A married couple laugh together in a restaurant. They’re playing a game, making up stories about the strangers around them. Because they take the game so very seriously, we come to understand how little fun they are otherwise having. If only I can keep this going, the husband thinks, if only, if only… He can’t. This is “Don’t Look Now,” the story that made me fall in love with Daphne Du Maurier’s work, and it is lovely and wistful and unsettling. Though she’s best known as a novelist, Du Maurier’s strange, often beautiful stories deserve to be more widely read than they are. Like her novels, they are built around elements of suspense, romance, and the supernatural, but they are less fettered by plot contrivances, and the best of them are heartbreaking. They show that Du Maurier, whose name is still associated to her detriment with middle-brow romance, is an altogether weirder and more modern writer than this slapdash categorization implies.