woozy looks fabulous tonight, Bienville decides. Just as he likes him, spooky as hell and deliciously ready for the mortician.")

Meeting Handl before she died, I heard how her novels were written "in a great sort of wave". Castleton was based partly on Handl's Austrian banker father. (Her mother was French.) Marguerite was a former employer, "a hateful woman, hateful". Handl even designed the book cover herself. "I had nothing to draw it with except Max Factor make-up, Biro and rouge."

Handl intended to write a third book, but time ran out. As a person of "violent dislikes", Handl confessed, "I dislike people that think a terrible lot of money. Except they're very funny, and I write about them nastily." Nastily and extremely well.